Trish Ryan was the quintessential successful thirtysomething woman -- she had a career as an attorney, a nice car, and a succession of men clamoring for her affection. But despite all her accomplishments, the things by which she defined her life continually left her disappointed, especially when it came to dating. Like the heroines of chick-lit novels and Sex and the City, she couldn't escape her bad luck with men: men who cheated, who left her, who made her a lesser version of herself. After years of trying everything out there to make love work -- new age philosophy, feminist empowerment, myriad of self-help programs -- she finally, hesitantly, decided to give God a try. This is Ryan's story of how her search for the right guy turned into the search for the right God, and (spoiler alert!) how she ended up with the happily-ever-after ending.
My dream, ever since I was a little girl, was to be a super hero. Specifically, I wanted to be one of the Wonder Twins, meeting with Superman and Wonder Woman at the Hall of Justice on Saturday mornings to fight evil and save the world. Lacking a twin, I got a law degree instead, thinking it would give me evil-fighting super hero powers. As it turns out, I was wrong.
Shortly after realizing that I hated billable hours, I ended (read: fled) my career in law, and spent the next few years trying to make sense of the world. I couldn't shake the belief that things could/should/would be different - better, somehow - if only I could figure out what really mattered. I wanted to know how things like spirituality and luck and intuition worked, and how I could make them work for me. So I embarked on a quest to find the right God, but spent much of my time trying to find the right guy. At a certain point, after accumulating a heaping pile of mistakes on both counts, I came to see that the two might be intertwined.
The good news is, after much trial and error, I finally found them both: the God, and the guy.
Now I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts with my super hero-husband Steve, and our genetically-improbable mixed-breed dog. I wrote a book about my search, "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir of Finding Faith, Hope, and Happily Ever After," published by Hachette Book Group in 2008. The follow up, "A Maze of Grace: A Memoir of Second Chances" will be in stores in June 2010. And while I sit at my laptop typing each day, the Wonder Twin dream lives on...



