Car Washes, Cleansing Fire, and Katherine Woodward Thomas

Sophia, here. This is my first contribution to this search-for-a-soulmate blog, and boy am I ready to get started on this quest. I'm also under-employed at the moment. I should be looking for work, but blogging about love sounds way more appealing than drumming up clients at the moment. It's the middle of a hot, ashy day (from the rampant forest fires) here in Los Angeles. I'm calling on the fire gods to help usher in some spiritual renewal in the love department, to burn the chaparral of my errors in love and leave me with fertile soil to grow love anew.

So, down to business. We've canvassed our library of self-help titles and, at the urging of Blanche, settled upon Calling in "The One": 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life by Katherine Woodward Thomas as our first text. I brought the book with me to the car wash this afternoon to begin reading and got so riveted by the introduction that I had to pull out a pen and start underlining resonant passages and marking in the margins, all while trying to keep the cover folded over so as not to reveal the embarrassing title of the book to fellow car-wash-goers. What is it about reading about how to find love that feels so shameful? It's like wearing a T-shirt that says, "I'm Single and Desperate."

Embarrassment aside, I did manage to meet my goal and read both the preface and intro. I totally, eerily identified with Ms. Woodward Thomas (shall we call her KWT for short?) and her love tribulations. Like her, I too am someone who has kept dating unavailable men and then has wondered why I haven't yet found "the one." Married men, porn addicts, alcoholics, men without jobs, two-timers, Don Juans on the dance floor -- I've seen them all. According to KWT, the key to finding love is not decrying the male gender as hopelessly fucked up and unworthy. No. The problem is not that men are dogs (though clearly some of them are). The problem is that I have not loved MYSELF enough to keep the dogs at bay. Lightbulb!!!

I've been receiving this same message in various guises over the last few months. Call it codependency, call it love addiction, whatever it may be...the truth is that I don't look out for my own needs in a relationship. I find someone who, within the first week of meeting me, basically says to me that they are not looking for a relationship, and then instead of fleeing for the hills, as most definitely I should, I proceed to give and give and give to this person in the hopes that they will see the light and love me. I will be so irresistible, I tell myself, that they will realize they DO in fact want love and marriage and children and all the things they say they don't want because it's been cosmically ordained with me, their undeniable soulmate. Then, when this doesn't happen, and I realize that I've only been giving and they've only been taking, I wind up drained, depleted, angry, and confused, not to mention with a few more of my precious child-bearing years stripped away. I'm turning 35 in three weeks. Time for a total transformation!

So, as I'm sitting at the car wash reading and connecting with KWT, an email comes in on my Blackberry from my friend, let's call her Carly. It says, "It's been a big week for me. First, I'm married! I also handed in my manuscript, all 83,500 words of it." Carly, like me, is a writer. She has a book contract. And she just married her soulmate this past weekend. In one fell swoop, Carly achieved the two things I want most in life: to publish books and marry my one and only. Amazingly, Carly was able to complete her manuscript and get to the church on time in the span of one year. Why can't I do the same?

In Calling in "The One," KWT writes, "I decided to set an intention around finding 'The One.' To make it official, I called a girlfriend. 'Naomi,' I said, 'I'm going to be engaged by my birthday.'" Guess what? KWT got engaged eight weeks before her birthday! As I thought of Carly's email and KWT's seemingly magical engagement, I thought, why not me? Why can't I too have the things I want? And why not soon?

OK, so here it is, dear readers, here is my intention. I'm setting it. I will manifest it. Here goes: At this time next year (by my 36th birthday), I will be engaged to my soulmate AND I will have a book contract. MARRIAGE + MANUSCRIPT! BOOKS + BABIES! Woo hoo!!!!

At the core of KWT's philosophy is this idea of letting go, of discarding the relationships and internal beliefs that are not working in order to clear space for the new. She talks about spending "Saturday nights at home alone going through old things, burning old love letters and deleting old e-mails that I'd saved for no reason other than to feel less lonely." As a writer who relies on old journals and letters in order to do biographical research of others' lives, I feel reticent to throw out such papers of my own. When I'm a famous writer, won't the Smithsonian want all of these artifacts? But I CAN do something symbolic. For several years, I've held onto a stack of engagement announcements that I made when my ex proposed to me. He broke the engagement before we sent the announcements out. They were so beautiful, really. I was taking a letterpress course at the time, so I designed them, typeset them, chose a beautiful saffron ink, and ran them by hand on a vintage letterpress machine with gorgeous cream Fabriano paper from Italy. I've saved them because they represent a piece of my heart and a sample of my art. But the time has come to part! I'll save one for the Smithsonian, but Dear Reader, witness what is about to happen before your eyes. I AM TAKING THE ENTIRE STACK TO THE RECYCLING BIN, DUMPING IT, AND SAYING GOODBYE.

I learned in KWT's introduction that this book is really a course. It's intended to be 7 weeks long, with one exercise per day for 49 days. I'm glad that Dorothy and Blanche are "enrolling" in this course with me to help motivate me. I can totally see not sticking with it if I were doing it myself. In fact, KWT recommends doing the course with others so you have trusted individuals to "bear witness" to your growth and progress. I feel so grateful for the friends in my life who share a spiritual consciousness and similar worldview. Just as I've tried to rid myself of rotten relationships lately, I've also worked to jettison draining friendships. Today, in fact, I parted with a friend who is a good, kind person yet who has not worked through enough of her own issues or come to any type of spiritual awareness about the course of her life. As a result, she was draining me beyond belief, asking things of me that were unreasonable to ask, judging me by a set of standards I didn't want to be judged by. I've realized that just as I want soulmate love, I want soulmate friendship, friends with whom I can honestly confess my faults and flaws and still be recognized, understood, accepted, and loved. Here's to true friendship...and true love. Now if only I could put this much effort into finding some paying work...

-- Sophia

Welcome, Dear Reader

Well, it’s Wednesday night 11:49 on September 2, 2009. This is the eve of the commencement of Project Soulmate. I, Blanche, and my friends Sophia and Dorothy, (not our real names -- yes, we've chosen the Golden Girls as our inspiration) for our past few months of singledom, and in my case years, have traded the books on rules, dating advice, dating guides etc. for books that eschew all of that and emphasize dating to find your soulmate - books that reject the notion that there are key things one must do in order to make men want you. We are the girls who believe that we will find our soulmates, our one and onlies, the ones who want us just the way we are, the ones with whom we’re meant to be with as ordained by the universe, god, and the publishing companies who sold us these books. Yes, we’ve bought that whole notion and we’re not giving up on it. It’s all about magnetizing so that we can attract our heavenly mates - but this does not happen, apparently, without a lot of personal reflection, accessing of our higher selves, and investment in some art supplies.


And although we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the ideas in these books with each other, we realized that we never quite followed through with all of the exercises, never wholeheartedly embraced the principals of the books and realized that our avoidance stems from the fact that it often feels like homework and jeez, who the hell likes homework? Well, in fact, I actually don’t mind it when I’m forced to do it. But that’s just the thing. No one was forcing us to do it, so while completing week one, two, and sometimes three of the exercises in these books was often inspired and characterized by enthusiasm and excitement, the ensuing weeks were usually marked by weariness and eventually even a resentfulness that finding a soulmate should be so much work. No one else we knew in relationships did this much work to achieve their successful relationship. (But wait, everyone we knew in a relationship did not seem to be in a successful relationship, at least not by our standards, they certainly didn’t seem like soulmate relationships – isn’t that why we’ve held out til this point and become these unmarried 35 and 40 year olds?)  


So is there value to this work, we wondered, enough to spend all of this time doing these exercises? We didn’t know. But we wanted to be sure that we’d tried. And so that we’d have a good reason to be the pissed off old spinsters that failure would mean we’d become. So discipline, back to discipline. We wondered about how we might be more disciplined so we could finally fucking complete a book. Discipline, accountability. That’s what we lacked. How, how, how to do work when no one is making us we wondered?
 
And that’s when the brilliant Sophia stumbled upon the idea of a blog, a blog to recount our efforts in each chapter of a different soulmate seeking guide. Yes, yes, yes.We discussed this and concluded that this is the only way to stay accountable. We will blog - and then you dear sympathetic public will hold us accountable. You will give us the discipline we need to find our soulmates. It is you dear public sympathizers that we will toast at our weddings for bringing us together with our beloveds. We will take turns covering a chapter or section and discuss our experiences with you about doing these exercises. We will tell you about the ups and downs, the past relationships that must be dealt with, and the baggage in every other form that comes up as we take on the personal challenges that the exercises present. Yes, this is the idea and this is the night it all begins.
 
-- Blanche