I'm reminded of the concept that everyone has a physical "type," perhaps an ideal look for a partner that we "imprinted" on as very small children. I don't know if there's any biological validity to the imprint theory, but I do know that if someone asked me to name my "type" of guy, I would say something like "blond and slim, fit and toned."

My first hopeless crush as a boy fit that description. He was a baseball player, and to this day his sort of "look" is my ideal. He was never my boyfriend, though, because we were not at all compatible, starting with the reality that he was looking for a girlfriend not a boyfriend, and moving on to the fact that he was not actually a very nice person.

Over the years, that seems to have been a pattern for me. I would pursue relationships with men whose physical appearance matched my ideosyncratic definition of 10 or something close, only to be disappointed that the total human package was wrong for me, for us as a successful couple.

Only when opening myself up to more possibilities did I discover joy in relationships.

Neither of the two loves of my life matched my ideal type. Neither was blonde or particularly slim and toned. Neither approached being a physical 10 by my personal definition of 10.

But falling in love with each of them, I learned something really important. Love doesn't much care about idealized body types. Each of the loves of my life became ideally attractive to me because I loved them. I learned that I was not bound by the chains of attraction I thought I was bound by.

In fact, even though I would have not picked either one out of a catalog as a potential boyfriend, opening up to possibility changed me for the better in important ways. I discovered that if I left myself open to change, I left myself open to joy.