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. 

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. 

My colleague Andrew loves Dr. Phil for his no-nonsense, get-real approach to relationships.  Friday, as I was leaving the office, I passed Andrew's desk.  My attention was caught by a book with a big red heart on the cover and a familiar smiling face.  It was Dr. Phil's Love Smart: Find the One You Want – Fix the One You Got.

"Andrew won't notice," I thought, as I picked up the book and slipped it in my bag.  "And I need some weekend reading."

Now, to be completely up front, I am not a Dr. Phil fan.  I feel that Dr. Phil tends to make gross generalizations in his attempt to be "real" with his clients.  Personally, I prefer to empathize with people first, understand them, then encourage them towards a new perspective or way of behaving.  The shock treatment of a cold splash of reality in the face just seems, to me, unnecessarily cruel.

My personal opinion notwithstanding, I was excited to learn what Dr. Phil had to say about relationships.  So, on my commute home that night, I opened the book with anticipation.

A half hour later, I'd had enough.  I put the book down and stowed it carefully in my bag to return to Andrew on Monday.  I didn't even want to look at it again.

What happened?  It all started on page 6.

Dr. Phil tells us that dating is a game, and the only reason any of us is single is because we don't know how to play it.  Let's listen to him in his own words.

Let me start us off by telling you two things that I know for absolute, drop-dead certain.  First: if you do not have what you truly want in a relationship, then you are right, something is seriously wrong.  …[T]he problem is not you.  You are not a bad person…. (pp. 5-6)

Whew, glad we got that out of the way.  So none of us are bad people, but if we're still single (when we wish we weren't), then something is "seriously wrong."  Oh dear.  Never fear: Dr. Phil can fix us.

The second thing I know for absolute, drop-dead certain is that you are not thinking right or playing the game well; otherwise you would have what you want. (p. 6)

So the reason we're not in good relationships is because we're lousy at playing the dating game?

Yep, says Dr. Phil.  In fact, the only reason you're not married right now is because "you apparently don't know how to get in the game or play the game once you do" (p. 6).

I disagree … quite vehemently.

I'll talk about my own beliefs in a moment, but right now let me share the perspective of Dr. Barbara De Angelis.  In her wonderful book, The Real Rules, Dr. De Angelis describes an unhealthy belief that sounds suspiciously like Dr. Phil's.

The premise of THE OLD RULES is that your purpose is to find a man and get him to marry you.  You are the hunter, and he is the prey.  Your goal is to catch him.  But THE OLD RULES say that a man won't naturally want to make a commitment to you–he doesn't want to be caught–so somehow, you have to trick him into it…. (p. 19)

In other words, to get a man, you have to play the game.

Even though Dr. Phil may not agree with the Old Rules (as described in Ellen Fein's and Sherrie Schneider's book The Rules), his language sounds suspiciously Rules-esque.  For example, we learn in Chapter 10 of Love Smart how to "Bag 'em, Tag 'em, Take 'em Home."  True hunter language.

Marriage seems to be the natural culmination of the dating cycle for Dr. Phil.  It's the happy-ever-after ending that is our reward for playing the game well.  In fact, his five-step series of goals to CLAIM what we want includes: envisioning our perfect relationship, finding the perfect person, seducing him, getting him to "want what you want long term" (p. 5), then marrying him and getting "busy being happy!" (p.5). 

Does this match Barbara De Angelis' description of the Old Rules, in which "the goal of a woman's life is to find a man and get married" (p. 11)?  Sounds like it to me.

Barbara De Angelis explains the problem with game-playing beautifully when she says:

Playing games is for women who've been convinced that they aren't intelligent enough to figure out the right way to communicate or behave with a man, and instead must memorize absurd lists of do's and don'ts….  Playing games is stupid, and you're not stupid. (p.39)

So, Dr. Phil, I won't be learning how to play the game better so that I can get the relationship that I can deserve.  Instead, I'll be taking a leaf from Barbara De Angelis' book.  I'll be focusing on learning how to become emotionally generous, being honest (with myself AND others) about my feelings, and remembering that everyone (even men) needs love and reassurance.

As for myself, I believe that the reason that most of us are not in good relationships yet is because we still have some growing and learning to do.  The time isn't yet right.  Forcing things will just hook us up with the wrong men and hold back our own personal growth and development.

This doesn't mean that you should sit back and assume that the universe will bring Mr. Right into your life (though, if you've done your spiritual homework, you've got a very good chance of this happening).  What it does mean is that instead of focusing on how you can get Mr. Right, you should be focusing on how to grow as a person: how to become more open-hearted, loving, and caring to EVERYONE you encounter.

When I focus on becoming a more open, genuine, and loving person, I know that I will naturally draw the right man into my life.  I don't have to worry about it.  I don't have to waste time envisioning, judging, or evaluating men based on my character profile of Mr. Right.  I believe in the law of the universe that states that we attract what we are.  I feel confident knowing that my ability to attract the right men into my life is proof that I am developing my character in the direction that I want to go.

Best of all, because I am not focused on getting a relationship, I have faith that the right relationship will just happen.  Have you ever noticed how the best things happen when you're not looking for them?  If you follow the advice of other dating gurus and focus all your efforts on meeting and interviewing dozens of potential mates in the attempt to find the "right" one, then judge your success on whether you can "Bag 'em, Tag 'em, [and] Take 'em Home," you're almost ensuring that you won't get the best possible relationship that the universe has in store for you.

One of my favorite songs is one by Garth Brooks called "Unanswered Prayers," in which he tells the story of meeting his high school sweetheart after many years have passed.  By this time, he is married to another woman.  Yet such is the power of first love that he can still remember how he used to pray to God every night to make this other woman his forever.

At first, it seems that he'll be tempted to reconsider his marriage vows.  Yet as they chat, he realizes that they don't have much in common any more.  He looks at his wife by his side, and such is his gratitude and appreciation for her presence in his life that he thanks God for unanswered prayers.

We don't always know what is best for us.  Sometimes the greatest tragedy is actually a blessing in disguise.  And that, I suppose, is the message that gets lost in Dr. Phil's Love Smart.  Sometimes, the smartest thing you can do with love is to simply allow it to happen as it should.

On Friday night a friend and I went out on the town.  In my city, the nightclubs and bars don't really start humming until 1am, so we waited until nearly midnight to head out.

Our taxi dropped us off on the Strip, a series of bars along the river, with outdoor seating warmed by gas torches and lit by strands of Christmas lights.  We were disappointed to see that despite the warm night, the bars weren't packed.

We chose the busiest of the bars to start the evening: the Tap Room, the bar of choice for businessmen and professionals.  The average age of patrons at the Tap Room was mid-forties.  Most were dressed in slacks and button-up shirts, as if they'd just come from work.  The women at the Tap Room were wives or girlfriends with expensive jewelry and exquisite accessories.  Everyone stood in small groups, drinking wine or glasses of rum and coke, intently focused on their own conversations.

We felt rather left out at our quiet outdoor table, so we filled the time by people-watching.

The best part about the Strip is that you can watch the parade of passers by.  On the street in front, taxis stopped, letting out pairs of beautiful women.  Groups of young men strode past, drunkenly laughing and shoving one another.  Couples paused in front of the bars, discussing whether they wanted to stop.  It was so much fun to watch this cross-section of the city on parade.

After some time, I began to notice a curious pattern.  The most beautiful women—the ones with perfectly straight blond hair, slender bodies, and gorgeous clothes—acted as if they were the stars of the show.  They tossed their hair back for the benefit of everyone watching them.  They leaned over and kissed the taxi driver for the voyeuristic young men.  They walked arm in arm with their female friends, presenting a unified front against anyone who might approach them.

My friend who was with me said, "No normal guy would even have a chance with one of those girls.  He'd get shot down!"

"But look at that girl," I said.  One girl, who looked like a model, was talking to a large, flat-faced man the size of a football player without the benefit of muscles.  Even though he was not even close to her in the looks department, she held his arm, whispered in his ear, then touched his chest flirtatiously.  "Do you think they're together?" I asked.

My companion mused, "Maybe they're just friends."

As we observed, we noticed that the guy kept glancing at the crowd around them, as did she.  Even though she was talking to him, both of them seemed more interested in watching who else was around them … and perhaps who was watching them.

The scene illustrated the fact that beautiful women don't always date handsome men.  Instead, women who are aware of the status that their beauty affords them tend to date men who are equally status-conscious.  In other words, (please forgive the language) "bitches attract jerks."

It is a strange phenomenon.  For some reason, women with aloof, stand-offish attitudes tend to be attracted to men with arrogant, cocky attitudes.  Attitude attracts attitude.

In the book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss, Neil explains how any man—no matter what his looks—can date models, actresses, even strippers through a sophisticated series of techniques designed to prick through her attitude and establish his superiority.  Once a man can make a beautiful woman feel inferior, the theory goes, he has her.  She will then spend the rest of her night trying to prove herself to him and win his favor back.

As I tried to explain this to a friend, he didn't seem surprised at all.  "So?  We've always known this.  We know that if we want girls falling over us, all we have to do is be jerks.  But it's just not worth the effort."

It seems to be true, then.  Be a jerk and you'll attract women.  Be a bitch and you'll attract men.

In fact, a popular book by Sherry Argov claims just that.  Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl teaches women how acting like a bitch can actually make men fall all over them.

But for me, the question becomes … if bitches attract jerks, why in the world would you want to do it?

Acting aloof, superior, and like an actress on a movie set will definitely get men's attention.  It will get their competitive blood flowing.  They'll see you as a challenge that they want to conquer.  Play it cool, and only the cockiest, most confident men will approach you.

But as a result, all of the kind, ordinary guys watching you will feel intimidated.  Nice guys won't even step up to the plate.  The honest, genuine men who don't play games won't go to the effort of approaching you; instead, they'll focus their energy on more open, friendly girls.

So many women say, "I can't seem to meet any nice guys."  The problem in most cases is that they've memorized the thinking that tells them that they'll only be able to attract men if they dress like models, act aloof, avoid smiling or seeming too interested.  The only men that behavior attracts are men who are interested in the conquest rather than sharing their hearts.

I left town that night in a contemplative frame of mind.  What would happen, I wondered, if one of those beautiful women opened up her heart and smiled, acted friendly, chatted with everyone who spoke to her, and made everyone feel at ease?   She'd be swamped with admirers.  She wouldn't be able to get any peace, because her outer beauty would be matched by inner beauty.  Perhaps that is exactly why these women acted defensive.  They were protecting themselves from too much attention.  It is safe to have men admire you from a distance, not so safe when they keep coming up to you without a moment's rest, trying their lame pickup lines in hopes of earning your favor.

There is no easy answer to these questions.  Ultimately, each of us makes the decision about what attitude we will put on when we go out on the town.  But what we must realize is that the attitude we choose is just as important as what we decide to wear.  It will affect who approaches us … and who doesn't.