Continued from, The Perfect Man at the Perfect Time, part I

I’ve heard it said that worry is merely the bad habit of being ungrateful in advance. I decided to be grateful in advance and that little decision had big consequences.

As I grow older, I realize that it is imperative that we pay attention to the quality of our thoughts. One of my own “trouble spots” has always been envy.

Throughout those lonely years, I felt especially envious when I saw a cute couple in a restaurant, giggling and touching and looking nauseatingly happy. It was bad enough that I couldn’t find a decent romantic partner of my own, but did I have to watch others cuddle and cavort?

And then one day, I read an interview with Alfre Woodard in the Christian Science Sentinel. She said that her mother had taught her to feel sincerely joyous and grateful for the good things that happened in other people’s lives, and to take it as a personal promise from God that, “If it happened for them, it can happen for me, too.”

After reading that story, I decided to change the way I looked at those couples. My mantra became, “Thank you God for this evidence and this proof that if it happened for them, it’s going to happen for me, too.”

The first 783 times I mouthed these words, I cringed.

What a bunch of malarkey, my brain shot back to my heart. “God’s promises are kept,” my heart snapped back to my brain. And so it went. Eventually, the mantra went from being words falling off my lips to a trenchant truth with meaning and substance.

Putting a rudder on the directionless wanderings of my emotional, overheated brain was one of the great challenges of my life, but I knew it was the fastest path out of my lonely life. Praying, instead of whining and complaining, also required a great deal of mental discipline. And learning how to feel genuinely grateful for others’ pair-bonded happiness was most challenging of all, but eventually, it became a habit. And as I wrote out my four-page “What I Want In A Man” mission statement, I dreamed and planned and imagined a delightful future with a delightful man.

The process of falling in love with my second husband started well before I knew that there’d ever be a second husband. I made a list of the spiritual qualities I wanted in a life partner and then I imagined the joy of living with someone who possessed all those wonderful qualities.

In my book, The Ugly Woman’s Guide To Internet Dating, I have a chapter devoted to spirituality for an important reason. Maybe the women who are less than beautiful have never known about the so-called womanly wiles, but I hope they know about prayer, which is a more substantive, more powerful and more reliable resource.