Dig through a purse or wallet and you might find (among the receipts and other notes) a fortune from a fortune cookie offering ancient wisdom and insight that you believed was meant specifically for you. Drawing from my private practice and the workshops and classes I’ve taught, I’ve compiled my own “fortunes,” that I call love notes. I’ve shared these with clients and students as notes designed to help singles meet their goal of finding their soul mate. As you read these love notes, I hope you will find a couple that speak directly to you.

• Before you find your soul mate, make sure you’ve found your own soul. Being the best you can be is step one, then (and only then) shop for your best fit in a mate.

• Know that hope is not a strategy. Visualizing your goal is great, but the pretty picture you paint in your mind’s eye must be followed by effort and action. Cheer yourself on every time you take a risk. Mating is a numbers game so when you “lose,” you are that much closer to winning.

• Let every date get to know the real you from the start. Just be sure to reveal the most positive possible version of you. Do not share your woes, negative thoughts, and perceived flaws before a date is thoroughly smitten, or at least asked you out again and yet again. Scaring away potential mates is a common maneuver to stay single.

• Don’t go shopping for love without knowing exactly what you want and need. Determine your requirements in terms of values, religion, sex, activity level, status, intimacy, and communication. But don’t carry your checklist around with you. Focus only on being a contributor to fun when you date. Use your list as a safety net to prevent you from continuing to date someone who is not a keeper.

• “Typing” is just another word for stalling. It is a very useful technique for eliminating a major part of the population as potential dates. Challenge your own concept of your “type” (one thing we know is it hasn’t worked for you yet).

• Remember, you wouldn’t take a job because of the office building. Inner beauty tends to get prettier over time, while a lack of it will leave you wondering what you saw in the first place. By focusing on character, kindness, intelligence, and connection rather than looks, status, formal education, and style, you face a lesser level of competition and heighten your chances of a great relationship.

• Yes, appearance matters, but your date doesn’t have to start out looking a certain way. You can influence certain elements once they feel accepted. Most women will make some adaptations if you have a complimentary way of asking for change. And most men don’t care that much about clothes, but they do care about getting laid.

• “Rough” doesn’t always have a diamond inside. If a diamond doesn’t emerge with minor excavation, stop mining.

• Meaning well is not a substitute for doing well. The road to “love hell” could be paved with their good intentions.

• Get good at rejection. The loss of deep and/or lengthy love relationships requires grieving, whatever the reason for the end. Brief dating relationships do not. If your past relationship was dating briefly, move forward now.

• Pushing a man to label your relationship before he thinks it’s time is like putting a cross in front of a vampire.

• If a past relationship had been the right one, it would have worked out for you and you wouldn’t be reading this article. Let over be over. De-clutter your emotional closets of ghost relationships. Cease yearning over the ones that got away. They are simply off in lost boy and girl land. You need to say “goodbye” and they need to be forgotten.

• No one is going to marry you and then be ok with being alone. If you are serious about getting married, you need to get serious about your work/life balance starting now.

• You not only need time to meet, date, court, and mate, you need time to relax between work and other responsibilities and your love life.

• Do reduce stress. Stress makes you haggard, harried, impatient, and much more likely to reject great potential just because someone is not perfect.

• Learn to listen attentively in all relationships, without interrupting, eye rolling, or sighing. Then when you find the love of your life, you’ll be ready to hear what he or she is saying. No one will reveal themselves fully to someone who won’t listen because they just don’t seem to care.

• To feel understood, you have to feel heard. And feeling both heard and understood is essential to feeling loved.

• A huge element in compatibility is the feeling that you have a helper, someone who wants to help you reach your goals and develop as a person. With this base, staying together is relatively easy.

• Don’t marry without believing the man or woman right in front of you is 100 percent lovable, livable, and likable.

• Either you feel great about yourself when you’re with someone, or he or she is not the one for you. No exception to the rule.

Use these love notes to help create your own good fortune. Put them on post-it notes on your mirror, a card in your wallet and a reminder message on the computer. Keep the tips that resonate with you close by until your nod of agreement has become your next new habit!

Email this post