When you find a guy who meets all of your essential criteria, don’t be surprised if you feel no initial chemistry with him. Unfortunately you’ve probably become “addicted” to the kind of overwhelming attraction you’ve felt for Mr. Wrong. What you felt for Mr. Wrong was not actually chemistry, but rather a longing for something you knew you couldn’t have. Believe me, if he suddenly became available to you, you’d run for the hills!

Healthy and lasting love is not about feeling constantly on edge. It is not the adrenalin rush that you experience at the start of a relationship, nor is it the crazy longing you feel for the guy who will never commit. It’s a strong, steady attraction and an affinity for another person; a belief that they will be there for you, and you for them. Healthy love involves devotion and trust.

So Where Are All of These Princes?
Meeting potential partners in today’s world is not an easy task. Women share with me daily their horror stories about the guy they met who seemed like a dreamboat in a dimly lit room, but turned out to be a shipwreck in the light of day!

Over time, women successful at meeting great men have shared with me how, where and when they’ve found them. There’s no easy answer, and each situation is unique, but here are some possibilities:

Do what you love, and Mr. Right will follow — Are you a closet philatelist? Instead of collecting stamps all by your lonesome, how about joining a stamp collector’s club? If you are an avid skier, it shouldn’t be difficult to find a singles club or tour group catering to ski bums.

If you happen to meet someone great, you already know that you have something in common.
Volunteer (with a mission in mind!) — Doing for others is a great way to put your woes into perspective. As a by-product, you just might meet

Mr. Potential. Most towns and cities have volunteer banks, which are clearinghouses for all the volunteer activities available in you area.
Remember Steph? She met Justin while hammering away at a Habitat for Humanity project — and the rest is history.

Connect with a church, synagogue or other house of worship — Many singles find peace of mind through attending church services. And many religious groups offer parties and other activities specifically for single men and women.

Don’t be shy — Lightly slip into conversations with friends, family and acquaintances, that you’re in the market for a great guy. Mention it to your dentist (but not when she’s drilling!), and by all means tell your hairstylist and realtor!

Get a part-time job (but do it where the boys are!) — I have worked with financially successful women who have taken second jobs (part-time) — and not for the money! Working in the men’s department at Brooks Brothers (or Banana Republic) or the café of a bookstore can be a productive way to earn those few extra dollars you don’t need!

Learn something new — You never know whom you’ll meet when you enroll in an adult education class. You may not find Mr. Right, but you’re bound to make some new friends while expanding your mind.

Kill two birds with one stone (or try your local gym) — Working out on a regular basis is great for both mind and body. And oh, by the way, you may have noticed the hordes of guys lined up for the stair-steppers and the free weights! This would probably be an excellent time not to wear your smelly sweats.

Don’t limit your search to my suggestions. Just like Steph and many other resourceful singles, you have what it takes to come up with your own list of creative ideas!

Well, I have enjoyed every moment of our time together. I do hope that this three-part series has made you begin to think and act differently as you work toward creating a healthy love relationship

tiptop shape, where do you go from here?
Who Is Mr. Right, Anyhow?

If only you shopped for men the way you do new cars! When you go out to buy a spiffy new vehicle, you probably make a list of the options you

are looking for — leather upholstery, a top-notch sound system, sunroof, etc. You also consider what you can afford, and you look for cars

within your price range. Then you visit different dealerships and — after careful consideration — you select the car that most closely meets

your criteria, at the right price. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

You probably choose your cars more carefully than your men — When it comes to the men you let into your life, however, you likely base your

decisions on some vague “chemistry thing” — an overpowering sense that you are destined to be with this Mr. Mystery. Should you become aware of

some red flags, such as he says he’s still not over his last girlfriend, you quickly overlook these things. After all, it FEELS so right. And

once you’ve wound up in bed with your Mystery Man, you lose all perspective! He could tell you that he is a recovering ax murderer, and the

words probably wouldn’t register!
You keep doing the same old thing, even if it hurts — There’s another important process going on when you desperately seek Mr. Wonderful: If

the way you feel with him is familiar (in other words, it is similar to the way you felt in a key childhood relationship) — even if that

feeling wasn’t good — you will somehow be driven to stick with him like glue!
The picture is looking awfully bleak, isn’t it? The good news is that there is a way to avoid this knee-jerk approach to picking the men in your

life. The solution: Make your decisions as methodically as you do when buying that sexy new car!
How to Sidestep That “Old Black Magic”
Use the “What I Want In a Mate Worksheet” to positively influence the kind of partner you choose. Instead of selecting men based on “That Old

Black Magic,” you will now be able to evaluate potential mates. As you meet men, you will be analyzing them in these areas:

qualities
characteristics
interests
abilities
Here’s how you begin: Under the main headings on the left-hand side of your worksheet, list the qualities, characteristics, interests and

abilities you are seeking in an ideal mate. Within each main heading, your lists will be broken down into essential or preferable.
Qualities are personality or character traits, such as honesty, ability to commit, sensitivity, sense of humor. Characteristics are physical

attributes or demographics, such as medium build, same age, similar background. Interests would encompass activities he enjoys, such as golfing,

bird watching or science fiction. Abilities would be areas in which he is very competent, such as great verbal skills, highly intelligent, a

great cook or an accomplished skier.

Now review these worksheets with a friend or mentor. What qualities, characteristics, interest or abilities did you forget to mention? Add these

to your list.

Make copies of your lists. Each time you date a new man, rate him from 1 to 10 on these points. You should rate him after a first or second

date, and definitely before you have had any sexual involvement. Otherwise, you will lose all perspective on the situation. You will be amazed

at how much you know (or can surmise) about someone after only a couple of dates!

1/3 cup fresh mushrooms, sliced thin

1/2 white onion, chopped

1/3 cup celery, chopped

1 tablespoon margarine

1 small can sliced water chestnuts, drained

1 small can water-packed tuna, drained

1 cup plain low-fat yogurt

1 tablespoons flour

1/4 teaspoon marjoram

1/4 teaspoon thyme

1/4 teaspoon salt (optional)

1/2 teaspoon white pepper

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/2 cup chow mein noodles
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Do not overcook noodles.

Saute onions, mushrooms and celery in margarine. Combine noodles, vegetables and tuna in an 8-inch square baking dish sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.

Combine yogurt, flour, marjoram, thyme, salt, pepper and lemon juice. Fold into tuna mixture. Top with chow mein noodles.

Bake for 30 minutes or microwave for 18 to 20 minutes until bubbly.
Yield — 4 servings, 1 1/2 cup each

Per Serving:
Calories 206
Carbohydrate 20 g
Protein 16 g
Fat 7 g
Cholesterol 25 mg
Sodium 289 mg
Potassium 327 mg
Phosphorus 192 mg
Diabetic Exchanges — 1/2 vegetable, 1 bread, 1 1/2 meat, 1 fat

Diets –Appropriate for the following diets: healthy family, heart healthy, diabetes, renal, low fat

Menu Ideas — For variation, substitute canned, drained salmon for tuna.

Classes are usually offered at hospitals, health centers, community centers, businesses and adult education centers. They are generally inexpensive and discounts are available for senior citizens and for signing up for a series of classes.

Don’t try to learn yoga from a book or video. You can use books and videos for practice at home after you’ve taken a class.

Exercises are done on a mat or rug, so wear loose-fitting clothes and go barefoot when you go to class.

You will begin with a series of breathing exercises and gentle stretches. Be sure to move at your own pace. The beauty of yoga is that it produces benefits within the limits of each person’s physical ability.

During the classes, you will move into several poses — in standing, sitting and prone positions. Standing poses help you build lower body strength and balance. Sitting and prone poses build strength and range of motion.

At the conclusion of the class, you will do a brief meditation or relaxation exercise.

As you leave the class, you may feel energized and peaceful — a benefit that will keep you coming back for more!

About 5 grams of fat is in the yolk. The egg white contains no fat and no cholesterol; it is all protein.

So how should we interpret this information? Are you “healthy”? Is your cholesterol — LDL cholesterol and HDL cholesterol — within normal limits? Is there a history of heart disease or diabetes in your family? Before you merrily order up those scrambled eggs in the morning, take stock of your own health risk and eat accordingly.

Eggs seem to have gotten a bad rap. Because of the high cholesterol content, diet recommendations for people with high cholesterol include a restriction to two or three eggs a week in order to keep the total cholesterol intake down.

Eggs do not cause heart disease, but may be decreased in the treatment of heart conditions. You can certainly work in some eggs if you reduce other sources of cholesterol and saturated fat in your diet.

Be careful how you eat your eggs. If a typical egg meal included two fried eggs, sausage, hash browns, toast and butter, coffee with cream and sugar — you have exceeded this reasonable advice. The calories and total fat content alone may catch up with you. So enjoy your eggs well-cooked, with limited added fat, and keep your total fat intake for the meal under 30 percent of your total daily calories.

Whether you’re stricken by land, in the air or on the sea, here’s what happens: When you’re moving and the horizon is moving, your brain gets mixed signals and you get sick.

Take these healthy hints:
Keep your eyes closed, or don’t look at the horizon. Try over-the-counter pills or patches.
Whatever you choose, take it about an hour before you travel and enjoy smooth sailing!

An ongoing health survey of more than 4,000 Californians by the Behavioral Risk Surveillance Survey System found that 53 percent of those surveyed were obese or overweight in 1999. About 60 percent of men and 45 percent of women reported being overweight or obese, causing more than 33,000 deaths each year due to overweight-related illnesses such as heart attack, stroke, arthritis, cancer, diabetes and other chronic diseases. These cost the state $6 billion in annual health care costs.

Health authorities recommend a healthy diet that includes vegetables, fruits, foods high in fiber, and limited amounts of sugar and fat, along with at least 30 minutes of daily exercise to reduce the risk of becoming overweight or obese.

Community efforts are also being sought to increase the availability of healthy foods in schools, work and restaurants, and to promote exercise by providing safe and accessible parks, bike and walking paths, and other public recreation areas (BusinessWire, June 13, 2011).

It sounds like this story presents a good opportunity to teach children about guns and gun safety. If it were me, I would read the story to the children and then I would discuss guns and alternatives to guns.

I would explain to children that guns are dangerous and should not be used as toys – even popguns that do not shoot real bullets. I would say why: Guns hurt people and many times even kill them. Let the children ask questions or add to the discussion and then end the discussion by reminding them of gun safety rules. Ask them what they would do if they saw a gun? Stop. Leave. Get an adult and tell the adult about it.

Finally, have the children come up with other ways the boy could’ve gotten rid of the nightmare. Let them think of creative suggestions for facing their fears — maybe nightmares melt when you throw water on them, like the bad witch in the “Wizard of Oz”.

Or maybe nightmares are sad or ugly things that do not live when you tell them happy and beautiful things. Children will come up with many possibilities. As they brainstorm, write their ideas down and draw pictures as illustrations.

Coming from experience, the key to not feeling like you are traveling alone is to make sure everyone knows you are traveling alone. So have a Mad Tea Party for one, or take up an entire row of Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s an instant icebreaker! But if you’re still stuck, turn to the person in line next to you, and use the five magic words, “Have you ridden this before?”

Another fantastic solo activity that gets my highest recommendation is a behind-the-scenes tour. On the Magic Kingdom’s “Keys to the Kingdom” tour you will get to ride some attractions and have lunch with other Disney World enthusiasts, many of who are also there on their own. But don’t reserve the first tour of the day, I slept in, had to reschedule that time slot and later found out I was the only one signed up for that tour!
IV. Table for One: Dining Alone

Dining is often the rickety bridge for many who want to plan a solo trip; deciding whether to have a leisurely sit down meal over the “safer” fast food is sometimes difficult. I feel, after experiencing each of them, that the best sit down restaurants for solo travelers are:

* Liberty Tree Tavern and Columbia Harbour House at Magic Kingdom
* The Garden Grill at Epcot
* 50’s Prime Time Cafe and Sci-Fi Dine-In at Disney-MGM Studios
* Any character meal, they can be hilarious if you are not too shy!

A lot of solo travelers though are looking for a quick, inexpensive bite to eat, and Disney World prides itself on its fast food venues. Turkey legs, Dole whips, jumbo hot dogs and beavertails are some of my favorite “meals,” when I’m too excited about touring to even sit to eat! Dining at Disney World should be the same whether you are eating alone or not. Everyone needs sustenance!

Now go, my independent friend, spoil yourself! But be forewarned, a taste of this freedom may require a lifetime supply! Good luck with your endeavor and I’ll see ya real soon!

It’s happened to me before, as I enter the Voyage of the Little Mermaid theater, I try to hover equidistant between two families as I enter the row, so that the family in front of me thinks that I’m with the family in back of me, and vice versa. Or on Ellen’s Energy Adventure, when I have that entire endless row to myself, it’s very intimidating. But I absolutely love touring the parks alone, I can explore Disney World in my own unique way. For me, that means hopping from ride to ride, park to park, whatever doesn’t have a line. My enthusiasm emanates from the attractions, so when I’m alone, I get to ride all my favorites all day long, with Mickey bars for meals.

Tip # 3…Use the FastPass system whenever you can. Waiting in line for even half an hour can be a drag if there’s no one interesting to chat with. So take advantage of this free service often and you can use one ticket after another.

Riding alone has never posed a major problem for me, albeit a college boy sitting unaccompanied in a bouncing hunny pot is definitely an awkward image. From most of the cast members and families I met on my first solo trip, I found out that they truly admired and were somewhat jealous of my decision to go alone. “Sharing the experience” had usually been a high priority for me, I needed to have someone to enjoy the parks with. But sometimes sharing the experience with yourself can make you remember why you fell in love with Disney World.

Still, if you feel a little self-conscious, here are a couple ways to avoid looking peculiar:

* DO NOT put your arms up and scream in the middle of It’s a Small World.
* DO NOT protest to the Great Movie Ride tour driver that Police Academy 3 should have had a scene.
* DO NOT break into one of the Swiss Family Treehouse rooms and tell everyone that you are being held captive by the Imagineers.
* DO NOT walk up to the aquarium at the Coral Reef restaurant, point to a fish and shout, “I’ll take that one!”

There are a few places that I do not recommend as a single adult. Waiting in line for the Tomorrowland Indy Speedway and Dumbo can be a chore when alone, as they offer little in the way of amusement. The same goes for Mickey’s Toontown Fair, it’s nice to look around, but pass by if you are short on time. And although the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Movie Set at Disney-MGM Studios may be magnetizing from the outside, once you get in it is a mob of three-foot tall human bumper cars. Not fun!

Epcot, however, is the quintessential place for the solo adult. When you go with a friend or family, discrepancies on how much time to spend at one pavilion are inevitable. Until my solo trips, my pals only permitted me to breeze through Innoventions. When I went alone, I spent countless hours there, including an hour just playing with Aibo, that funky robot dog from Sony. I had that thing doing my taxes by the time I was through!

Tip # 4…Allow yourself more time at Epcot than at the other three parks. There are so many fabulous pavilions and extensive exhibits that you can explore them without being a hassle. The Living Seas, The “What If” Labs, and all eleven World Showcase pavilions, you can stay there until your heart’s content. Oh, and you can even ride Test Track as many times as your stomach can handle with no wait, via the singles rider line!

On most attractions you will be seated alone, everything runs smoother when the cast member doesn’t need to search for another single rider. Other times you will be the fourth in a row with a group of three, like on Dinosaur.

Outside of the four major parks is a world created just for the solo traveler. Spa treatments, golf, boating, shopping, swimming and fishing to name a few are all tailor-made for one. Use these activities as a retreat if the parks begin to overwhelm you.

And then there is the question of simple loneliness. I’m someone who lives in a building with 500 others and has become accustomed to having instant access to friends 24/7, and loneliness has never been a problem. Just being around the chattering crowds of a theme park is plenty of social activity. But for a sure fire outlet for your need for human contact, pin trading is a terrific way to have a light-hearted conversation whenever you need it.