They say if you want to meet someone then you should stop looking, don’t they?

I have to hold my hands up and admit that I thought that was a vicious rumour put about by people who get sick of listening to their single friends bemoaning their relationship lot (or lack of, as the case may be). And who could blame them? Being single but wanting to be in a relationship can be a miserable existence .. I should know, I was that soldier. You can picture marrieds everywhere emptying wine glasses, rubbing their eyes and stifling sighs as their single friends lament the passing of their latest crush-fest, over and over and over …

Of course it’s not socially advisable to go public about your longing to be one half of a pair and so I donned a cheery facade and battled on. But there can be no doubt that I bent more than a few ears of friends with the in-depth analyses and second-guessing that goes hand-in-hand with newly-established dating patterns.

Being single is far from the worst condition you can find yourself in, but there is only so many nights in front of Greys Anatomy painting your toenails you can take before said toes start a-tapping in restless acknowledgement that you’re .. well, a bit lonely.

Now I have made no secret of dabbling in the dark world of online dating. To me it was the dating equivalent of an unpleasant medical procedure .. you had to go through with it to get over to the other side .. the side that was a lasting relationship with someone special. I failed miserably. I went through the unpleasant procedure many times and the result was always inconclusive. So I decided to administer treatment myself by deleting my profile and retreating back to base.

And in the middle of all this I joined Twitter which some may know as the social networking site on which people discuss their sandwiches all day; in reality it’s a global forum that gives you immediate access to like-minded individuals and to unlimited information on any topic you could think of. And for me it laid the path very quickly that led to J.

I remember the very first time I saw his profile photograph (or as we in “the know” call it, his avatar). In fact his photograph was and is very obscured offering up no visual clues to help you pick him out in a crowd, but something registered. I was interested. He was unassuming, lovely and charming. He was all the things you can’t ascertain from an online blueprint.

Now I’d like to say I knew we would end up dating but I didn’t. I do suppose however that my interest, which developed into intrigue kept me focussed on maintaining a steady progress in the direction of that first coffee date.

If that counts as scheming then I’m guilty as charged, and quite happy to take the rap I might add.

And so the point to my rather rambling account this evening is this .. if J and I had been profiles floating aimlessly on 2beekum1.com then I think it’s fair to say we wouldn’t have met, and that’s because we almost certainly wouldn’t have matched each other’s blueprints. So .. before you could have uttered “I’ll have a skinny latte please” the concept that was the first coffee date would have evaporated into thin air. We would have eliminated each other from the running.

And at the depression of the delete key I would have missed out on the feeling of excitement I get at the prospect of seeing him each week, of the instant smile that creeps across my face when he messages me and that lovely warm glow inside because life feels a lot better these days.

OK .. I know all this is a tad on the schmaltzy side compared to my earlier posts on this blog but I needed to make a point today having read the appalling account of how a dating site has expelled 5,000 of it’s members for putting weight on since they created and posted their profiles.

Seriously .. would you be interested in dating anyone who even hinted they were concerned that you weren’t quite as physically perfect as they’d hoped?

Lots of people are making pots of money by implying they can connect single people on these sites using logic and calculating means.

And I know for one it doesn’t work like that.

There’s nothing logical about finding happiness, which makes it even more prized.

There is one thing you can be sure binds us together when it comes to relationships …and to be clear I’m talking about all relationships here, not just the intimate ones. And that is this ..we’ve all been disappointed at some point.

That’s not to say that every relationship will let you down, but in the main there will have been a falling short of the mark that caused us to retreat, sob, lick our wounds and sob some more in the worst cases, and to shrug our shoulders in resigned acceptance in less severe instances.

When we invite people into our emotional space we attach hopes to them in terms of their behaviour and consequential outcomes, we hope, will weigh heavily in our favour. The more we like a person, the more hopes we attach. It’s like planting a garden. If it’s of critical importance to you that it blooms to perfection then you’ll tend it regularly, ply it with fertiliser, stand and wait for green shoots to appear. If on the other hand you don’t care one way or the other, you might chuck a few seeds about in homage to whatever BBC2 gardening bonanza caught your eye as you channel-hopped one evening.

Hopes, dreams, aspirations … if you hang on to them for dear life and fail to implement a qualification process that tells you whether they are realistic or not, they become one thing. Expectations.

Some where deep down we might start to conjure pictures of a happy ever-after with someone we just met or else we possibly imagine our child opening his practice in Harley Street thirty years hence as he walks into his new classroom on his first day at school. If you’re really adept at this process you will imagine these things happening before there is a “someone we just met” or before you’ve even taken a positive pregnancy test.

We like to dream, we should all live in hope (despite there sometimes being no apparent reason why that’s a good idea) and aspirations gave birth to the profession that is marketing. Expectations, however, seem to be the root of disappointments and let-downs, dashed and disregarded like insignificant pieces of flotsam and jetsam floating on the cruelly hostile sea of hope.

Now I can’t hold my hands up as a visionary on this subject for I too was practically olympic-standard at imagining the “whole roses around the cottage door” scenario when it came to fledgling relationships. And then after what seemed to be an indeterminable number of gargantuan bitter pills my friend Ullie spelt out my solution in brilliantly simple terms…

“You should never enter any relationship with expectations. They are the seeds of misery. Rid yourself of expectations and you will enjoy the relationship for what it is in real terms, not what you’re willing it to become”

Ullie was unequivocally correct.

Only yesterday I had a vivid reminder of how ignoring this advice can play out when I was targeted with a nasty little message left “anonymously” on Facebook.

Some time ago I became aware that a chap had taken a liking to me, he wasn’t my type in any way shape or form but he could be mildly amusing so we occasionally swapped banter. Every time I reaffirmed the distance between us, he seemed to ramp up his attempts to preen and parade himself in front of me like some prize-winning bull, often in front of his easily amused friends.

It became harder to feign a smile in front of Mr Jack T. Ladd, especially when he proclaimed pearls of wisdom like “You and I are so alike. We both have an air of mystery about us.” Explaining to him that it wasn’t mystery in my case, it was indifference felt like it possibly would have popped his balloon with a force he wasn’t ready for. So I chose to dodge him at every given opportunity, often very unsubtly.

My opinion on events like this is quite straightforward. If you like somebody and you throw out bait several times which they chose to ignore, then they don’t like you. Simple. And when if you’re a man throwing said bait, be in even less doubt. Continuing to puff your chest up that bit more and plunge in once again is only going to ensure that when the realisation sets in that the interest is not mutual, the catastrophe will feel so grave it should make the six o’clock news headlines.

And so Mr J T Ladd went on and on and on. And I backed off and off and off.

And then yesterday evening to my Facebook Honesty Box question “Tell me something you probably wouldn’t say to my face” I got this (anonymous) response ..

“I think you are a coward which i find disappointing. I would never have a problem saying that to your face mind you, just never got the opportunity.”

Now anyone who can’t be bothered to capitalise “I” isn’t worth a huge amount of bother anyway, but that just happens to be a bête noir of mine that I battle with constantly amidst the many grammar and spelling affectations that haunt me.

And, in case you are wondering, I knew this to be Mr Ladd … for one simple reason. He and people like him can’t just let their expectations go because they think everyone is waiting for their next promised installment, so when they sense the game is starting to run away from them they seize on that critical match-winner … the last word, preferably a nasty toxic one.

Building expectations is never advisable, particularly when you have no knowledge of the person you’re constructing them around. Which is why Ullie was spot on with her advice.

But if you really can’t help yourself donning a hard hat and erecting some scaffolding in preparation…. then learn to let them go gracefully.

Or even better … live in the moment and let the rest go hang.