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Choosing
the perfect mate
Going
about the business of finding your one true love
By
Mark Wolf, News Staff Writer
 You're looking for the person of your dreams, someone with whom to grow old and share the pleasures and burdens of your life.
It's a labor of…business.
Ask Philippa Courtney. She was a successful business consultant by day, the poster child for desperate dating at night.
"I was single and desperate and tired of everybody saying 'Why haven't you found somebody yet?' I'd tried every dating service known to humanity and thought there had to be a better way," she said. "When we're at work, we're this sharp, analytical person but even the smartest person becomes cotton candy when they're dealing with their emotions.
"I had this epiphany. I was working with Fortune 500 companies, so why didn't I look at what I was telling them? I used myself as a guinea pig, looked at myself as a client. I started standing outside myself trying to ask the right questions and eventually figured out what I had to do. I had no goal of helping other people, I simply wanted to meet somebody nice for the holidays."
She devised a method of identifying the kind of person she needed to attract and how to combine her business skills with the callings of her heart. It worked for her. She met and married a man who is now her business partner.
"Other books make you come up with lists of what you want in someone but didn't take you to how you felt with someone," said Courtney, who turned her approach into a series of seminars and the new book
4 Steps to Bring the Right Person Into Your Life Right Now! ($14.95). "How you feel about yourself is more important than how you feel about the other person."
Key to her approach is discovering what makes you happy when you are with the right person.
She created a Meant2Be profile as Step One: 10 categories to define the person you're looking to attract. They include physical style (example: social drinker, fitness oriented), emotional style (private, sharing, independent), social style (lots of friends, sense of humor), intellectual style (artistic, scientific), physical expression style (demonstrative in public, passive), communication style (listens, remembers), career/financial style (career-focused, personal interest focused), personal growth style (open to counseling, into self-help books), belief style (organized religion, atheist), passions (social causes).
After deciding what you're looking for, Courtney said, it's important to develop an "emotional snapshot" of the person.
"If you have a regular snapshot of a happy time you've had…a wedding, vacation, time with your family, you can erase the visual and still have the emotions. That would be how it feels to have this person in your life. It's without physical characteristics. It's the sound of a voice, the style of a person, the way the eyes twinkle when they're around you. How you feel more relaxed or alive around them. They get so fluent with this that, when they do meet the right kind of people, the bells in their head go off."
Courtney suggests keeping a detailed
date-book to rate each date on a 1-10 "feeling rating" scale for comfort, connection, compatibility, chemistry and "emotional snapshot" and include brief comments about how the relationship is progressing.
"This doesn't mean I don't believe in romance and the hands of fate, but you have to prepare yourself for the opportunity," she said. "It might be someone who's been close to you for years. I look back and I know I tried so hard to be what I thought I needed to be to get someone. The absolute joy is having someone who thinks you're great the way you are."
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