Toss Out Your Checklist, Find Love

I cannot express how excited I am. I just received this email from a reader who subscribes to my newsletter and also had her profile written by E-Cyrano. If this doesn’t illustrate the value of changing your approach to dating, I don’t know what does. Enjoy, and please offer your congratulations to Laura in the comments below!

Dear Evan,

Your newsletter in my email today really struck a chord for me and I had to write.

Last December I finally realized I was doing something not quite right in the whole dating process. I wasn’t meeting guys that I clicked with, and the ones I felt the click with were not getting it on their side. It was frustrating and lonely and I got to the point where I was telling myself that I was done with the whole idea of dating after 40. Clearly there was no one out there who was interested in a 40 something woman with three kids who was a self-professed pop culture geek. I don’t fit the conventional picture of what most men my age are looking for. I was very definitely never going to be the “it girl” on any dating service.  I gave myself one more month and one more expense and then I was going to call it quits. Things were getting dire.

So I went for the new profile, and I was really pleased with how it came out. I thought it made me sound how I truly saw myself and I was hopeful that it would be the thing that finally set me on the path to meeting The One. Along with my new profile, I was reading your column obsessively, taking your advice to heart and trying to think about how to respond to emails, how to act on any dates I might actually get, how to keep all your words of dating wisdom in my head and not make some silly mistake that would cost me that great guy who fit into my criteria.

At the same time, I started thinking harder about one piece of advice in particular and that was about which men I was counting out as possibilities. I thought I was pretty open about a lot of things but I did have some hard and fast rules about things I couldn’t possibly budge on. One of those things at the time was religion. I’m not a religious person, and I was sure that trying to make a match with a man who was religious enough to mention it in his profile was just asking for trouble. After all, religion’s pretty major, right?

Right…

But then there was this profile that came up on one of my searches. Great guy. Funny, clever, smart, good looking. Similar interests. Close by – a real plus! But… but he’s got a whole paragraph there about his religious beliefs and how important they are to him.  Too bad.

Except I couldn’t stop coming back to his profile over and over again. Something there was just so compelling. I smiled every time I read it. So finally I decided “How bad could it be? One wink, one email, one drink and we either hit it off or we don’t. Try something new, Laura. The old way is sure not working for you.”

So I winked. He winked back. We emailed. We talked on the phone. We went to dinner. This was in December.

He moved in with me in June. I have never been so happy or felt so understood and appreciated in my life. His son and my sons get along as if they’d been brothers their whole lives. So I second your advice – give that person who’s just one or two marks off “the perfect list” a try.

Thanks for that push I needed to toss my list aside.

Laura D.
Pennsylvania

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