In the lead up to Valentine's Day, Amy Spencer is giddy for all the singles out there.
With her new book out next week, Meeting Your Half-Orange: An Utterly Upbeat Guide To Using Dating Optimism To Find Your Perfect Match, Ms. Spencer hopes to purge singles of their most pessimistic thoughts and help them pluck their half-orange. (That's Spanish for mi media naranja – one's perfect other half.)
Playing off the law of attraction popularized by the best-selling self-help tome The Secret, as well as theories of neuroplasticity, Ms. Spencer argues that singles don't have to conceal who they are, play games or exhaust themselves on abysmal dates. They must simply be their “most authentic selves,” while meditating on their ideal relationship – preferably daily.
“We attract what we think about, focus on and feel,” Ms. Spencer writes in the exclamation-point-laden book, one of many lobbed at singles at this time of year. She spoke to The Globe and Mail from Venice, Calif., where she lives with her half-orange … er, husband.
You write that we can attract our ideal partners simply by thinking about it regularly. Tell me about that.
Basically, it's this idea that what we're thinking is not just ephemeral. Our thoughts are electric impulses in our brains. When we have specific thoughts, we strengthen particular neuropathways and what is stored in our brains, which changes the structure and function of our emotional brain. If you can change that, you can change everything, from the way your body language reacts to the way you perceive the world and the way the world perceives you. This of course changes what you attract.
How do you know this works?
Well it worked for me. I was single in New York City and I was having a great time for many, many years. Eventually I found myself tiring of dating. When I went home at night, alone, I would be really bummed out. I started to feel slightly desperate, which is of course the one word that no single girl ever wants to utter or think or feel. I hated the idea that this prime of my life was being wasted on not being happy. I decided that I was going to flip it and become a dating optimist. It essentially changed my entire life and eventually led me to my husband.
How did this philosophy play out in meeting your husband?
Oftentimes, I wanted to hang out with my family or my married friends but I felt that as a single person trying to find a relationship, I was supposed to go to the parties and try and meet somebody. I would walk in the room, scan the crowd, look for the right guy, not find him and go home depressed. I thought, why were my happy life and my single life two separate things? It was in fact one of these days where I wasn't at a singles event but spending time with my family that I ran into my husband.
You write about “focusing every cell” in your body “on attracting this guy – whoever he was” to you. You compared it to Lance Armstrong's visualizations during the Tour de France. How much of it is natural when you're focusing every cell on your body on it? Is that living?
