I had lunch today with a coworker who got divorced at about the same time as me, and we were talking (ambiguously, of course) about the forward motion that Diana and I have. My friend has had a harder time getting back into the game, in part because she had a crappy situation that took her longer to get over.
In any case, she seems to be really receptive now to dating, but has already had some less than ideal encounters. She has a lot of doubt about marriage as an institution, and finding someone seems improbably to her. I told her about how Diana and I met on eHarmony and all of that, and I made the assertion that frankly she just isn't meeting enough people to write herself or dating off.
That in turn led to a discussion about "the one." I decided a long time ago that "the one" is actually more like "the one million" because, and maybe I'm an optimist, there are plenty of people out there who are right for you, and if you meet enough people, you'll find one of them. That doesn't make the person you end up with any less special, which I think might be her hang up about the concept, but with billions of people on the planet, how could you possibly believe that there is only one person right for you? The odds of meeting that one person are almost impossible. I don't mean to turn romance into a statistical thesis, but come on!
Ultimately, I think the likelihood of finding someone you can jive with is more tied to your own openness to it. You have to believe in your own worth and respect it. You have to be honest with yourself and with your potential suitors. That means you don't filter what you think and feel, to you or them. I honestly think that's the fundamental you need to have in place to be in a truly successful relationship.
Of course, I'm largely basing this on my own experience, so it's probably not fair to assume some universal truths. Still, I suppose I've seen and experienced enough of what you shouldn't do to have a strong opinion about it!
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