Andrea Syrtash - Hes Just Not Your Type (and Thats a Good Thing): How to Find Love Where You Least Expect It

It was September 2005 when I realized I had accidentally fallen in love with Michael.

I was horrified. I wanted to be one of those women who, upon getting engaged, tells her friends, I knew from the first moment I saw him that he was the one! The day I realized that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my longtime friend and neighbor, I was terrified.

Michael was the fun guy in the neighborhood. He had more chutzpah than anyone I had ever met. (He would walk into our house, put on my sisters slippers, and start making eggs without even saying hello!) Michael was a teacher, an improv actor, and a drummer. His favorite T-shirt, which he wore often, was vintagebut not in a hipster kind of way. It was paper thin and displayed a photo of Michaels prepubescent face framed by a WANTED sign with the caption Rogers Bar Mitzvah. December 1990. I believe it had a hole in the left armpit.

This was not the guy Id envisioned bringing home to Dad and certainly not the guy I envisioned ever being a dad. If anything, Michael was boyfriend (not husband!) materialfor someone else.

Over the years, I had dated several perfect men who made good money, treated me well, and knew exactly the right thing to say at social functions. These men were often a little older than me and usually a lot more stable. Their qualities looked great on paper and satisfied my checklist of good husband material. They were ready for marriage, but I always delayed the decision with excuses like I think we should just date another year. Whats the rush?

Friends jokingly dubbed me the Runaway Bride, since each time I was close to a marriage proposal from a wonderful catch, I took off. When I broke up with one such boyfriend, he called me out. Youll never settle down! he said. You have commitment problems. Do you know how many women would be happy to marry me?

He was right. While most women I knew fantasized about weddings with guys like him, I dreamed up escape routes.

I began to realize that not only was I on a different page from my boyfriends, but I was in another chapteror maybe even a different book. After the end of yet another chapter, I decided to move back to my sisters house in Toronto and start practicing what I preached. After all, Id been an advice writer for almost a decade, instructing people to follow their passions, live their best lives, and stay true to themselves. I coached people in dating and told them that in order to find love, they had to be open to possibility and replace the word should with want (more on that later). Given the state of my love life, I felt like a fraud.

So I made a conscious decision to focus on my dating pattern. We all have one. I realized that my head dominated my heart and that I hadnt been giving enough attention to my feelings. I had spent time carefully analyzing the details of my relationships while completely ignoring my instincts. With this shift in my perspective, I also realized that perhaps the men Id always thought of as my type were not the people with whom I would find long-term love and happiness.

I thought about the qualities that were most important to me in a mate. I realized I wanted to be with a guy who made me laugh and who was emotionally intelligent and spiritually connected. I wanted to be with a man who deeply understood and inspired me, like a soul mate. I did not know what he would look like, but I knew how I wanted to feel around him. For the first time, I became less concerned with who this man was and more concerned with who I would be with him.

I used to think I had a problem committing to a relationship. It never occurred to me that the problem wasnt some inherent flaw in me; it was in the choices I was making, the men I was choosing to date. Ive talked to so many women who are in the same position, even if they dont realize it. For example, Ive listened to clients confess that theyve had little success in love, even though they admit that the men they date warn them early on that theyre not ready for a long-term commitment. Women date these men in the hope that they will change their minds (or that their minds can be changed), but dating a man for his potential, and not for the person he is today, is usually a path to heartache.

Ive talked to other women who use a mental checklist full of external criteria (as I had done) to determine their ideal mate, focusing more on earning potential and college degrees than emotional and physical compatibility. They date the same kinds of men over and over, moving from one failed relationship to the next. In other words, they get caught up in a dating pattern that is simply not working. If you are familiar with Einsteins definition of insanitydoing the same thing over and over and expecting different resultsthis behavior could classify a person as insane.

I do not believe in bad luck in datingjust bad choices.

Throughout this book, you can expect to be challenged, guided, supported, and entertained. I will ask you tough questions, make you dig deep, and assign exercises and dating homework (trust me, thats the fun part). As you gain self-awareness, you will learn to take responsibility for your role in your dating pattern. And as you begin to apply what youve learned about yourself, your love life will undoubtedly improve. Most important, you will learn to break self-defeating patterns and create a new recipe for happiness.