Welcome to the beginning of your SoulMating journey. We know that you probably chose this book because you have a yearning to be in a wonderful lifetime partnership, where you feel loved, honored, cherished and accepted for who you are—imperfections and all. In this book, you will be presented with the tools and skills to do the same for your loving partner.

The journey begins by discovering who you are and what you value, focusing on becoming the best possible mate. Without giving up your identity as an individual, you then can support your partner to create his or her own sense of fulfillment, together experiencing genuine and unconditional love, where you both feel like you’ve come home when you are in each other’s presence.

The major goal here is to acquire the vision, attitude and values necessary to become a whole person—a complete I—filled with joy, happiness and meaning. This includes learning to acknowledge your soulful who qualities—such as kindness, compassion, acceptance and patience—as gifts, so that you naturally feel passionate about all of life, allowing you to be able to love yourself fully and present yourself to the world as your own best friend. Only then can you begin the journey of SoulMating with another. Remember, you can’t fully love another unless you first know, like and love yourself. In a healthy life partnership, you are the cake and your potential partner is merely the icing, although the icing can be quite delicious.

What is partnership? Webster’s Dictionary defines a partner as a person who is associated with another in some endeavor. Taken literally, there are millions of partnerships flourishing at this moment. Yet we all know that something is amiss. More than 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and less than 20 percent of the remaining couples who stay married state that they are happy and content. That’s why we feel it’s necessary to add the words healthy, fulfilling and lifetime to this mix.

For this section, we interviewed hundreds of partners who we believe are in a healthy and loving partnership, and asked them their secret for success. We compiled the answers, and the consensus is that they:

Agree that the who qualities of each partner are more important than the externals

Share core values as well as many interests

Grow closer during difficult times because they have a solid foundation based on friendship

Accept the partner’s whole package—the positives and negatives—without trying to change them

Love spending time with their partner, feeling better about themselves when they are together

Both value authenticity and never play games

Don’t keep grudges, forgiving their partner for being human and accepting each other’s mistakes

Can laugh at themselves, making fun of their shortcomings

Show a willingness to be flexible when interacting with their partner

The most interesting part of these interviews was that nobody, not even once, mentioned that the key to a successful partnership was based on sex, passion, physical attraction, financial independence or status. Matter of fact, they rarely mentioned external values at all.

Here, conversely, are some highly publicized and erroneous so-called guiding principles to a happy partnership that are prevalent today. Sadly, these points are the exact opposite qualities that we espouse, but are generally emphasized by family, friends, society and media, as the secret to date and mate successfully.

• Instead of first discovering who you are and what you value by focusing on becoming the best possible partner, you are taught to look for the romantic fantasy—that perfect person—based on external values such as beauty, success and money.
• Falsely believing that a great date leads to a great mate.
• Seeking a partner based on the person’s what’s, instead of who they are.
• Confusing true love with lust and passion.
• It must be true love because there are fireworks.
• Playing games instead of being authentic and sharing your true values while you date and mate.

This list of our society’s myths perpetuates an unrealistic romantic picture of relationship, which automatically sets you up for failure. That’s why so many of you suffer in one of the most important areas of your life—the relationship arena.

Our work, as the SoulMating Doctors, has been committed to end this pervasive suffering. We are devoted to helping individuals find true love, joy, peace and harmony in their relationships with themselves and another. This led to the creation of our model, which we call “SoulMating,” the map and the process that is the key to finding and maintaining one of three healthy partnership models: a companion, soul mate or spiritual partner.

Healthy partnership is a collaborative dance between two whole people. The key ingredient is your ability to touch your own soul, creating an intimate and nurturing relationship with yourself, in order to connect soulfully with another. It’s passion, intimacy and romance, based on true friendship. It’s the cultivation of the relationship over time that produces a happy couple, feeling understood and accepted for all their “crazies” or shortcomings.

The goal of a fulfilling lifetime partnership is an ongoing commitment to be together, understanding that this work never ends. Healthy partnership is a process, where the partners invent themselves and their relationship continually so that their union becomes stronger and more intimate each day. This can only be achieved by learning healthy partnership skills before the partners actually commit to one another.

The foundation of a fulfilling lifetime partnership is based on friendship, love and true intimacy, rather than on passion and lust. As friendship grows, a low level passion keeps getting better and better because the connection is based on admiring each partner for who they are, not for what they do or have. The partners know that the essence of true partnership extends well beyond the external qualities of age, physical attractiveness, making money, success, status and high-powered careers, to something much greater and intrinsically more satisfying. This level of intimacy is the key to personal, emotional and physical health, along with the interpersonal fulfillment that only a wonderful relationship can provide.

In order to live in peace and harmony with yourself and another, it is essential to embrace your imperfect self—warts and all. That’s what becoming the best possible you is all about. Here you will learn to accept and love all aspects of yourself, including:

• Your thoughts, behaviors and mistakes—past, present and future
• Your feelings—positive and negative
• Your looks, height, age, weight and body type
• Being at peace with any relationship that didn’t work out
• Your strengths and challenges, and the mistakes that you made in your life
• The way that you are like your parents

It involves abandoning the chase for what you want to be or think you should be, as you learn to accept and fully experience who and what you are, specifically your wants and desires. You will begin to see the world as half-full by eliminating negative self-talk, such as, “I’m not OK because I have brown eyes, not blue,” or “I’m curvy, not athletic and thin.” You will replace all these unloving statements with “I am,” asserting how proud you are of all the parts that make up the unique you. This includes knowing and making peace with your strengths and challenges, where you can set goals for yourself, striving for excellence instead of perfection. Accepting these principles in your everyday life is a major component of your successful SoulMating journey.

To accomplish this end, the following areas will be explored:

• Pursuing perfection is a trap.
• Valuing the process as well as the end result.
• The more that you can love and accept yourself for your total package, the easier it is to totally embrace and accept your partner for theirs.
• By living in the world effectively, you will raise your self-esteem.
• Different situations require different skills, which can be learned.
• Learning about your strengths and challenges in the relationship arena.

Perfectionism

Many of you suffer endlessly trying to be what you are not and can never be, because you set unrealistic or impossibly high goals for yourself. Trying to achieve the perfect image perpetuated by media and society, combined with your failure to understand the impossibility of achieving this goal, sets the trap of never measuring up.

In the relationship arena, many men believe the myth that women will not find them desirable unless they are financially successful. And many women, when presented with the image of models and movie stars as the epitome of what they need to look like, actually believe and are told that unless they look a certain way, they are not dateable, let alone marriage material. When Basha had her severe eating disorder, she believed this myth for many years. Sadly, both of these examples focus on the superficial, exterior qualities of a person, rather than who that person is inside.

When we fail to make this crucial distinction between an idealized image and a real-life, less-than-perfect loving partner, we’ve taken the bait and stepped into the perfectionist trap with its paralyzing anxiety, fears and unhappiness. A relentless pursuit to do well in life is not the problem. The difficulty comes with unrealistic goals that virtually guarantee failure.

No matter how well they perform, perfectionists are never satisfied with the outcome. They cannot tolerate merely coming close to their goal. Consequently, they always feel an inner emptiness instead of joy from their accomplishments. This unrelenting drive can lead to procrastination, endless suffering or failure to do anything. Becoming the best possible you is the ability to unplug from these unreasonable expectations and goals so that you can win in every area of your life.

Many of us were raised to believe that perfection was possible, so we continue to chase this unattainable goal, which creates much frustration and suffering in our lives. Being human means finding peace with the idea that there is no such thing as absolute perfection.

Here are some issues you should consider regarding the pursuit of perfection:

• If you are a perfectionist you were probably raised in a critical family environment. The message was consistently, “What have you done for me lately?” When you made a mistake you were criticized, rejected or negatively judged. Part of becoming the best possible you is realizing that these critical individuals were operating with an erroneous belief system because they were focusing on what, rather than who, you were.
• You are not good at everything. Nor can you be instantly good at new tasks. You need to be forgiving of yourself as you take on something new.
• You will never be happy with yourself or others if you only value the end result. Fulfillment in life means valuing all the steps along the way, honoring the process.
• The perfectionist operates only in doing mode, never loving themselves completely because anything less than flawlessness is unacceptable.
• Perfectionists believe that they are only as good as their last victory. They can never be truly happy with themselves unless they keep on performing. With this point of view, when they stop achieving, their sense of self-worth is totally diminished. Not only do they love themselves with conditions, but because they have not valued who they are, they feel empty.
• Self-acceptance doesn’t discount self-improvement. In fact, it’s just the opposite. By surrendering the impossible dreams that you simply can’t become or achieve (like yearning to have blue eyes when your eyes are brown), you gain the energy, enthusiasm and passion, to tackle and accomplish the possible ones.

Healthy relationships cannot occur when one or both of the partners are perfectionists. The perfectionist is usually so preoccupied with themselves, trying to achieve the unrealistic goal, that they ignore everyone else. This also affects intimacy because the perfectionist does not let people get too close for fear that their flaws will be revealed and they will be abandoned or thought less of, projecting their standards on others the same way they were treated by their parents. A perfectionist is also very critical of others, judging their partner, friends, children or colleagues according to the impossible standards they have set. This is not a recipe for a satisfying and nurturing connection.

In order to be intimate and open with another, you need to be comfortable in your own skin and able to acknowledge all of your shortcomings. Only then can you believe that the right partner will find you loveable and likeable. Also, the more that you are willing to know and accept yourself, the more you are able to embrace another for who they truly are.

A Great Date Does Not Make a Great Mate

Don’t go for looks, they can deceive. Don’t go for wealth, even that fades away. Go for someone who makes you smile because it takes only a smile to make a dark day seem bright. Find the one that makes your heart smile. There are moments in life when you miss someone so much that you just want to pick them from your dreams and hug them for real.  ~Unknown

When it comes to lasting love it’s important to be able to make a clear distinction between the qualities and attributes that make up a great date versus a great mate. The goal of this step is for you to become conscious of the behaviors, values and attributes that distinguish a dateable person from a mateable person, including your own dateable and mateable qualities.

We all love the romance and passion of an exciting date. However, after the burning passion wears off, if we truly desire finding a loving life partner, we know in our heart and soul that we need more. We crave a best friend, the person that makes us feel like we’ve come home to ourselves.

We assume we’re mateable because we want to get married, or we assume others are dateable because they act casual and carefree. Dateable and mateable, however, are not always visible attributes. It’s easy to fool yourself about your relationship, as others can bedazzle you with their charm and wit. It takes a certain amount of observation and reflection to determine if you, or if others, are dateable or mateable.

In general, dateable people are great at the beginning of the relationship, being skilled at seduction. They are the perfect date, providing the romantic fantasy we have all been led to desire through societal cues and the media. They value fun, excitement, passion and sex. Their desire is to be with you only in the good times because they revel in the chase and nonstop excitement. Realize that, as much as they might fall head over heels in love with you, there is no commitment to the long-term.

Mateable people, on the other hand, value stability, friendship, authenticity and commitment. Their initial presentation is usually quite different. They might appear awkward, shy and uncomfortable at the beginning, but they are great in the long run. Once they get over their initial discomfort, it’s natural for them to connect intimately. Mateable individuals are real and deep-feeling, and the relationship grows with a low-level passion as they get to know each other.

Remember, dateable people show you a good time. Mateable people give you a good life. If you are serious about finding and maintaining a fulfilling life partner, you need to find the greatest friend, not the greatest lover.

Here are three categories or levels that describe a person’s readiness for commitment:

• Dateable—not ready for commitment
• Getting ready to commit—preparing to become a mateable person in the future
• Mateable—ready and willing to commit

We want to emphasize up front that we’re not making value judgments about dateable versus mateable individuals. We’re also not telling you that being mateable is a state everyone should aspire to. Some people are at a point in their lives where they prefer to be dateable, and that’s perfectly fine.

But, don’t waste another minute on dateable people if you know that you are mateable. When you date and find someone who looks like a possibility, it is really important to look beneath the surface to ascertain if indeed he or she is truly mateable. This includes their sincerity about commitment and life partnership, and just as important, to discover if they have the skills to follow through and “walk the talk.”

At least understand what level they’re on: dateable, getting ready or ready and willing. Otherwise you will be wasting your time and may get hurt.

Remember, love is not enough. Someone may truly love you and still not desire a life partnership. You cannot change a dateable person into a mateable one, even if they love you. Only you can transition from being dateable to mateable, if you so desire.

Dateable

No matter what the reason, some individuals are never ready or able to share themselves in a healthy manner. They have created a life where there is little room for a serious commitment to another. It could be due to unresolved hurts in childhood, selfishness, temperament or some other reason. It doesn’t make any difference what the reason is, the important thing is that you make sure that their problem does not become yours.

Mr./Ms. Fun and Excitement 

This individual is focused on the externals—looks, money and other personality traits. Image is everything to them, and they’re into empty conversations and activities. If you ask them what they want from another person, they will list superficial qualities. They bounce from one relationship to the next and are waist-deep in romantic illusion, lust and chemistry.

These dateable individuals are “cool” in the classic sense of the word. Their mode of operation is to play games as they seduce you with flowers, candy, romantic dinners and total attention while, at the same time, they never call you back, keep promises or offer emotional support when you have rough times. They have an adolescent preoccupation with date excitement along with an unwillingness to make a long-term commitment. This type of person cherishes their freedom above all else, only valuing having fun.

Ironically, these individuals make the best dates. They are experts in the magic of romantic illusion, often sweeping you off your feet like the romance novels and movies perpetuate as true love. Some of them are Don Juans (or Donna Juanas) who love the chase. They’re addicted to falling in love at first sight because they are excitement junkies.

The fact that they’re so much fun can cause misperceptions about who they are. There’s so much “chemistry” that you may mistake lust and romance for true love, and dateable for mateable. It’s important to remain conscious so that you can enjoy this great date without getting caught up in the idea that this leads to “happily ever after.”

Larry is a good example of a dateable individual. He had just joined one of our groups when he announced that he had met a gorgeous, amazing woman who drives a Jaguar and lives in a luxurious condo. “After three weeks of going out with her and having nothing but fun and lots of great sex, I can’t find a single thing wrong,” he told the group.

Larry and his “amazing woman” are both dateable people. Larry is deep into romantic illusion and lust, and he’s with a woman who also is just into fun and sex.