I’m heading out for two weeks vacation this Friday, so for the next few weeks you’re going to have a guest writer!  James B. is part of the 000Relationships Network.  He’s a fantastic guy who’s seen both sides of the dating fence: he’s been single, and now he’s engaged to a lovely young woman.  He’ll give you insights into the male perspective by telling you a little bit about his experiences and what he finds irresistible about women.

I’ll be back June 13 with stories about my adventures overseas!  I’m heading to South America.  Last time I was there, I missed visiting the rain forest, so that’s my goal for this trip.  I’ve got my malaria pills, insect repellent and sunscreen.  Sadly, it’s the rainy season, but perhaps I’ll get a bit of a bronzed glow.

I’ll chat with you all again in a few weeks!

I have to admit … I'm the giggly happy girl day-dreaming today. 🙂

I had a second date last night.   And my … what a second date it was.  A long walk along the beach, watching the sunset, holding hands, styrofoam cups of coffee finished off by a romantic Indian dinner for two.

It has been all the more fantastic for being unexpected.  I didn't think I would like the fellow at all.  We'd been chatting online for about a month, and when we talked on the phone for the first time last weekend we annoyed one another.  I thought he was arrogant; he thought I was rude.  I was ready to throw the towel in and not meet up, but he thought we should give it a go.  We had been chatting for so long, after all.

Thank goodness for that.

Sometimes the unexpected creates the most beautiful results.  I hadn't been expecting much from him; he hadn't been expecting much from me.  And as a result, what we found was something better than either of our expectations.  A connection.  A shared sense of humor.  Pleasure in one another's company.

I believe that one of the reasons that unexpected encounters yield such wonderful relationships is precisely because we have no expectations.  Neither of us has to live up to anything.  I accept him as he is; he accepts me as I am.  There's no pressure to be perfect or to not slip up.

When there are no expectations, we can simply be ourselves around one another.  We have the choice to like one another as we are or leave without guilt.  He doesn't have to like me any more than I have to like him.

And in this magical climate of no expectations, no pressure, and no pretending to be any better a person than we actually were, we looked at each other and liked what we saw.

Isn't that fantastic?

Sarah forwarded me the following consultation she did for a member of 000Relationships.com, and I felt that it was so beautiful that I asked her if I could share it with you here.  [Parts have been edited from the original consultation.]

Waking up and realizing you are running out of time to find a soulmate is a scenario that is not to uncommon for a number of women in their mid to late 30s. In fact, it happens all the time. But while this happens all the time, I am continually baffled why this happens. Where in society or in your own individual programming does it say that in order to have achieved you have to have a man? You want a man, yes, but outwardly believing that you are running out of time puts you in a destructive mindset in which you project your impatience and expectation upon others.

Your first step is to believe that it will happen. It will happen. And, in believing that you will find someone, you will start to live your reality. You may have been hurt in your previous relationships. That’s understandable. But you have also probably loved and been loved in your past relationships, too. Which part of your past do you choose to bring with you? The hurt, or the love?

Each relationship you are in offers you the opportunity to meet a different man and learn something more about yourself and the type of man you are looking for. Trying to recreate your past is not going to work. We need to stop comparing our future relationships to our past ones and have faith that each man we meet is going to be even better than the last.

My recommendation is to have some patience and enjoy living in the present. Enjoy each man you meet and each experience you have, and look upon each experience as bringing you closer to your destiny. The key to finding love again is to change your perspective and be in a position where you can understand and appreciate it when it comes. It may not be the consuming lust of your teenage years, but it may be packaged differently.

Focus on the journey, not the destination. 

Wow … we’ve just spent the last week filming the 2006 Edition of How to Be Irresistible to Men.  It’s going to be fantastic!  Andrew Rusbatch from Save My Marriage Today! and a motivational speaker/success coach joined me for several hours of discussion on topics ranging from living in love to making a relationship work this time around.  We also discussed how to awaken your femininity in such a way that men will be irresistibly drawn to your inner glow.

I’m simply amazed at what we accomplished.  What we’ve created is different from anything out there on the market right now.  What the 2006 Edition is about is not strategies for capturing a man, but rather the truth about love and letting love in.

As for me, I’m tired of playing by The Rules.  I want to understand my love life in a way that honors and respects me as a person who is complete with or without a man.

I find it rather embarassing when I am asked how to go about "getting" a man or "catching" a man.  I don’t want to get a man (or any man, for that matter).  I want the right man to be drawn to me naturally.  I don’t need to capture him, either.  I want him to feel that he can freely choose to be in my life if we’re suited for one another.  If we’re not, we’ll let one another go with grace.

In my opinion, setting out traps to catch a man and playing by The Rules so that he’ll be convinced to stay with you even if you’re not the best match is simply silly.

A mature relationship requires a foundation of authenticity, but many of us are scared that being genuine, open, and honest with our love will scare men away.

If what you truly want is an immature relationship (and there are lots of immature guys out there who will respond eagerly to a woman who plays games), then, yes, learning to become more open and expressive with your love will scare the lesser men away.

The great men, however, will recognize you as one of the rare women who truly allows herself to be herself … and who allows him to be him.  You’ll create a mesmerizing sexual energy based on your masculine and feminine polarities, NOT based on your ability to wear the latest fashions or style your hair in an attractive way.

As you examine your beliefs about men, love, relationships, and femininity, you’ll find that you don’t have to do anything to attract a man.  All you have to do is understand how your own beliefs are either limiting you or creating possibilities for you.

And that’s what the 2006 Edition of How to Be Irresistible to Men will teach you.

As for me, I find it a breath of fresh air to realize that I don’t have to be losing weight, mastering dating protocol, or flirting seductively to attract men.  All I have to do is unlock my own inner radiance that I have by virtue of simply being me.

Of course, being oneself is a lot harder than it sounds!  You have to learn to forgive yourself and let go of the voice in your head that keeps criticizing you for not being good enough or for driving him away.  You have to learn to place less importance on what happened to you in the past and be present in the here and now.  You have to understand how men respond to your feminine energy and use it wisely.

I’m sure that the 2006 Edition of How to Be Irresistible to Men has a message for all women out there who want a genuine, real relationship based on deepening love and intimacy.  I can’t wait for you to experience the transformative powers of these ideas for yourself.

I’ll be keeping you posted! 

You are meant to be single right now.

What a strange thing to say! Isn't our natural state to be in a relationship, and when we're single we're … well, lacking?

Of course not.  That isn't true at all.  But as a woman I am still very conscious that all the models of happiness I see in society – from Hollywood movies to family pressures – involve being matched up with a man who is one's soulmate. (One's soulmate, of course, has to be a man according to this ideal.  It can't be a female friend, or a mentor.)

Wait a moment!

Although many of us enlightened women like to think that we celebrate our single status and desire a relationship as an extension of our happiness, rather than the purpose and cause of it, we still respond to the cultural programming that tells us that we are incomplete if we don't have a man.

That same cultural programming shames the woman when her man cheats.  That same cultural programming blames the woman for not holding the relationship together.

Although we know in our minds that it's all a bunch of baloney, I don't think that there are many of us who can honestly state that we don't respond to those beliefs on a heart level.  Emotionally, we still feel shamed if we can't "get" a man.  We feel shamed if he leaves us.  We feel that it's our fault, somehow.

Our cultural programming is so powerful that many of us end up seeking out a relationship just because all of our female friends in relationships seem so happy.  We want to have what they have.

Yet what if you told yourself that, unlike them, you were meant to be single right now?  You were single because there was something that you had to do.  God is giving you the chance to be on your own because He wants you to learn something, or to develop a new skill, or move to the next level spiritually … and being single is the only way you can do it.

Wouldn't you want to know why you were single, and then take advantage of it?

Very few of us spend any time examining our belief systems about what it means to be single.  Socially we're told that being single is merely the limbo period between relationships.  But is it?

What if you were meant to be single right now?

What if it was your job to figure out what you're supposed to be doing with your single time and doing it?

Wouldn't you feel a lot more okay about being single?

Wouldn't you feel a greater sense of meaning and purpose in your life right now, rather than waiting for the time in which you have a partner?

You aren't single because you can't get a man.  You aren't single because you're not enough.  You aren't single because you're bad at dating.

You're single for a reason … and it's your job to find out that reason.

Once you do, then you'll have completed the reason for which you were single.  And then, magically, you'll find that relationship opportunities open all around you.

Does that sound too airy-fairy?  Perhaps.  But it can also make your single life much more wonderful and meaningful than an endless search for a partner.

By now, most of you know that my colleague Sarah Paul (author of "How to Be Irresistible to Men") is having a baby!  We've known in the office for quite some time.  🙂 She's just been glowing.  This is definitely where she's wanted to be in her life, and I know that she and Jason are going to be fantastic parents.

Many of my friends have been having babies recently.  It's that time in people's lives.  Five years ago, everyone was getting married except for me.  I was too busy traveling the world, having adventures, meeting tons of fantastic men, and enjoying every minute of it.  I didn't want to settle down; I had too much to do and see!

Now, I've finally reached the stage in my life where settling down appeals to me.  I've done most of what I wanted to do in my life, seen most of the places I've wanted to see, and staying in one place doesn't sound too shabby at all!

I'm not yet at the stage where Sarah's at.  She's been so happy with Jason that having a baby is the natural next step in her life.  All the inconveniences of being pregnant — who ever thought that buttoning up a winter coat could be such a chore! — are simply amusing events that she laughs off.  She keeps focused on the future.

The one part of it that saddens me — a purely selfish sorrow — is that when Sarah and Jason become new parents, they won't have time to do all the things we used to do together.  I'm not the only single woman who finds that as her friends have children, social events become less and less frequent.  Children change everything.  For my married friends, their lives are richer.  For me, I feel a small sense of loss for the time that we'll no longer spend together.

I went to a barbecue recently with another single friend.  We sat in the garden with paper plates balanced on our knees and watched as kids played recklessly with cardboard boxes, sitting in them, putting them over their heads, and falling over them.  Parents kept an eye out from the porch to make sure that no one hurt themselves.

Every so often some of the parents would detach themselves and come talk to us, shaking their heads in amusement.  I think they envied what they saw as our single, carefree lifestyle.  But as my friend said, "They've got the real prize.  They have partners who love them and children they love.  What they see in us is a false memory of their single days, without any of the loneliness or wasted nights in bars hoping to meet someone."

It is difficult being single and getting older … watching your friends marry, then have children.  But there's nothing wrong with being different from everyone else.  A male friend told me recently, "All of my friends are getting married.  I'm dating this girl that I really like, and I know that she wants to get married.  But I'm not ready yet.  Am I just being selfish?  Maybe I should just take the plunge and do 'the responsible thing.'  But then what if I regret it later?"

I hope that no matter where you are in life, love and romance isn't on your agenda simply because all of your friends have boyfriends, partners, or husbands.  Pressuring yourself to get married by a certain age or to have children by a certain age can cause havoc with your love life.  Give yourself a break and believe that the universe has great things in store for you.  There are so many men out there right now who will make great friends, even if they don't end up as boyfriends, so get out there and meet them for the pure joy of it, not because you expect something.

As for me, I know that Sarah's life is beautiful and perfect just as it is .. and so is my life.  We're both exactly where we're supposed to be. 

I don't think there's anybody who doesn't know this already, but just in case … we've just launched a fantastic 6-Part MiniCourse for Sarah's "How to Be Irresistible to Men" course!  Sarah and I have been working on the minicourse for the past month, and it reflects many of our new ideas about where the 2006 Edition of "How to Be Irresistible to Men" will be going.  Each day introduces you to a new concept that will transform how you think about love and dating.  You can get it by signing up to the "How to Be Irresistible to Men" newsletter series at www.000relationships.com/tomen/.

I'm really excited about what Sarah and I have created.  I don't think that any program like this exists yet for women.  I've read sooo many dating and relationship books over the past year, and most of them teach one thing: how to manipulate men into falling for you.

But I don't want men to simply fall for me.  I want love!  I want REAL love, a guy who will commit to me freely, from his own heart, and work on our relationship with a genuine desire for intimacy.  I want the kind of love that long-married couples have, the kind that only arises after you've worked through conflicts and difficult times together and come out stronger.

Most of the techniques taught in popular dating books will attract men to you, that's for sure.  But once you get into a relationship with those men, you'll find that their attraction was shallow.  You have to keep your games up to keep his interest level high.

That's because his initial feelings of attraction to you isn't actually love.  It's infatuation.  And, let me tell you, it's easy to get a guy infatuated with you!

Personally, I don't want to have to keep playing games to keep a guy interested.  I want to know that when the first sign of trouble arises, when that "veil of illusion" falls and he sees all my flaws, that he's going to make the decision to stick with me and work through whatever conflicts arise.

But to get to that point, I have some work to do on myself.  I have to be the kind of woman that men naturally feel comfortable with … the kind of woman that men know won't judge them … the kind of woman who is not only fun but also makes them feel more alive, more masculine, and more at peace.

Many women will say, "Hold on a minute.  It's is the point of my life to make men's lives better.  He has to do something for me, too!"

But it's exactly that kind of thinking that sabotages relationships.  The kind of thinking that says, "I'll give you love if you give me love."

Have you ever been loved unconditionally?  If so, you know how wonderful it feels to be loved no matter what … no matter what you've done for the other person … no matter whether you've hurt them or not … you simply know that you'll be loved anyway.

If you are doing something so that you can get love back from a man … if you're treating him a certain way so that he'll treat you a certain way … then you may benefit from our 2006 "How to Be Irresistible to Men" course.  It will teach you how to let your inner light shine in such a way that men will be drawn to your radiance.  You'll learn to let go of your expectations and instead trust in the natural course of attraction.  You'll learn how your beliefs create your reality, such that simply by shifting your thinking you can transform your love life.

There's only one catch: the 2006 Edition of "How to Be Irresistible to Men" hasn't been launched yet.  We're starting filming on it tomorrow.  We've got a fantastic guest speaker in, and I truly believe that magic is going to happen in the studio.  I'll keep you posted on its progress!

If you've already purchased the 2005 Edition of "How to Be Irresistible to Men," then you'll get the 2006 Edition free!  That's because every purchase of "How to Be Irresistible to Men" gives you lifetime membership to our Members Area.  You can start working on the current course and be ready to take your attraction to the next level when the 2006 Edition is launched.

For now, I highly recommend that you try out the 6-Part MiniCourse.  Again, all you have to do is sign up for the free "How to Be Irresistible to Men" Email Newsletter Series at www.000relationships.com/tomen/.  I'll be excited to hear what you think!

I've been going on a slew of blind dates from an online dating site recently.  It seems that every profile I put up attracts a different sort of person.  My last profile seemed to attract young, intense, focused entrepreneurs.  My current profile appears to have attracted intelligent artistic men.

It's strange how a online dating profile, like a resume, can highlight different aspects of yourself, each attractive to a different sort of guy.  My early efforts into online dating attracted a lot of immature young partiers.  I wasted hours chatting to men who lived so far away that we would never meet, and I spent ages composing carefully polite responses to men that I knew I'd never want to date.

Although I know much more than I did back then, my online dating efforts seem to follow the same pattern: I put up a profile, chat with a dozen or so guys, meet half of them, then end up with one really cool friend/romantic interest with whom I end up hanging out constantly for the next six months.

I tend to get discouraged with online dating sites.  It's like the old adage: "Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink."  There are so many men online, but finding someone you click with is hit or miss.  The effort involved in answering emails and sorting through "winks" can become too much when coupled with work and social activities.   After a month online, I end up removing my profile and spending more time on me rather than dating.

The great thing with taking a break from online dating is that when you get back into it, you have fresh enthusiasm.  I recreate my profile from scratch every time, with different photos, so that I can meet different sorts of people.  My most successful profile was when I was moving to a new country and men lined up to show me around.

Why was that particular profile so successful?  I think it was because men had a reason to meet me that wasn't to suss out the romantic possibilities.  Even if they weren't particularly attracted to me, they felt a friendly obligation to welcome me to the area and did it with pleasure.

And when romance happened, it struck without warning.  A friendly fellow thought that it would be a laugh to meet this traveler for a drink and a chat, and the attraction was immediate.  We ended up having a wonderful six-month relationship.

So what does that suggest about online dating?  That perhaps a better approach to meeting than the first casual coffee date is to meet one another for a reason.  Maybe he is into kayaking, and you'd like to learn.  Maybe your favorite museum has a new exhibit, and he doesn't know much about art.

When one of you has something to share, and the other one is willing to learn, then a friendly ground is established that promises that the date will be a positive experience with no pressure. 

I am always wary of online profiles that state that Bachelor or Bachelorette X is seeking for their soulmate.  We're ALL looking for our soulmate.  But I don't want to meet a possible online match knowing that I'm going to be immediately rejected if I don't fit his vision of the perfect mate.

I think that men feel this way, too.  Men will want to meet you if they think from your profile that they're going to have a great time chatting with you.  If they sense that your only purpose in being online is to find the guy of your dreams, then they may not want to put themselves up for rejection.

At any rate, I've had a couple of nice chats with lovely men.  No sparks yet, but I don't have any expectations.  I'm simply enjoying the experience of dating.

I didn't recognize him at first.  We walked into the hostel and glanced in the bar on our way up to the room.  There were a couple of guys drinking there.  "Is that your friend?" Daryn asked me.

I looked, but their backs were to us.  "I don't know.  I said I'd meet him at his room."

We went up to the second story of the hostel and knocked, but no one was in the room.  "Maybe they were in the bar," Daryn said.  So we trooped down again.

As we walked into the bar, the first guy in a white striped shirt turned around and smiled.  "Well, hello!"

Yep, it was him.

It's so surreal to meet someone that you had a fling with, years later, in a different country, when both of your lives are so different.  I'd met Ben (not his real name) back when I was working in a winery, sorting grapes for the harvest.  He was full of energy and enthusiasm for the wine industry, and he introduced me to the artsy wine bar scene.  At the time he was living in a fantastic house with a hot tub on the deck and a game room complete with pool table, wine cellar, and wide-screen television, where I watched Sex and the City for the first time.

Even though we only knew each other for a few months, I was always grateful to him for showing me what big city life could be like.  We zipped through Portland in his yellow convertible and browsed organic vegetables, Doc Marten shoes, Nike pedometers.  The city seemed full of possibilities, potential, and fascinating people I had yet to meet.

Meeting him here, so far from home, brought back memories of Portland.  It seemed strange not to remember our relationship as vividly as I remembered the city itself, its feel, its energy.  What I felt wasn't nostalgia for him but rather for the sense of possibility I felt at that time and place: the culture of youth, the celebration of being alive, and the promise of bright careers ahead.

So many of my past relationships have been like that.  When I think back on them with nostalgia, what I remember most isn't him and me, but rather the feelings I had at that point in my life.  For example, when I think of my first love, I remember how excited and aware I felt as I experienced the beauty of those emotions for the first time.  Yet the years have faded his face in my memory.

I realize that my journey through love has not been a journey from lover to lover, but rather a journey through myself.  Each relationship has taught me new ways of appreciating life.  My romantic history is not one of winning and losing but rather of seeing through ever-renewed eyes.

Each relationship expands my sense of who I can be as I learn to enjoy his hobbies, understand his world view, take pleasure in his tastes, respond to his rhythms.  I'm not leaving behind my self: I'm becoming greater than I was before.

If we limit our lives to what we like, to how we think, to what we want, then we're keeping ourselves constricted in a tight cage of identity.  Loving gives us the gift of opening up our cages and allowing us to dissolve our singularity into something greater.

Even when he leaves us, or we leave him, we carry part of him with us: the way he thought, his mannerisms, his favorite books or music or shops.  We can appreciate more of life because he shared his world with us.

Yet, last night, I didn't share these thoughts with Ben.  Instead, we chatted and drank and caught up with stories until it was time to go home.  I promised to give him a call next time I was in Portland, and he promised he'd be back this way again.

And instead of thinking about him on the way home, I simply thought of Portland and how wonderful it will be to experience the city again. 

Like most children, I grew up in a world where weight mattered.  My mother was self-conscious about her weight, and how much weight others had gained or lost was always a ripe topic of discussion.

As a teenager I believed that if I weighed less I'd be loved more.  I knew that the only reason I wasn't as popular as I wished was because I wasn't slender.  I was built like a farm girl: strong and square. 

My belief that my body was responsible for all my social inadequacies didn't inspire me to change anything about how I ate, however.  I still baked batches of warm chocolate chip cookies, drank chocolate milk, and ate appreciatively of my mother's homemade bread drizzled with butter. 

Sally Tisdale's book The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food discusses how deeply food is engrained in our personal histories.  The foods we were nourished with as a child become an indelible part of our psyche, evoking tastes, scents, and cravings long into adulthoood.

Yet sadly, for so many women, eating is no longer about nourishment.  It has become a secret, dirty pleasure.

When I was a teenager, I put up with my shameful body because I believed that I had no control over my desire to eat.  I tried diets from women's magazines but abandoned them when cold cabbage soup couldn't assuage my emotional hunger.  I despised myself as weak when I reached for cookies for breakfast.  I truly felt that my weight was a red flag to the world, signalling a weak will.

These attitudes were not unique to my teenage self.  They are common in the cult of beauty.  The feelings of shame and guilt about having a body that doesn't reflect our innermost dream about who we are can be torturous and lead us to feel like we are two people: the one who squeezes into ugly clothing, and the one we are in our dreams.

That is why is angers me so much when people (mainly men) tell me, "Overweight people are that way because they choose it.  It's a simple equation: what you gain is what you eat minus what you burn."

Weight is emotional.  The heft of our body can weigh our hearts down.  Images of stick-thin models encourage us to believe that burning away all fat will lighten our spirits until we blissfully drift away.  Our desire for food is heavily influenced by whether we are happy or sad, content or stressed.  Food is our friend and enemy, filling us with the loving remembrance of childhood pleasures and the corresponding guilt of indulgence.

It is tragic how deeply our body image affects our sense of ourselves as sexual creatures.  We've been led to believe that we cannot be attractive or sexy unless we have a certain body type.

Some of us, like myself, were even taught to believe that whether or not people like us is based on our appearance.  Every time a guy we like rejects us, every time we don't get noticed, every time a relationship breaks up, it is tempting to blame it on our bodies.

"If I were more beautiful, he'd still be in love with me.  If I were more beautiful, I'd have men falling over their feet to be with me.  If I were more beautiful, I'd be happier."

Wrong.  This might only be true if we replaced the "If I were more beautiful…" with "If only I loved myself more…"

I have learned to live comfortably and happily in my body no matter what my shape and size, but I know that I will never escape the cultural mandate that punishes women for volputuous, sensuous, natural bodies.

Today, years removed from the chunky figure of my teenage years, I am embarrassed to admit that I am still proud of myself when I lose a few pounds.  The lower number on the scale is like a pat on the back.  In the back of my mind I imagine my mother telling me, "You've done well."

As women, we owe it to one another to stop perpetuating the cult of weight.  What would happen if we all stopped criticizing others for their weight?  Stopped complimenting friends for having lost a few pounds?  Stopped obsessing over dress sizes and diets?  Started enjoying good food, good living, and the wonderful bodies that make it all possible?

I think that the world would be a better place. 🙂