If you keep kissing the frogs you'll eventually find your "pince"

Day 34: today is our 10th wedding anniversary, although we've actually been together for over 18 years: Pretty cool eh? There was a time when I was going through boyfriends every six months that I couldn't imagine being with anyone for so long. How on earth could you put up with someone day in day out for years? Okay I was under the 20 at the time and guys under 20 are pretty immature so I probably didn't have a very representative sample to base my assessment on. However, I do remember when a lifetime with a single person felt like an impossibility.

My husband is my second significant partner, the first, my daughter's father and I split up with him when she was about 2 ½. It's really difficult being a young single mum trying to re-establish another meaningful relationship. First you have to worry about what people you are giving access to your child. Leaving aside the most awful things you can imagine, being stupid and lacking ambition is not something you want to expose them to either.

There are an awful lot of stupid un ambitious single guys out there, who labour under the misconception that if you are a single parent you are so desperate for a partner that you will put up with anything. Obviously, when you first meet them they don't display these traits or they wouldn’t get a look in. However after about 3 to 4 weeks, when they are pretty confident that the intoxicating effects of "love" have blinded you to all there faults they start to relax.

After this pattern had repeated itself a few times, I began to wonder if there was a better more efficient way of meeting people more likely to satisfy my criteria than waiting for fate to randomly select someone. Clubs and bars have produced the worst candidate.

Now I'm not saying that it's not possible to meet a decent person in a club or bar but the odds are definitely stacked against it. Think about it – alcohol, dim lights, loud music: all your senses are being compromised at once. Is it any wonder that you leave with the phone number of your soul mate (or in some cases the person; I was always a bit old-fashioned) only to discover at your next meeting that the only "soul" they would be suitable for is the one at the bottom of your shoe!

As I hadn't managed to find a suitable candidate in my work environment either, I decided to try the dating industry. Back then, there weren't any Internet dating providers to extract large sums of money from you, in order for you to find out that the only people on their books are clearly there for a reason! So my first foray into blind dating was to use a phone dating service. You called a premium rate number and record a message. Potential matches would call up and listen to your message and if they liked what you said and the sound of the voice, they would leave you a message with their contact details. Let's just say it easier to sound sexy and coherent in a short two-minute message and leave it at that. After meeting what can only be described as all stages of evolution: Australopithecus, Homo heidelbergensis and a few Neanderthals, I decided that this wasn't working either.

Okay I reasoned, how about old school: lonely heart columns. Lonely heart columns are where you place an ad in a newspaper and people respond to them in writing, I.e. they have to put words on a piece of paper in a sufficiently coherent order that it is likely to impress you. You can tell a lot about a person from a letter! That's the plus side; you can weed out the illiterate, people with a weird views, the arrogant etc. However, there is an art to lonely heart column ads – a language all of its own. GSOH = good sense of humour and means "I speak before I think and I think what I say is funny"; using words like bubbly or fun loving is interpreted by men to mean "hey I'm looking for no strings attached sex"; tall is above 4’8”; slim is not as fat as the world's heaviest man and good-looking, anyone who has to describe themselves as good-looking or attractive... Isn't!
Consequently when you finally meet them you can still be in for a surprise.

So, I met my husband via a lonely hearts ad in The Voice Newspaper. The week he responded to my ad, my ad had been highlighted as the ad of the week. When I saw I was the ad of the week I was really pleased because I thought "I'll get lots of responses". It was probably the third or fourth time I've place an ad and I usually got four or five responses. However despite being the ad of the week, I got only one response and that was from my husband. I guess the universe was saying "you don't need to choose, this is him; we've chosen him for you"

Like all couples, we've had our good times, bad times and even rocky times, is not all been smooth sailing. However the universe got it right. It handed me my soul mate. I'm so glad I kept trying despite all the horrors I met along the way. Happy Anniversary Darling.


Reverse psychology: Please do not write any comments I  am not interested in what you think -  well alright then if you must,  but keep them short!