The ‘he said, she said’ guide to dating rituals

I used to have fantasies of meeting a male alter ego, but who could also fix the dishwasher. I thought my soul mate would be like me, until I remembered that half the time I hate myself. In fact, the whole point is to find someone better than me, someone who doesn’t succumb to jealousy, selfishness, or five-hour bouts of TiVo watching. So then I’d fall for guys not like me — the opposite of me — only to realize we had nothing in common. No wonder so many of us are single; we’re single-minded. In our minds, we’ve created such a specific portrait of The One that we don’t allow for the guy who falls outside of our mental map. But our “dream guy” isn’t out there precisely because we’ve dreamed him up. (Besides, I can’t help thinking that if soul mates really do exist in the cosmic sense, there’s sure to be divine retribution.)

Which is why instead of waiting for The One, I’m just waiting for One. One guy I deeply connect with. In a twisted way, it would be a lot easier to believe that there’s a single soul mate out there and I can’t find him, than to believe that there are dozens of potential soul mates and I can’t even find one of them. I mean, what kind of loser am I, when the odds are that high? And yet ... I’ve let go of the sole soul mate idea.

Dozens, on the other hand?

Now that’s something I can believe in. Amen.

1. There had better be. If you assume there’s only one soul mate out there, the odds a soul mate will be in the same city, let alone the same bar, at the same time you are ... well, it boggles the mind. Consider: A few years ago, in the middle of the ocean between Hawaii and Japan, an American submarine named the Ehime Maru surfaced under a Japanese fishing trawler. Nine Japanese fishermen died. The American captain was forced to apologize, since he apparently should have known it was a distinct possibility he’d come up underneath the Japanese vessel. I spent a full afternoon calculating the odds that a submarine the size of a submarine would happen to be in the same place at the same time as a fishing boat the size of a fishing boat in an ocean the size of an ocean. (I mean, have you seen the ocean? It’s like ... an ocean.) I came up with a number: 1 in 800,000,000. Point is: It wasn’t the captain’s fault. It was fate. It was a miserable, horrible once-in-a-lifetime tragedy. Like soul mates.

2. We’re writing a particularly delectable recipe for self-defeat if we only date women who are our “type.” Some men, for example, only date blondes. Others date Latinas. Or blond Latinas. Or married women. Or married blond Latinas. Or long-legged Polynesians. Or short-haired Poles. Or big-breasted redheads. But regrettably, the more specific we get, the harder it is to convince ourselves we’re not at a dog show. (“And up next, a lovely bitch Norwegian. Look at her fine grooming!”)

Excerpted from “I Love You, Nice to Meet You: A Guy and a Girl Give the Lowdown on Coupling Up” by Lori Gottlieb and Kevin Bleyer. Copyright © 2006, Lori Gottlieb and Kevin Bleyer. All rights reserved. Published by St. Martin's Press. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher

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