How to Stop Looking for Someone Perfect and Find Someone to Love

For most of us, life's big questions aren't about meaning and immortality. They're about the challenge and the difficulty of finding love in a world that extols love as the highest good. For all the enthusiastic praise of love, there's precious little in the way of instruction books about how to find it. Sills' book is a serious book about a desperately important question. It's written with a wry, light-hearted touch that makes the advice so much easier to follow. You're almost left with the impression that you thought of these ideas yourself and that you're a better person for it. The author's ouvre continued with A Fine Romance,Fine Romance which is a natural history of courtship and the extremely wise Excess BaggageExcess Baggage: Getting Out of Your Own Way-a book that is at once clever and good and supremely useful. How to Stop Looking should be the first book you buy for any newly-single friend or for yourself if you're wondering where all the love has gone. Lynn Hoffman, author of the very humanistic bang BANG: A Novel

This book helped me get "ready" to meet my now fiance. I cannot praise it enough, and I credit this single book with helping me make the breakthrough away from micromanaging every person I dated, to letting it all flow so I could find the person who I felt like myself around (and her too!). And don't forget the sections on not wasting a single second on someone who is unavailable to you. How many of us have pursued such time waisters?

In 1990 I read this book and was fascinated with the insights. But I was about to start graduate school in a different state, so I wasn't ready to begin looking. Shortly before I graduated, I told my co-worker that I planned to be married within a year, much to his skepticism. Nine months later, I was married, and I'm still happily married more than ten years later. The hidden beauty of this book is how it gave me life skills to recognize the value of the person that is my wife, through very difficult times.

My husband isn't my "type" and but for reading Judith Sills' marvelous book in the late 80's, I wouldn't have given him a second glance. She helped me focus on the durable qualities which are truly important to happy relationships---intelligence, kindness, sense of humor, trustworthiness---and thus to look beyond the packaging. Her key question is "How do you feel about yourself when you're with this person," NOT "How do you feel about him or her?" Working through the past history exercises she suggested, I realized I'd been more on the right track in close friendships with men I admired than in relationships with guys who seemed romantically attractive.I don't know how many copies I've given away, as well as Sills' follow up book, "A Fine Romance" about the passage from courtship to marriage. If you only read one book on dating and mating, this is the absolute best. Without it, I wouldn't have a big, bagpipe playing, adoring husband, a new circle of friends, and trips to Scotland---I'd still be miserable with "my type" of neurotic artists. There's no way for me to ever thank Judith Sills enough.

For anyone who's been single most of their life, this book should be on your list of "must reads." Judith Sills writes with a common sense approach, and makes you stop and take stock of your behaviors. I've read this book over and over again, especially when I meet someone new who doesn't quite match my "ideal" of the perfect partner. Reading this book is like a free therapy session. For anyone who's tired of being single, this book will help you get there!!! Highly recommended!