Four Key Steps for Finding Love as a Single Mom

Dear friends,



So as you all know if you've only read me once or twice, I basically suck at love.   Yup, there I said it.  I asked my friend, Honorée Corder (author of The Successful Single Mom) for some much needed help.  Here are her 4 steps for finding love, I'm going to take her wise advice.  Please enjoy her piece about her journey to find love again and her great suggestions!



Smooches,



The Single Mom

The Art of Finding Love As a Single Mom

My
philosophy on the art of dating is quite simple:

Dating is an opportunity to ask for what
you want, say what you’re looking for (your purpose for dating), date lots of
people (as many as you’d like), have fun and enjoy the process, have almost
zero expectation, and remain unattached to the outcome.

When
you engage in the art of dating from the right place physically, mentally and
emotionally, you actually stand a better chance of ending up with the person
who is the best fit for you sooner. Much
sooner.

If
you’ve been searching for “the one” and beating your head against the wall,
crying yourself to sleep, or lamenting to your BFF how “a good man is hard to
find,” well, stop it. You will only get what you want when you make up your
mind about what that is, and get smart about your search.

I
write all about my journey to finding my husband of five years, my Mr.
Wonderful, in The Successful Single Mom Finds Love! Before I found him,
before I got smart, I had to kiss a lot of frogs, cry too many tears, and spend
countless hours and dollars on men who didn’t deserve the time it took to write
this sentence. I want to save you some time, aggravation, heart-ache and
babysitting dollars. Are you ready? Then let’s get started.

Ask for, and Get, What You Want

Remember:
There
is someone out there who wants for you to give him what you want to give and
who will give you what want you to receive.

Your
role in this process is to speak your truth (state your “purpose for dating”),
and sort and keep sorting until you’ve
found the person you’re going to date, live with, marry, have children with,
all of the above, or none of the above.

Oh
yes, and you probably will want to enjoy the process. Therefore, decide right
now that you’re going to begin this process when, and only when, you can commit
to yourself to enjoying the process and not before.

I
make it sound so easy, right? Actually it’s simple, but I recognize it’s not
necessarily easy because of the way we are wired and because of the way we’re
used to doing things.

Here’s
your new dating process:

1.                 
State your “purpose
for dating” all the time. Tell everyone within the sound of your voice what and
who exactly you’re looking to find.
They may have a brother, son, nephew, cousin, co-worker, or neighbor who sounds
like a good fit. You just never know where your Mr. Wonderful is going to come
from.

2.               
Have fun and
enjoy the process. What’s the point if you don’t have fun and enjoy the
process? When all of your energy is wrapped up in “finding,” you won’t be
“enjoying.” Inject fun into the dating that you do! Go to new restaurants,
indulge in new foods, try miniature golfing, go hiking, learn how to SUP
(stand-up paddle), learn a new language, train for a triathlon. All of these
activities put you in front of people, many of them new people.

3.               
Have no
expectations. What if you could just go on a date and the only expectation you
have is that you’re going to have a conversation (maybe even a good one) and a
nice meal? Wouldn’t that take the frenetic energy out of the date? The energy
that holds expectation and hope and
even a little bit of crazy? Wouldn’t that be nice? Yes, yes it would. Nod and
smile, so I know you’re with me, okay?

4.               
Don’t be attached
to the outcome. Don’t worry if “he’s the one,” just do your best to have a good
time, enjoy your dinner and movie, flirt your ass off, and then wait and see
what happens.

There
are two other love-finding tips I want to share with you.

First,
do what you haven’t been doing: go on more dates or dress differently. Go out
with your girlfriends, or even take a weekend away by yourself. In other words,
do the thing that scares you the most when it comes to dating. Shake things up.
Shake yourself up! You deserve to try something new and get a new, great
result.

Second,
save yourself for the best fit, i.e., you
deserve the best. So no settling! I mean it: this part is where I insist
you not settle. Good enough is just not good enough.

This
process isn’t about finding Mr. Perfect. He just simply doesn’t exist. This
process is about finding Mr. Perfect-For-You. My husband isn’t perfect (pretty
darn close), but he is perfect for me. We compliment each other so well, and
that makes our relationship harmonious, most days, anyway.  I’m so clear I’m not perfect, but he swears
I’m perfect for him. That’s a pretty great feeling, a feeling you, too, deserve
to have.

Bio: Honorée Corder is a Personal
Transformation Expert, Keynote Speaker and the a best-selling author of The Successful Single Mom book series, The Successful Single Dad, Paying4College: How to Save 25-50% on Your Kids College Education, Play2Pay: How to Market Your College-Bound Student-Athlete for
Scholarship Money, Tall Order!, and the
upcoming Vision to Reality.

Learn more on her website here. Visit her Single Mom blog here and her Personal Transformation blog here.

Going Deep

Today I’m going to be painfully honest with you and it scares
me to admit what I’ve been feeling.  I
started this blog as a leap of faith almost three years ago, I honestly didn’t
know if I was a good enough writer, funny enough or had anything to say that
mattered.  I always wanted to write and
leave a legacy of words on the world in my own way.  I wanted those words to make you laugh, inspire,
teach, entertain and sometimes even touch your heart.    

While none of those goals changed, my circumstances did,
drastically.   I can’t even read some of
my first posts today because I don’t know who that woman was, she sure isn’t
much like me today.   Ouch, I can’t
believe I really wrote that and haven’t backspaced it yet.  Yikes.   
When I began writing this blog, although I just got dumped and fired I
had no idea that life was about to suck even more.

I’ve written some about these hard days and I don’t want to
rehash a bunch of that stuff, but to review, life got increasingly more
challenging after I started writing this blog. 
What I’m about to say sounds corny, but I truly think some of those
experiences shaped me to be a better writer. 
While they sucked on ice, I’m also grateful for them because they helped
me go deeper and have more to share.

This time in my life forced me to realize that if I was
going to inspire YOU, then I had to get my shit together first and put good
stuff in my dome.   It was a downside of having an audience, in a
small way I felt responsible to put some good crap in your heads, my writing
had to have more substance than high heels, lip gloss and making out.  It had to.  
Fortunately, I’ve attracted an intelligent audience who likes to be
entertained and wants some depth with it.   
I realized that this blog couldn’t just be a cheap lap dance, but it
could still be sexy.  

In the beginning, I was naïve.  I thought I write these fun little dating tales
and it would be fun for both of us.   I’d eventually end up meeting someone terrific
who would worship me silly and you would clap and cry tears of joy.  Eventually, I’d bore the crap out of you as
all I had to share was our boring trips to Home Depot to pick out tile.   Spoiler alert: that shit didn’t happen, now
did it?   Nope.    Almost three years of dating and writing
and I’m closer to going cat lady crazy than shopping for tile. 

The last two and a half years have been extremely difficult
to endure.   There were many nights I
went to sleep hoping I wouldn’t wake up in the morning.  I didn’t know how I’d get through another
day, let alone another week. 

The two reasons my life has become so challenging  were financial struggles and that my ex
stopped being a parent to the boys.   Before
this, I could at least count on being a wild and crazy bachelorette every other
weekend and having some time to catch my breath.  Now, I don’t have that at all.  It’s been harder to have a life, be a good
mom and to maintain a job, to be quite honest with you.   I hate admitting this but I need a break
from being a mom, a weekend, an overnight, anything.    I feel like a failure for thinking that let
alone writing it, but it’s the truth.  I
don’t feel like I’m my best and therefore not able to give my best to the
boys. 

In some ways I also feel like I’ve failed you, my
reader.   I want to be writing happy,
sexy posts consistently.  Heck, I’ve
barely been able to write at all.  But
hey guess what, life isn’t always what we expect and I know you
understand.   But I’m hard on myself,
harder than I’m sure you are.  

Another reason I feel like I’ve failed you is because I
haven’t found love.  I haven’t written
that perfect walk into the sunset, holding another hand.   Sometimes, I wonder what is wrong with me
but lately, I’ve realized that it goes deeper than that. 

This deep dive into self-improvement and all my hardcore
personal development, especially this year has caused me to pull away from many
potential relationships with men and be more picky about who I truly let
in.  Yet, I can date more casually for
fun, more for the experience of meeting new people, but it takes me much longer
to get attached.   I’m also starting to
look at why I’ve attracted a certain type of man into my life and then why I
was even more of a dumbass and slept with that dude, over and over again.  

A lot of my answers lie on my own shoulders.  I realized that I’ve welcomed men into my
life who had some kind of handicap that would keep us from becoming too serious.  Ouch, that’s pretty painful to admit.   A great example of that is the most recent man
I dated this summer,  who was much
younger.  I wanted companionship but I
didn’t want him crowing my life.   The
fact that he was younger was a built in hurdle, so that we wouldn’t become
extremely close.   What is wrong with me? 

I haven’t truly loved anyone since “The Reader”.  You don’t know how hard that is to admit,
especially since he may still read my blog sometimes.   On the other hand, the time that has passed since
being involved with him has shown me that although losing him from my life was
painful, it was absolutely for the best.  
Today, he’s not a man I would be attracted to; I’ve changed so much,
it’s almost staggering.  

Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten as close as one
can to falling in love, without completely falling over the cliff.    Truthfully, I’m scared of the weak little
girl I am after a difficult breakup, so scared in fact that it keeps me from
fully immersing into love.  So my choices
are simple, I either let someone in partially or I stay disconnected totally
until I find someone worthy of taking the risk.   I’m meeting a lot of men and flirting, but
haven’t met anyone who is worth risking my sanity.

I was very fortunate this year to find a book that has
drastically shaped my life and my future.     I highly recommend, The Successful Single Mom for anyone going through a difficult time
in life.   It’s an excellent book for a
single mom or anyone actually who needs a jump start in life and career.  I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with the
author of this book, slobbering all over her, thanking her for writing this
book.   Her advice literally changed my
life for the better,  I use some nugget
of wisdom from her book every single day. 
It also forced me to look harder at myself, my inner circle and my
thoughts.  I’m truly a better person for
reading this book.  

In the next few weeks, I’ll share an experience this summer
that has made me swear off online dating, at least for now and more from my
dating life.  As always thanks for reading and for all your encouragement, it really means a lot!  

Smooches,

The Single Mom

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