Why can't I find a good girl?

SPICE

I was horrible at finding a good person. I was insecure, I was scared to talk to people. I was weird looking. And I was a liar.

Even worse, I was always attracted to people who were bad for me in various ways. Either they didn’t like me (which always made me feel worse once I “outsourced” my self-esteem to them) or they had problems that were too big for me to handle.

Or I had problems too big for them to handle. I haven’t been emotionally mature in most of my relationships.

So when I was in my 20s, I had to figure out a 2-step plan to define “good” and then what do I have to do to meet good.

But then it was DIFFICULT to implement.

First: WHAT DOES “GOOD GIRL” MEAN?

I didn’t know how to define it. So I thought about it. And as a rough guide, I came up with this idea.

S.P.I.C.E.

Someone who is in the top 1/4 of five mutually exclusive categories (i.e. being good at one category has zero to do with being good at any of the other categories).

Sweet, Pretty, Intelligent, Creative, Emotionally mature.

Is this a lot of women?

Here is the ONLY use of math that I learned in high school:

The odds of finding someone who intersects in five mutually exclusive categories is multiplying the odds of all five.

So one out of four (1/4) times five. Which is one out of 1024 women are in the top 25% of ALL of the SPICE categories.

Assume half of them are married. So one out of 2,048. And assume another half are in the right age group. So one out of 4,096.

How many women is that? In the US that would be about 37,000 women. Assuming there are 150,000,000 women in America give or take.

Wow! That’s a small number?

Which leads to part TWO

HOW DO YOU FIND SPICE?

Two steps:

A) “Dress for the job you want”. If you want SPICE, YOU have to be SPICE.

1. Are you sweet?

2) Do you work on your health and hygiene and appearance so you can be “pretty”?

3) Are you intelligent? Not everyone is but you can at least focus on learning every day, reading, being curious and this takes the place (and is even better) than pure intelligence.

4) Are you creative? The way to practice this is to simply exercise the creative muscle every day. Journal every day. Or write down ten ideas a day. Or sketch something every day.

For me, I try to write down ten ideas a day. Ten ideas of businesses to start, 10 ideas of books I could write, 10 ideas for how I would make XYZ company better, 10 ideas for helping my friends, etc. I’ve been doing this every day since 2002.

5) Are you emotionally mature?

This is really the hardest. Because I know I have blind spots in this area.

Age helps, because you make lots of mistakes and can look back and think about them.

Therapy helps. It’s like having a tennis coach look at your swing over and over again and telling you what you are doing right and wrong.

Reading helps, because you can read about people who are emotionally mature and read about people who aren’t and try to emulate the habits of people who are.

Summary of “A”, To find SPICE, you have to try to be SPICE, or at least be moving in that direction with sincerity.

I would say I am not SPICE. I don’t think I am in the top 1/4 of all five of those categories. But every day I try to move in that direction.

B) “Skate to where the puck is going”.

If you want to meet a woman who is SPICE, go to where there are more single women than men, and go to places where you are more likely to find someone with at least 3 out of those 5 categories.

Example: NYC has many more single women than men.

And I’d rather go to a painting class than a bar to meet someone with SPICE.

On social media you can find groups and message boards of people in your area, with your interests, that have meet ups where you are more likely to find someone who shares qualities of SPICE.

---

Does this work? I think so. I hope so.

I can tell you this. When I focused on this idea, it worked better than when I didn’t focus on this idea.

When you have a formula, you can use it as a guide to see if you are going roughly in the right direction. With no formula, you are throwing darts in the wind.

Sometimes I find three out of the five features. Perhaps because I only had three out of the five. Those relationships would work for awhile but not for long.

But I’m still trying, still improving, still learning.

And hopefully it’s working for me right now. I’ll tell you after I’m dead.