How to Find the Right Person for You: A Guide to Successful Dating

By Melinda Korenchuk

Choosing the right person to marry is probably the most significant factor in your personal happiness, but how do you know who is right for you? Most of us don't really know what we are looking for, so we look for the wrong things, in the wrong places and fall in love with the wrong people. This is all in your power to change. After reading this book and working through the exercises, you will have your own personalized dating strategy. In the process, you will learn:

What you value, and how those values drive your decision making
What interests you, and how your interests influence your relationships
Your preferred way of thinking, learning, organizing, and interacting with the world, and how that effects your lifestyle choices
Your expectations for a relationship, both in terms of what you can give, and what you need in return
The type of person you will stay in love with, and who will accept and like you the way you are (yes, that person is out there)
Where to look for this type of person, and how to find him or her
How to know when you have found him or her and when to keep looking
Your expectations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: May 22, 2003
• ISBN: 9781466957947

Melinda Korenchuk

Melinda Korenchuk is a consultant and qualified practitioner of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the most widely used and respected instrument for assessing personality type. She holds a BA from the University of Nebraska and an MS from Bentley College in Massachusetts. For more information, please visit the author's site at: www.mkbetterway.com

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© Copyright 2003 Melinda Korenchuk. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author, author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncomercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Myer-Briggs Type Indicator and MBTI are registered trademarks of Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Korenchuk, Melinda, 1955-

How to find the right person for you : a guide to successful dating / Melinda Korenchuk.

Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-55395-862-4

1. Dating (Social customs) I. Title.

HQ8 01.K6 8 2003 646.7’7 C2 003-901033-3

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About the Author

Once there was a girl, 17 years old, who fell in love with a 16 year old boy in her physics class. He was a lot like her, and they did everything together. But they were very young and inexperienced. When she went to college a year later, they seemed to be worlds apart, and they parted. The girl became a young woman who went out in the world and met many interesting men, but not the right man. She moved far away from home and met a man whom she found attractive, and who seemed to like the same sort of things she liked. She married this man. As it turned out, they both liked to read science fiction and they both liked to bicycle long distances…but they didn’t think about things the same way at all, and they didn’t talk much, and they both felt lonely somehow. Marriage wasn’t what she had hoped for. It seemed rather empty.

Five years later, they had two children. Now they didn’t even bicycle together anymore, and they lived parallel lives, together but alone. In another five years, they parted. The woman, not as young now, met and fell in love with a man who seemed to think like she did, and they spent many marvelous hours talking about interesting things. But they didn’t value the same things and didn’t do the same things, and after eight years they parted company, too. This relationship had been passionately good and passionately bad, and wasn’t what she wanted, either.

At this point, the woman decided it was time to find the RIGHT person, someone who made her feel passionately good, like the man who talked about interesting things, but who also shared her interests, like her husband had. And more, someone who filled her soul the way she remembered her high school relationship had. But in a more grown up way.

She began by thinking about her past relationships, and what qualities were non-negotiable in the man who would be right for her. Then she put a dating campaign together for herself, and worked at it every week. Within three months, she met THE ONE. She knew he was the right person soon after she met him because she knew exactly what she was looking for, and she was dating with the objective of finding it. Within seven months of meeting this person, she was married to him. And years later, continues to live happily the life that she wanted to lead.

And so can you! The secrets of understanding what you really want from a relationship are in this book. It isn’t going to be easy, though; in fact, it is going to require a lot of difficult work. Only you can determine what you are really looking for and to do that, you are going to have to do some serious and difficult thinking about who you are, who you want to be, and what you want to do with the rest of your life. Then you need to buckle down and work on finding that person. Yes, it’s a lot of work. But it’s worth it!

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Is Anyone Out There for Me?

Take Charge of your Love Life

How Can I Find this Person, Then?

The Four Step Plan

What Attracts: The Cinderella Syndrome

What is Love?

What Keeps you in Love: shared VIPs

Can a relationship work without shared VIPs?

Are you Ready for Love?

STEP ONE: KNOW YOURSELF

The V of VIP: Values Dictates Life Choices

What do you Value?

Values Inventory

Your No-Compromise Zone

Some Examples

Values Statements

The I OF VIP: Interests create bonds or walls

How To Use the Interest Inventory

Interest Inventory-Current Picture

Interest Inventory-Future Picture

Time Tracking

Time Planning Log

Time Tracking Log

The P OF VIP: Personal Preferences

What is your TRUE SELF?

The Four Dimensions of Behavior

How we Reason and Learn: Experiential or Conceptual

How we Make Decisions: Principles or Values

Combining Reasoning and Decision Making Styles

How we Organize our World: Decisive or Exploring

Combining Reasoning and Organizing Styles

How we Focus: Inward on Ideas/Memories or Outward on People, Events & Things

Combining Focus and Organizing Styles

16 Preference Patterns form 16 Personality Types

What You’ve Learned So Far

Values: What drives your decisions

Interests: How you spend your time

Personal preferences: How you prefer to live Life

STEP TWO: DEFINE YOUR EXPECTATIONS

Expectations Need to be Uncovered and Shared

Inappropriate Expectations

Character Flaws and Bad Habits

Wanted: Attractive, Intelligent, Interesting Person

Expectations for Looks and Habits

Expectations for Intimacy

Expectations for Affection and Affirmation

Expectations for Closeness and Conversation

Expectations for Companionship and Autonomy

Expectations for Sex and Passion

Role Expectations

Expectations for Emotional Support

Expectations for Family Life

Expectations for Domestic Contribution

Expectations for Financial Support

Marriage Models

Traditional Marriage Model

Two-Career Marriage Model

Soul Mate Marriage Model

What You’ve Learned so far

Attraction Factors

Intimacy

Roles

Marriage Model

What’s Next?

STEP THREE: Design your Dating Plan

Why should this work for you?

Visualize What You’re Looking for

The Person I’d Like to Meet

Values

Interests

Personal preferences

Examples

Where to Look

Singles Clubs

Organizations, Clubs, Classes

Dating Services

Personal Ads

Events

Network

Developing your Personal Campaign

If you are outgoing …

If you are a private person…

Make your List…

Put it all Together

My Dating Campaign

Person I am Looking for (key values, interests, preferences)

Strategy to Find this Person

Person I am Looking for (key values, interests, type)

Strategy to Find this Person

Steps to Implement Strategy

Daily Plan to Carry Out Strategy (Things I will do each day)

Weekly Plan to Carry Out Strategy (Things I will do each week)

STEP FOUR: Find and Recognize your VIP

Are you Counting on Luck or Success?

First Meetings

Risk and Safety

When, Where, How long?

Early Observations

Early Conversations

No-Compromise Zone and the Polite Exit

Settling for Almost Right

How do you say no to the relationship?

The Art of Getting to Know Someone

Conversation is an Art

Exploring Key Interests

Exploring Driving Values

Exploring Personal Preferences

How Long is This Going to Take?

Bibliography

Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

Is Anyone Out There for Me?

Yes! The right person for you is out there, looking for you in all the wrong places with no idea how to recognize you. The process of getting introduced, becoming acquainted, and falling in love has no script; most of us do not know what we should be looking for, let alone how to look for it, and so leave the process we call dating pretty much to chance.

Finding the right person to share your life with is probably the most important decision you can make, the one that has the greatest impact on your happiness, and yet…we don’t do a very good job of it. Once we have found someone to love and start living with that person, half of us give up after a while, get a divorce and try again. Of the remaining half, a large percentage has decided to make do and settle but still wonders if there isn’t something better out there.

Take Charge of your Love Life

If you are single right now, you can let fate determine whether or not you will meet someone who is truly compatible with you…or you can take charge of your life and make sure that you do meet someone you can love and live with for the rest of your life.

You may have difficulty meeting people. You work five days a week, after all, and there are responsibilities outside of work to take care of. How do you find the time to meet someone new and interesting? WHERE SHOULD) YOU LOOK?

You may meet plenty of people, but no one you meet is even remotely interesting to you. ALL THE GOOD ONES SEEM TO BE TAKEN. Where are all the nice, attractive people hiding?

The problem with dating is this: we don’t work at it enough, we don’t know what we are looking for, and we don’t know it when we see it. We often look for the wrong things, in the wrong places, and fall in love with the wrong people. This is all in your power to change, and you are taking the first step by reading this book. You have the opportunity to make a choice that will work for you. Make it!

How Can I Find this Person, Then?

Finding the person who is right for you is a lot like finding the job that is right for you. To find a good job you need to know yourself and what you have to offer. You need to know the job market and what sort of job would suit you. You need to know where to look for available jobs and how to go about it. You need to develop a job search campaign, and you need to dedicate a lot of time to finding it.

Finding the right person for you is even more important than finding the right job…and the same rules apply: know yourself and what you have to offer; know what types of people are available, and what sort of person would suit you. Have a plan for your search, and dedicate a lot of time to finding the