Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (22 page)

Choose something you’d like to learn—for example, scuba-diving—then join a club and go on weekend trips. You’ll learn a skill and meet lots of new people. Take a course in something that you have been interested in for a long time but haven’t started. You could learn to paint, dance, or take photographs or start up any other interest that you would love to try. You will meet people with whom you have an immediate rapport because they like similar things. This way, there is a greater chance they may also have similar core values and beliefs. You’ll also make new friends of the same sex, who can be a great avenue for you to meet their single friends.

Never join a club just to find a partner—but don’t limit your prospecting. The bottom line is that you make a plan and stick to it. The harder you work for it, the more likely you will be to find your ideal partner.

We are now going to ask you to take control of your love life and stop letting relationships happen by accident. What you are about to read can change your life forever. Have you ever written a list of goals that you thought you wanted to achieve? You’ll probably answer “yes” for your work life because businesses can’t survive without written goals and targets. If you have written goals, you’ll know that the pathway to these goals
suddenly materializes. When you decided to buy a certain type of car—say, a blue Toyota sedan—as soon as you decided exactly what you wanted, you started to see blue Toyota sedans everywhere, right? Here’s how it works—you can take in and absorb less than 5% of what happens around you; otherwise your brain would become overwhelmed by too much information and couldn’t cope. So your brain actively searches only for data related to the things you have in your mind and ignores the rest. Any time you make a decision to do something or to achieve anything, you immediately begin to see things about it in newspapers, on TV, and in magazines, and you hear it in people’s conversations. It’s like when you’ve read the newspaper and would swear you’ve read everything and someone asks, “Did you see the story about …?” and you can’t recall seeing it. You return to the newspaper and find an entire page devoted to the story. The story wasn’t part of your priority list, so your brain didn’t see it.

Now we want you to write a list of the characteristics and attributes of your perfect life partner. Don’t compromise. Why should you compromise when there are over a million potential outstanding partners out there somewhere for you? You must also be realistic—there’s no point in writing that you want Brad Pitt or Elle Macpherson unless you’re prepared to upscale yourself to the level they would want in a partner. Part of the reason love evolved was to help us fall for someone whose attractiveness, intelligence, status, and overall Mating Rating are similar to ours, as this would help us avoid chasing someone who is unattainable. We promise you this—whatever you write down on your list will immediately begin to appear around you and be drawn to you. And it does not fail.

As an example, here’s a list that Robert, one of our male readers, wrote at one of our seminars:

For Robert, this woman would be his perfect mate. When Robert first wrote this list, he felt a little uncomfortable about doing it but was prepared to give it a go. He’d always written detailed goal lists for business but never for a life partner (which is why he’d gone from one bad relationship to the next). He later reported that when he had completed his “perfection” list, he started seeing women who matched his criteria everywhere, just as he had described his ideal woman on his list—and just as it had happened with his blue Toyota sedan. He carried his list with him for over two years and repeatedly had dates with women who matched his criteria. We know that if he’d never written this list that day, he may never have found the blue-eyed blonde he has now been ecstatically married to for the past six years.

“I was standing at the counter of a coffee lounge when Fiona walked in,” he said. “My heart stopped when I saw her, and when she spoke, I felt paralyzed. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my list. She was the woman on my list! She took the coffee and sat at a table. I approached her with my heart in my mouth and said, ‘Do you mind if I join you for a few minutes? I’d like to ask your advice.’ She said, ‘Sure,’ and that’s how it started. I had no idea what to say because I’d never done this before. I explained that I’d been to a seminar where we were asked to write a list of our ideal life partner. I asked her to comment on my list. Fortunately, I’d changed the last item from ‘whore in the bedroom’ to ‘tiger in the bedroom’ in case I met my match and showed her my list. Fiona
was both stunned and flattered. If I had never written the list and had it with me on that day, I would never have had the courage to make that approach. Fiona would have just walked into my life and then walked out again!”

If your list said you wanted a redheaded, green-eyed person with freckles, that’s who you’d begin to see around you. The list idea works. Do it now and stop being a member of the “accidental-relationship” club. If you meet a wonderful partner by accident, it’s a bonus, but don’t let chance be your only relationship plan.

Another delegate, Susan, wrote the following “wish list” of her ideal partner’s attributes:

Susan put this list on her refrigerator and carried a copy with her in her purse. She looked at it regularly. As with most goal setting, you should not only write it down and refer to it regularly, you should tell your friends and they’ll start to see this person appear, too. The list technique will save you time and heartbreak because you’ll know exactly who you are looking for, and if someone walks into your life who doesn’t match your list, you won’t waste your time or hope that person will change. If a person has at least, say, 70% of your requirements and you feel you could live with what that person doen’t have, then spend the time getting to know him or her better. But if people have only 20% of the qualities you are looking for, forget it. Susan has reported that since writing her list, she has been amazed to see men who match this description literally jump out everywhere, including at supermarkets, in the gym, on TV, and crossing the road at traffic lights. Her brain is programmed to search for the things in a partner that are important to her. That’s why this idea works.

Your list needs to describe your minimum requirements for a permanent partner. If a prospective partner doesn’t qualify for most or all your written criteria, look elsewhere.

Graham Steele, author of
All the Best Ones Aren’t Taken
, was an expert at playing the ratios and numbers game in sales and business. When he became newly single at age fifty, he decided to apply the numbers formula to the thousands of dating sites on the Internet to find his ideal partner.

His results were so dramatic, he wrote a book about what happened—and he met the love of his life. In 2009, we interviewed Graham about how he had applied the numbers game to the mating market, and here is what he said: “First, I wrote a description of exactly who I was looking for. I had been married previously, I’d had a number of relationships that didn’t
work out, and so I decided I would find my perfect partner and never settle for second best.”

This is what he wrote on his list as his perfect female partner:

“After I wrote this list, I then wrote a description of myself, trying to be as honest as I could and not exaggerating anything. Next, I chose a good photograph of myself and began posting the details on matchmaking websites around the world. Soon it became almost a full-time job managing the responses, but if I was going to get the result I wanted, I would do it. I soon averaged sixty hours a week online for close to three years, posting my details, answering the responses, and chatting to women on my computer. I met a lot of weirdos, some real crazy people, and I had a lot of fun.”

Here’s a summary of what Graham did:

1. He looked at over 20,000 head shots and descriptions on dating websites.
   

2. He got it down to around 1,000 women’s photos and full descriptions of themselves. That’s about 5% of the total women he had sifted through.
   

3. He sent his photo and description to these 1,000 women, and 30% responded (about 300).
   

4. In a return e-mail, he asked them if they wanted to have children—most said, “Yes”—about 285.
   

5. Next, he responded to this 285 with the “kill factor”—stating clearly that he was not going to have any more kids, as he already had three. About 60% dropped out.
   

6. This left him with about 100 women with whom he could develop a relationship. That’s 10% of the 1,000 women he thought were suitable candidates.
   

7. With each of these 100 women they learned about each other over time through Internet chat, phone calls, and e-mails; 38 came to meet him, and these relationships either strengthened or died.
   

8. From these 100 women, he invited 24 from foreign countries to holiday with him in Brisbane, Australia, on the basis that they paid their airfares and he would pay for everything else; 16 accepted.
   

9. Those who accepted also accepted the concept of premarital sex, so that if chemistry happened, they could both fully evaluate each other’s partner potential.
   

10. Women came from everywhere (including the sixteen from overseas), and mostly, they had a great time. Some arrived as virgins and left the same way—“my choice.” If there was no chemistry with them, he considered it a waste of time.
    

“Of all the women I met, Emma stood out in every respect even before I met her face to face. I remember clearly the day Emma contacted me—it was Easter Monday and I had spent eight hours studying women on
Match.com
and had responded to a hundred of them
that day
. Eventually, three of that group came to see me in Brisbane, and one was close to my ideal, except that she sulked and seemed like she’d be hard work. But Emma was absolutely perfect. When she arrived in Australia, we instantly felt the chemistry. We soon became engaged and were married the following year. That was nine years ago.”

When Graham met Emma, he was a fifty-year-old property developer, guitarist, and singer. Emma was a twenty-nine-year-old Chinese woman who held an accounting degree and fit Graham’s list perfectly. She was also a guitar player who has since learned to play classical piano. When we interviewed
Graham and Emma, they had been together and happily married for nine years and are two people we would describe as perfectly matched for a life together.

We asked Emma how she felt about being the result of what could be considered by some as a massive relationship lottery. “Graham chose me to be his wife from a possible twenty thousand other women,” she said. “How many women can claim that of any man? I have no doubt that I am number one in Graham’s life.”

“Emma is the woman I always wanted,” said Graham. “Most people don’t have a big enough pool of partners to choose from—that’s why they can’t afford to be as choosy as I was. You need a written list of what you want, and then you simply let the numbers game do the work.”

Although Graham Steele’s approach could be considered extreme by some people, he demonstrates that when you have a clearly written list of what you want in a partner and you state up-front what you have to offer, the numbers game will work just as well in love as it does in business.

The person you don’t want is someone who is desperate or under pressure to find a partner. This was the case for past generations of humans, and it worked well for them because their life expectancy was much shorter than ours and they had six to twelve children and were concerned with basic survival, not with satisfying each other’s emotional needs. There are people out there today who want you as their partner because
of their own external pressures, such as to please their family: “It’s that stage of life,” “All my friends are doing it,” “It’s probably time for me to settle down,” “I won’t get anyone better,” “If I don’t marry them, they’ll leave me,” “This could be the change in life I’m looking for,” “I need to have a baby before it’s too late,” and so on. You’ve heard them all before.