By Tracy McMillan
240 pages; Ballantine Books
Available at Amazon| Barnes & Noble | Indiebound　

For the first four or so decades of my life, I was like a house that was—and this is putting it charitably—a fixer-upper. A serious fixer-upper. Underneath all the layers of bad wallpaper and stained carpeting, you could see that there was something good there. But getting down to it was not going to be easy. I was going to have to grow. Spiritually.

What's more, remodeling my life, my self, seemed hugely overwhelming. At that point in my spiritual development, if I couldn't see how something was going to happen, I wouldn't believe that it could. It's not like I had Ty Pennington and a team of guys ready to come in and do an episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition. To me, seeing was believing. If I couldn't see it, I couldn't believe it.

Turns out I had everything exactly backward. In fact, believing is seeing. You really do have to believe something before you can see it. For example, pretend you're going to invent something. Like, I don't know, a cell phone. Before you can get down to putting all the little widgets and doohickeys together, first you have to imagine talking on the phone while walking around the block, and then you have to believe that it could, in some universe, be possible to do such a thing, even though you've spent your whole life tethered to a tightly coiled springy cord that gets all tangled up in your legs while you pace around your kitchen. Only once you've committed to those two ideas could you (or is it would you?) start pulling together widgets and doohickeys. And even then it might've taken years to work your way through the interim versions—like the cordless phone that would only go as far as the edge of the front yard.

This was true of my own personal evolution, too—from the landline where I started, through all the cordless-phone relationships, to where I am now, a place of flourishing. And—whether I am in a relationship or not—a place of self-love. So how did I get there?

I needed spirit.

Spirit is the thing that makes you who you are—totally unique. Some people call it Creative Intelligence. In Star Wars they call it the Force. Others think of it as the Higher Self. In Eastern philosophy, it's known as the Tao (the Way). Shoot, you could call it Jessica! But whatever you name it, it's the power behind the oceans, gravity, chocolate, and the Beatles. It's the thing that beats your heart.

Spirit belongs to every denomination and no denomination, and it is found everywhere. It's the engine that not only brings you the kind of relationship that you are really looking for but also drives it. For me, it has a simple name: I call it love.

Love is what it all comes down to.

Love is the big thing we human beings get to learn here on Earth, if we decide to really go for it in life and see what's beyond the cash and prizes. To love someone is to accept them as flawed. To marry them (to commit to them) is to give them the gift of being loved despite those flaws. That includes you.

Love means possibilities, and I don't mean that in a Hallmark way. I mean it for real. Spirit is the solution for your (supposed) single-lady "problem": whether it's that there aren't enough men, or that you need to "settle" for a man, or even that you're just a little bit slutty. Spirit makes it possible to accomplish (the more precise word is "attract") things that appear to be impossible, unlikely, or in defiant opposition to any sort of reasonable odds, at least as far as the demographers, the advertising executives, or even the evolutionary biologists are concerned. They'll tell you that to find a mate you need to be just the right age, or have just the right beauty, or have the right number of eggs remaining. But spirit says something else.

Spirit says that those things might be factual, but they're not true. There's a difference. When spirit gets involved in your love life, there are no more odds. There are no more demographics. There are only two people on a spiritual assignment. And spirit will move a mountain and make the impossible possible in order to make it happen. You know, deep down, in your deepest heart that this is so. Everyone knows it—it's why we could never tire of love stories. A love story is just a reminder that the impossible and the unlikely can and do happen, all the time. I want you to commit to that knowledge right now, because it's your commitment that makes it happen.

Which brings us to the other thing this whole book is about, besides love: transformation. I know it's a woo-woo word, but it's really the right one for what I'm talking about. Transformation is the process in which you go from what and how you are now—and maybe what and how you've been your whole life—to being some new way, the way you want to be, the way that will lead to the life you want. Doesn't that sound awesome?

Except the thing about transformation is this: you can't just make it happen. Okay, wait, sometimes you can—on the purely physical level. If you do four hundred sit-ups and push-ups and biceps curls every day for a month, your body will start to look all muscley. But just try that with, say, acting like a bitch, or being super jealous, or only wanting to date guys who are 10s. Your push-ups are no good here. That's because willpower works when it works, but when it doesn't it doesn't. And when it doesn't, what is a sister to do?

This is where spirit comes in. There is something about cultivating and tapping into a sense of a power bigger than anything down here on earth—anything limited to your five senses—that can bring about change where everything else has failed. It is the same power that will bring your perfect relationship into existence, and your babies—whoever they are and however they get here.

Then there's the other other thing you get from spirit—meanings. Meanings give your life and what happens in it a sense of significance or importance. Some people don't need meanings. To them, meanings feel unnecessary, or even undesirable in an opiate-of-the-masses kind of way. Things are totally random, and that's fine with them. Not me. I like it when things mean something. For example, in my world, when you sat down next to me at the DMV, it was because there was something trying to happen in my life and it needed you to get the ball rolling. Suddenly you were there for a reason. And that reason is part of what we are going to spend our relationship working on. It might even keep us together somehow.

That's because when you put meaning on something random, it becomes a story, and as you know by now, I love stories. I believe every good relationship needs one. As I said earlier, stories are how human beings organize their experience. This is super important when it comes to relationships. Without a story, it can be a lot harder to know why you're bothering to put up with some guy's bullshit—I don't mean abusive bullshit, just normal, everyday bullshit—and I can be pretty sure that sometime in the next forty-five years of marriage you are going to be asking yourself why you are putting up with this guy's bullshit.

The other thing about meanings is that you're probably making them whether you want to or not. Very few people believe everything is random. If you really press most people, even the hardcore atheist Philosophy majors, they'll usually admit that at least once something happened in their lives that made them feel like there's a bigger force going on in life—something beyond what can be perceived with the five senses, maybe even beyond what be measured with the most powerful microscope, telescope, or math formula. Not everything can be explained, least of all relationships.

Which is why—between love, transformation, and meanings—developing a sense of the spiritual is the final piece of the puzzle toward becoming ready for a relationship.

In the end, there really is no perfect person out there. What is out there is someone you are going to walk a path with, someone who will walk a path with you. How will you know who that someone is? What should that someone be like? What if that someone has flaws, big ones, that make you scared to commit? (You can be sure that this will be the case. After all, you're not perfect, right? So he or she won't be, either.) Why would you risk giving up your great rent-controlled apartment for an ordinary guy who will not only see all your flaws but also have the power to leave you? None of it makes sense. Unless you decide to make it about something way bigger than diamond rings and wedding dresses.

Unless you decide to make it something spiritual.