The rules tell you to scheme, flatter, and play hard to get, but our favorite life coach doesn't think that will get you very far. It's time to rethink the dating game.

Day after day, as I hear single women bemoan the lack of available men, I wish ethics allowed me to set them up with my wonderful male clients who are searching, with equal frustration, for the right woman. Instead, I end up simply witnessing singles of both sexes failing to find each other. I believe this failure has much to do with the model of love-seeking most popular in our culture: the idea of romantic pursuit as a type of predation, a hunting expedition the goal of which is capture. In my experience, the way of thinking that leads to successful relationships is altogether different. It's focused on the idea that the way to find love is to become so much yourself that you find others of your own kind, with whom you can share freedom.

The Book of Love?
The predator model of love leads to a hunter's way of dating: Seek large gatherings of your prey, dangle a false self as bait, wait for an individual to stray from the herd, then pounce on him with all the wit and wile it takes to bring him down. Internet matchmaking services, singles bars, speed dating, personal ads and even blind dating all borrow from this "statistical mass" logic. I've seen clients spend years dating this way, entering one briefly exciting, painfully doomed relationship after another. This is not a numbers game. It's a soul search.

The Other Rules for Seeking Your Soul (and Its Mate)
I would encourage anyone who wants to find a soul mate to follow three steps, which I call "The Other Rules."