Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
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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!

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?

As the title makes clear, this book is a repudiation of the notion of a perfect mate. Sills, the author, allows the person to make an "I wouldn't consider as a candidate for a mate anyone who..." list, but with only three entries. And one has to be specific, and this can be very difficult. The 3-limit list owes to practical reasons, if nothing else: "No one I've every met has been such an exquisite package themselves that he or she was entitled to enjoy contempt for more than three characteristics of other human beings. It's not only self-inflating, it's self-defeating."

Sills allows for some relationships to begin with fireworks, and others to develop gradually. She also believes that no one in a relationship should feel entitled. After all, many men come home to fix their own dinners, and many women have to care for their home and children as well as earning an income.

So how do you know if you've found the right person? Sills comments: "Does your prospective mate's view of you increase your self-respect? Does his or her attraction to you help you feel attractive? Does that person bring out or enhance the things you consider your strengths? Does he or she soften your failures and shore up your weaknesses? Are you a better version of yourself as you experience it because of your connection?"

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.

This book begins with a discussion of the "needs" of the individual reader in a relationship. There is no one-size-fits-all checklist. Dr. Sills challenges one to evaluate the mental lists we all make when seeking a new romance and comparing it with the actual needs we have in order for this relationship to be positive and fulfilling.
It is not an "easy read" book. To achieve the full benefit, some time and thought are required.
A bonus for doing the necessary work is a deeper and clearer understanding of oneself. This revelation provides new perspective for romantic relationships and those with family, friends, and colleagues.
Dr. Sills has written a number of books and this endorsement applies also to them.

I did find my "someone to love" and he was "My Mr. Right" although he wasn't my "Ideal Man". I subsequently married this man who is fabulous. I would never have done so without having read this very direct and honest book. Thanks for helping me take stock of myself and those around me.

I think this book has what many other relationship self-help books miss, the practical "how-to" of the advice. It is succinct, easy to read, and very practical. I have applied the advice already, and I am happy with the results!

I bought this book when I was a college student. I love it! I found my husband because of this book's help! The funny thing is...Right before I got married, my mom worried about me so much.She bought this book and sent it over to me. :) ....Moms always worry about you, no matter how old you are. They think you are only 3 months old...

I am happily married for 7 years with twins now. :)