I first read The Secret about 4 years ago. Being a bit of a control freak, I remember feeling very comforted by the concept that I could “control” the events that I attracted into my life. I have never been comfortable with the concept that we have no control over the things that happen to us, that our futures are pre-determined. What would be the point of life if this were true?

After reading The Secret, I decided to pay particular attention to my love life. I was 27 years old, owned my own successful small business, and owned my own beautiful home. I had been involved in one failed, unsuccessful relationship after another throughout my 20’s, and had never truly been in love. All I wanted was to have a stable relationship with a man who truly loved me, and to share my life with him!

I began to look at what I was doing to attract these failed relationships, and realized that it was living in direct opposition to the teachings in the secret. I slept in the middle of my king sized bed, I parked in the middle of my 3 car garage and there was no room for another car, I used up all of my closet space with my clothes, used up every room in my 4 bedroom house, and my bathroom drawers and cabinets were jammed full of my things. If what I had just read in The Secret was true, no WONDER I didn’t have a man in my life!

I immediately took action, thinking “what can it hurt to try?” I began sleeping on the left side of the bed every night (easy fix). I cleaned out my closet, donated all the clothes I didn’t use, and left an empty area for “my husbands” clothes. I cleaned out my bathroom drawers and cabinets and left 2 each empty. I emptied one of the bedrooms leaving nothing but a child sized bed. I then cleaned out my garage and left room for another car to park in there.

During this process of making room for “my husband”, the man I had been dating for a few short months did me a favour and ended things over an email. After a day of being angry at him, I decided to be grateful to him. I realized that he represented everything wrong with how I had been going about relationships. I would always date someone and convince myself that their qualities were what I wanted, and I would kid myself about their potential. I had NO IDEA what I really wanted in a man! I decided to seize this opportunity of being completely unattached to soul search and get clarity on what type of many I truly wanted. I didn’t want any diversion to confuse my heart or cloud my thoughts, so I vowed to all my friends that for a period of 90 days, I would not have ANY involvement with a man – and I didn’t. If someone asked for my number or tried to pick me up, I would politely turn them down, no matter how handsome they were!

During these 90 days I compiled a list of 100 qualities I wanted in my dream man. I began to feel gratitude for all the failed relationships and heartbreaks I had in the past as I realized they had all taught me about what I did and didn’t want. I began to write down the things I wanted as I realized them. Things from physical appearance, virtues, likes, dislikes, financial status, education, etc. I would read over the list every day and add and subtract things as I gained more clarity. This process was exhilarating and exciting as I began to believe that the man on my list might truly exist!

I also used the teaching of visualization to attract the man of my dreams. I remembered the part in The Secret where Mike Dooley describes how to visualize by looking intently at the back of your hand and imagine your hand wrapped around the steering wheel of your new car. I used this advice, but not to attract a car. Every morning on my way to work I would look at my hand on my steering wheel, and visualize having a huge diamond on my finger! I began to get excited about the concept of having a beautiful ring, and everything that ring would represent.

This 90 day soul searching quest ended on December 18th, after which time I would allow myself to seek out the man of my dreams. On January 17th, I went on a group snowboarding trip to Telluride where I was reunited with Bernie. Bernie was a friend of a friend, and I had known him for about 4 years. I was always attracted to Bernie, but he lived in Las Cruces NM and I lived in Phoenix, so I never really thought about him as anything more than a fun guy I would hang out with a couple of times a year. One night during this trip we went to dinner, just the two of us, simply because we were both hungry and our other friends wanted to go back to the condo and watch a football game. This was the first time Bernie and I had ever really spent alone together – we didn’t know it at the time but the universe had set this night up just for us! During this dinner, it was almost as if something magical had happened. We both felt an indescribable, almost spiritual connection between the two of us. We knew a relationship would be impractical since we lived 6 hours apart, but we could not ignore this feeling we had. After 4 wonderful days in Telluride, we both returned to our homes, not knowing what the future held.

Today is the third anniversary of the weekend described above, which represents Bernie and my first date. I am sitting on my couch watching our beautiful 10 month old daughter smile at me from her play pen. Bernie is still asleep, on the right side of that big king sized bed, and his truck is parked in that empty space in that 3 car garage. That empty 4th bedroom is filled with a crib, changing table, and closet full of pink clothes. As I type, I can see my stunning 1.5 carat diamond on the finger of my left hand. We have been very happily married for a year and a half now, and have a relationship that most people only dream about. Oh, and that list I created; Bernie has every quality out of the 100 I listed except for 3 of them… and those 3 qualities and things that really didn’t matter anyway.