Finding the Right Person for You

Finding the right person for you is like hitting the center of a target in archery. To aim and hit the center takes a lot of practice.

Good Endings Make Good Beginnings
How we end a relationship and how we evaluate a date are essential to fine-tuning our ability to be attracted to the right person for us. The secret of making sure one relationship leads to another one, closer to what you want, is to pay a lot of attention to how you end a relationship. How you end a relationship has an enormous impact on the quality of your next relationship. Good endings make good beginnings.

Repeating Patterns
When we end a relationship with resentment or guilt, we are attracted to someone who will help us deal with unresolved feelings and issues.

Staying Together Too Long
One of the reasons people end relationships with negative feelings is that they stay together too long. They do not recognize they are with the wrong person and move on. Instead, they try too hard to make a relationship work. They either try to change their partner or try to change themselves. In the process of trying to fit together, they make things worse. In trying to make a relationship that is close to the right one into the right one, they create frustration and disappointment. In the process of trying to make things better, they bring out the worst in their partner and themselves.

When Love Is Not Enough
As Bill and Susan moved through the first three stages of dating, everything had been fine, but in the fourth stage it went downhill. As Bill got to know Susan, he began to think he was not right for her and she was not right for him. He loved her, but he didn’t want to marry her.
Neither Bill nor Susan knew that it was perfectly healthy to get to know a person, fall in love, and then discover that this person is not a right one. Instead of ending their relationship with love, they ended it because they had so many arguments that they just didn’t like each other anymore. Without this important insight, many people end relationships by focusing on the negative instead of by focusing on the positive.

How Do You Know When Someone Is Right?
“How do you know if someone is right?”
“Well, I don’t exactly know what to tell you---you just know.”

What Many Single People Don’t Understand
Many single people don’t understand this basic truth. They mistakenly believe that if you love someone, you should want to have a relationship with them. This is not right. The closer someone is to being the right person, the more you will be able to see him or her as worthy of your love, but still this might not be the right person for you. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean he or she is the one for you.
People do not realize that love is not enough. If they discover that their partner is not right, either they feel guilty ending the relationship or they unnecessarily focus on what does not work in the relationship in order to justify leaving.
When couples don’t know how to end a relationship with love, they bring out the worst in their partners and the worst in themselves. Not only is this unnecessary, but it makes it more difficult to find the right person next time.

What It Takes
In most cases it takes both time and progression through the five stages before you can recognize your true life partner and soul mate. Certainly there are games and manipulations to make someone love you and want to marry you, but this doesn’t ensure that he or she will be right for you.

Finding a Soul Mate
A soul mate is someone who has the unique ability to bring out the best in us. Soul mates are not perfect, but perfect for us. While they can bring out the best in us, without good communication skills they can also bring out the worst in us, and vice versa. We are not just physically turned on to them; our soul gets turned on as well.
There are basically four kinds of chemistry between dating partners: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Physical chemistry generates desire. Emotional chemistry generates affection. Mental chemistry creates interest. Spiritual chemistry creates love. A soul mate includes all four.

Physical Attraction Is Not Enough

The Soul and Lasting Love

Opening Our Hearts
In the early stages of dating, when our hearts are not fully open to each other, we depend on our feelings of attraction and interest to find the right person. Feelings of attraction and interest can only lead us into a relationship that meets our emotional needs. Once we begin to get our emotional needs met in a relationship, our hearts begin to open and we experience real love and intimacy. As we get to know our partner with love, it is still not certain that we will pick him or her as our soul mate.
We may feel a deep soul love, but still that person may not be the one. Finding deep and lasting love does not mean a person is the perfect person for you. When some people mistakenly assume that loving a person means marriage, they can never open up to feel the love in their hearts because they are not sure that they want to marry that person.

Marriage Is a Choice
Marriage is a choice, but not like any other choice. You don’t marry just any person you love. Instead, you first find love and then you are capable of making the right choice. As we have already explored, the experience of real love for a person doesn’t necessarily mean he or she is the one for you. The experience of real love does connect us to our soul. With this connection, we are then able to know what our soul wants to do.
Choosing a soul mate is not mental decision based on the pros and cons of a relationship. It is not an emotional decision based on comparing how a person makes you feel. It is not a physical decision based on how a person looks. It is much deeper. When our soul wants to marry our partner, it feels like a promise that we came into this world to keep.
It feels as if we are supposed to be together and share our lives.

Preparing Ourselves
Most people find or are found by their soul mates when they are not really looking.

Autonomy Is the Basis for Intimacy
As we become more autonomous and mature, we automatically begin looking for more in our relationships.

Soul Mates Are Not Perfect

When You Can’t Make Up Your Mind

The Importance of Exclusivity

Increasing Discernment
Why Couples Are Waiting To Get Married
It is wise to first know yourself before trying to share your self in a marriage.

The Wisdom of Going Slowly
Just as living separately from our parents is an important part of growing up, living separately from the opposite sex is equally important.

(From "Mars and Venus on a Date" ch.2)

Archery: [U] 箭術
Resentment: n.[U] 憤恨、憎恨、怨恨
Autonomy: n.[U]自治、自治權；[C] 自治團體