Steve Scholl, founder of Ashland, Oregon’s White Cloud Press, began the seminar by delivering his resume. 25 years in the business of books: publisher, book agent, editor—a publishing pro. He asked each of the attendees to state their genre, topic, and experience. First attendee: Writing teacher and coach, 1 published book, women’s issues, 10 years. Next: Poet, 5 years. And it continued on…poet, fiction, poet, poet, fiction, self-help; 10 years, 5 years, 4 years, 15 years. Then it came to me. Genre: How-to. Topic: Dating and relationships. Experience: 8 months. I was only non-writer in a room filled with experienced writers.
Steve then proceeded to tell us about the harsh realities of the publishing world:
As I looked around, it was obvious that Steve’s laundry list of barriers to publishing was throwing daggers into the hearts of most of the other projects in the room. In my mind I was screaming, “yes.. Yes…YES!” Steve’s laundry list was perfectly aligned with what I already had planned, before I even started to write the book. I was certainly not omniscient, it just happened to work out that way. Call it kismet, fate, destiny–whatever it was–it all seemed to point at our project that day. Even the other attendees were pulled into the energy of our book. One by one they asked about the project and by the end of the day, it seemed to be the topic of the room.
As part of the seminar, Steve had set aside the following day for private consultations; authors could meet with him for one-on-one guidance. Being that I wasn’t even sure I was going to attend, I had not reserved a private session. By the end of the day, I wished I had. Destiny, however, was still in our court. As everyone departed, one of the other attendees stepped up and said, “I’m never going to be published. Would you like my spot for tomorrow?” Absolutely! Then the organizer came over and said that another timeslot had become available which just happened to be adjacent to the appointment I had just received. Two consecutive timeslots!
Judy was flying home that night. I couldn’t wait to tell her what had happened.
Almost 600 years ago, with single stroke of genius, Johannes Gutenberg birthed the information age. His movable type printing press ushered in an era of knowledge and enlightenment; mass-produced books made the worlds of philosophy and science available to kings and paupers alike.
As a writer, I believe the invention of the printing press may have also wrested some power away from the writer. Before Gutenberg, I imagine the ancient writer as a revered artist, a rare bird who produced unique masterpieces. At the behest of The Sovereign, monks, by candlelight and quill, produced handwritten copies of his (or her) manuscript to permit dissemination to a wider audience—the ultimate tribute to an author. But that all changed with the arrival of the printing press. From then on, writers would vie for the opportunity to have their manuscripts made into books. The publisher had become King of the Realm.
None of this was on my mind in March of 2011 when Judy handed me a flier announcing that a publisher had scheduled a local workshop for writers. I had been working on the manuscript for about 8 months. Inside I knew that it would be difficult to land a publisher, but I wasn’t really interested in attending the seminar. I put the flier aside both on my desk and in my mind.
The day before the seminar, Judy, who was out of town on business, called to remind me to go. I still didn’t want to attend, but I reluctantly admitted it would be a good idea to gain some intel on the publishing world, especially since we would eventually wish to have the manuscript printed. So, Saturday morning, March 19, I walked into the workshop with about a dozen other authors and author-wanna-bes, all wanting to hear how we could be the next Rowling.
The workshop would turn out to be a letdown for every author, except me. If my date with Helen in Jan 2008 was the first step in the Death Of Online Dating, this seminar would turn out to be the second step.
Click here for Episode 19, Part 2: No One Sells A Million Books
During our entire trip, Maurizio, the office’s head honcho, had been our unofficial ambassador to the best of Sydney. Maurizio is Italian (obviously), a pizza aficionado, surfer and all around super guy. He took Judy and I under his wing and indoctrinated us to work/life Sydney style: Morning coffee before work, lunch at a little restaurant around the corner from the office called Primavera, and the Sydney afternoon espresso break.
He was also bad for our waistlines. Maurizio was responsible for our pizza crusade. Maurizio also led us to the 3 foot-high cardiac arrest called the Italian Burger, as well as the best Thai restaurant we’ve ever been to three nights in a row – North Sydney’s own Limelight.
When Judy said she wanted to see a kangaroo, Maurizio suggested Featherdale Wildlife Park.
The place was adorable! Little roos hopping here and there. Furry koalas… Parrots that were orange, and blue, and yellow, and red… Storks with shiny, purple faces and black long beaks standing on one leg… It was a menagerie of Australian oddities.
Judy pet
the super soft Koala who couldn’t be bothered to move even an inch.
She hand-fed the roos with seeds that visitors carried inside ice cream cones. Yes, the roos ate the cones too!
Near the end of our self-guided tour, we reached a pen that housed the larger roos. They were huddled together some distance away from the path, apparently too aggressive to permit the visitors to pet. As we were looking, one stuck his tongue out at us! It was hilarious. I caught it on film. It was so hilarious that we made the rest of the day a tongue out day.
Every chance we got, we stuck out our tongues at each other. 
Guess we were still a little love dumb.
Sydney was everything we imagined and more. Happy and rested, we boarded a plane bound for home and our next adventure.
Did you ever have a time in your life where everything was right? I mean that feel of perfection when the planets align and the fates smile upon you? Peace…utter peace and happiness—as if to hold infinity in the palm of your hand? That’s the feeling I had looking out the window at the amazing Sydney nighttime skyline.
There she was. Smiling, beautiful, sexy, smart, wearing my engagement ring — with legs that could stop any man dead in his tracks! I still couldn’t figure out why she picked me, but I was so glad she did.
That night we were bound by taxi for a Valentine’s dinner at Kobe Jones, a well-known Sydney waterfront restaurant. With a glass roof and windows, Kobe Jones is one of the best places in town for Japanese food. I’m not certain that the Japanese actually recognize Valentine’s Day, but that didn’t seem to bother Kobe’s staff. The restaurant was well decorated for Valentine’s–red table cloths and flowers adorned the every nook and cranny to set a romantic Asian ambiance.
We had Australian red wine (of course), looked into each other’s eyes, and kissed all night long. Course after course of delectable food arrived: the chili sauce dynamite scallops; miso citrus beek katsu; the garlic, ginger wagyu tenderloin tataki. Every dish was mouthwatering!
We hugged and kissed and watched the fireworks. Our first Valentine’s Day together.
Click here for Episode 18: One Italian, a Pinch of Burger, and the Tongue of a Roo
When our first weekend in Sydney arrived, Judy wanted to go shopping–easy to do in Sydney, mate. Clothes, jewelry and opals, art—Sydney has it all. A cruise ship port, Sydney has a beautiful concrete and tall-glass harbor-side tourist shopping experience that just happens to lie in the shadow of the Opera House. Just off the subway, we passed the docked commuter fairies and made a beeline towards the shops. They were touristy, but not terribly so. As we moved from storefront to storefront, Judy spied a beautiful blue-hued necklace crafted from mother of pearl. I had to admit it was quite lovely. That was enough for me. It left the shop around her neck.
Afterwards we walked uptown, enjoying the beautiful down-under sunshine. We passed the super art-techy Apple Store (I had to go inside) and gradually worked our way up to the historic Queen Victoria Building.
Built in 1898–ornate, opulent and beautiful–the QVB is filled with shops, coffee shops and small restaurants. Being observant colonist, we stopped for afternoon tea and made our way from shop to shop until we reached the cellar where we found some really interesting individual-serving teapots that we had seen at a restaurant earlier in the week. Another successful purchase! 
In a custom jewelers, Judy fell in love with a spectacular opal ring, but it was too pricey, so we decided not to take it. She did score some sexy boots (that were taller than the Eifel Tower) to be worn for our Valentine’s dinner.
Before we left the building, we stopped for yet more pizza! Nope, still not as good as Davide’s.
Afternoon turned into early evening, so we headed back to our North Sydney love nest. As we passed the docked cruise ships, I looked a Judy and said, “Let’s go find the captain and have him marry us!”. It seemed like a grand idea. But Judy wasn’t having any of it. She had images of a gown (actually more than one) and a ceremony—you know, the whole Cinderella thing. “Come on honey. There’s some daylight left, we’ll go find a dress”. No deal.
We had Thai food instead.
Producing a manuscript is not like, say, starting a business. In business you might procrastinate long enough for new online services to be invented that accelerate product creation, awareness, or sales. In producing a manuscript, if you’re not writing, your project is at a standstill. For me, 2011 opened with much of the same 2010 ended…writing, writing, and more writing. I wanted this project to be on a path to completion.
It had been 4 months since Judy and I had gone to Mendocino for our first trip together. By the time January came, we were desperately in need of another break. That break would come from an unexpected source—my day job. One of the guys in the Australia office was scheduled to take a month’s vacation in February. His position would need to be covered during his absence and I was on the shortlist to go for two of the four weeks…and Judy would be able to join me. Valentine’s Day in Sydney. Woohoo!
Imagine the sophistication of New York’s Fifth Avenue, San Francisco’s metropolitan ease, and Santa Cruz’s laidback beachtown feel, and that’s Sydney. Sydney has a uniqueness that sets it apart from other major cities. It feels, and is, a surfing town—the people friendly and inviting. At the same time, it’s a world capital that is a center for fashion, art, and food. With warm weather, great shopping, excellent food, welcoming people, and tremendous natural seaside beauty, Sydney promised to be an awesome, romantic getaway.
I arrived a week before Judy and prepared our North Sydney love nest. North Sydney, across the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge from downtown, is a business center that is nearly a ghost town after hours. Like San Francisco, it is incredibly steep. The land undulates, rising right out of the bay. From our love nest hotel room perched atop the hills, I could see the boardwalk amusement park below and across the bay, the famous Sydney skyline.
After picking Judy up from the airport, we fell right into tourist mode. Champagne outside at the Opera House Bar, sunset walks along the bay, dinners at sidewalk cafes. For some reason, Sydney is awash in Italian pizzerias. We had to try a bunch of them to see if they were better than our own Napoli-native Caruso’s in Capitola. We ate pizza! Compared crusts, cheeses, toppings, wine. It was a gastronomical experience with all the different places and pizza combinations. In the end, Capitola’s own Davide Caruso emerged victorious!
And still, everywhere we went, we shared one never-ending kiss.
“Sleep is the for the weak…the week after release” was a phrase common to the Silicon Valley’s Internet bubble of the late 1990s. No one was sleeping during those heady times. The rallying cry was, “Work faster! The release date is almost upon us!” as if, with deadlines bulleting by, the competition might ambush the market before we could strike first.
As 2010 closed, I found myself reincarnated back to that era. I was still authoring our book on the iPad—an amazing device, but without an integrated backup mechanism. The remedy was to email the sections to myself. The string of emails revealed a one man battle against time. Incoming email at 4am. Again at 7am. A lull in the fighting as the day job begins, then more incoming mail at 6pm, 10pm, and midnight. Day after day, week after week, the same thing over again. Between the writing, my day job and sleep deprivation, I was beginning to feel battle fatigue.
But the year had also been incredibly exciting. I had started on the book in Paris, found the love of my life, and Stefanie had arrived at just the right moment to balance my radical notions with sage experience.
Just ahead, 2011 looked to be very promising…and our little triumvirate was about to be launched headlong into a torrent of insurmountable opportunities.
In the debut of the blog, I promised to post some excerpts from the book, and some segments of the manuscript that didn’t make the cut, as part of the unveiling of our project–a radically different perspective on dating, finding profound love, and selecting partners.
Today’s blog post is a section of the manuscript that didn’t make it into the final book:
How perfect can it be?
In the early drafts of this book I oft employed the words ‘perfect match’- and when I did so, I caught quite a lot of whingeing from both Judy and Stef. They believed that ‘perfect match’ gives the innate impression that there is only one perfect match or that you need to be a perfect person to find your perfect match.
“Perfect match” is not about being perfect. I’m sorry to say, but you’re not perfect. The only perfect guy I can recollect walked on water, and I’m fairly certain that not one of you has levitated across the backyard pool. We’re all full of imperfections: afraid to open our hearts, afraid to get married again, afraid to get angry. We fail to forgive, don’t love unconditionally, worry that we’re not special, don’t communicate, eat too much fat, file our taxes late, moan too loud and come too early.
These superlative relationships we are talking about in our project are not about perfect people, but about perfect *pairings*. It’s about the unique chemistry created when two people create a single couple. With Judy, I feel strong, able to communicate, free to create and love. In other relationships, other pairings, I didn’t communicate well, felt the urge to run, had difficulty holding onto the connection.
With some partners, I’m incredible and with others, well, significantly less. What’s the difference? It’s not me, I’m always the same. It’s the pairing. Perfect pairings, perfect matches–whatever you want to call them–are about the couple, not the individual. We can have superlative relationships with many different partners all of whom bring out the best in us. Selecting the right partner is just a matter of picking that one special combination that brings out the best in you, your partner, and the both of you together. A perfect *pairing*.
How do you do that? That’s what the rest of this book is about!
Lots of couples need therapy, right? You reach a place in the relationship where you need sage guidance—a mediator—to assist in building bridges of greater understanding. Therapists are our partners in understanding our pasts, transforming us into being the best, most openly loving, understanding spouse we can be. With a little work, they say, we can emulsify your separated oil and vinegar differences to create a lovely, satisfying balsamic marriage.
No, our relationship had not suddenly devolved into the need for counseling, but it was time to get a therapist.
Our book had been coming along steadily when Stefanie appeared on the scene. Stefanie was one of Judy’s friends. We had met at a party Judy hosted a month after we started going out. Stefanie was bright, cheery and intelligent. She also just happened to be a therapist with more than 20 years’ experience counseling couples. And as I got to know her, I discovered that she was a truly gifted counselor. She had incredible intuition and insight into human relations. Hmmm… And we’re writing a book on dating and relationships? It seemed like an outstanding opportunity for a fruitful collaboration.
Stefanie was elated when we asked if she wanted to become part of our book team. She had personally experienced the change in Judy since we had met. Judy had become softer, more tender. Things what would have really bothered Judy in the past now barely even registered. These changes in Judy made Stef curious, even more when I described that the changes were part of a relationship that had been engineered–created as the result of that Jan 2008 date when I first experienced a different kind of connection: profound, deep, and peacefully easy. That date was the biggest turning point in my life. It produced the amazing profile that captured Judy and ignited this project.
But even with Stef’s experience, perhaps more because of it, it would take 3 months of meetings to explain, discuss, and understand the nuances of the different type of relationship that I had spent the last 3 years personally researching and experiencing. At first, Stefanie was skeptical that there could be such a thing as frictionless relationships. I needed to explain all the unpinnings of the relationship. She needed to understand that the walls erected by daters aren’t best lowered as a function of trust (as is commonly but erroneously believed), but instead as the result of sharing similar experiences and life paths that, in turn, create overwhelmingly compelling connections. I had to explain my conceptual difference between matching and pairing. While I was writing lines like “find a different type of relationship, put a therapist out of work”, Stef was still questioning whether anyone had a perfect match. Gradually, she had to acknowledge that it was possible; the engineered relationship standing directly in front of her was difficult to discount.
Too, there was the question of how best to use all three of us in producing the manuscript? How would three people effectively collaborate in the actual process of writing? We decided that it would be genius for each person would write a portion of the book from different perspectives. Me: the unbridled, idealistic romantic. Judy: the converted skeptic. Stefanie: the provoked thinker. The different perspectives would provide a macro view of the relationship, speaking to it from all possible angles. It sounded great! It was only later we would discover that executing this plan was extraordinarily difficult. One of many miscalculations that I would make along the way.
Click here for Episode 13: You’re Not Perfect—You Moan Too Loud
At the very top of the form it said, “In order to care for the safe, sacred container of the group and to better serve you, we ask that you complete this confidential information form.”
“Baby, what the hell is a sacred container?” I asked as I looked over the required information form for the Couples’ Erotic Massage class Judy had registered us for in early November. Were we attending a class on the art of intimate massage or a lecture on the search for the Cup of Christ? Although I wasn’t sure about the ‘sacred container’, I was absolutely certain about my trepidation for being nude around a bunch of other naked people. I was not a boomer. For me, the Summer of Love had been about watching Captain Kangaroo, not the sexual revolution. At this point in my life I was just happy that Mr. Greenjeans kept his overalls on.
My eyes peered back to the form:
• What do you most hope to receive from this course?
I haven’t a clue…
• Do you have any concerns you’d like us to know about, any fears?
Honestly, I’m not really sure about spending two days with a bunch of naked people. If I bolt during the first 15 minutes of class, please don’t take it personally.
• What other relationship or Tantra trainings have you done?
None
• Are you in a committed relationship?
Yes
• With whom?
Judy
• Does that commitment allow for sharing nurturing, energetically-inspiring touch with another person besides your partner? .
Absolutely not!
• Please tell us about your strengths and challenges in intimate, sexual relationships.
You’re kidding, right? I’m experiencing the most amazingly deeply profound, soulful, powerfully-connected relationship. Epic, rare, sublime. Physically speaking, we can’t seem to make it out of the house on time….ever. At the time of your workshop, she’ll just be two days home from being gone for more than a week. You’ll be lucky if we show up by 3pm for your 10am start time (ok, I didn’t write that, but it certainly crossed my mind).
I wasn’t the only one with trepidations. Judy wasn’t sure either that she was up for this class organized by one of her friends. Not only would she be jetlagged after just returning from China, but we also had started working quite long hours on our book; the thought of some downtime without having to be somewhere–even for erotic massage–seemed very appealing to both of us. We decided to leave the final decision until the day before class.
The day before came and Judy decided she wanted to attend. I had learned that a ‘sacred container’ was nothing more than an agreement between the students to be respectful, but I still wasn’t sure about this whole thing. To help break the ice, Judy took two cups and applied labels that said, “Troy’s Sacred Container”, and “Judy’s Sacred Container”, and we headed off to the class.
Did you know that the left side of the clitoris is more sensitive than the rest? That deep breathing can prolong pleasure? Or that the heights of pleasure are best achieved by massaging, then stopping, then starting again? We settled in with the other couples and listened to the trainer in a room filled with colorful scarfs, candles, incense, mats, blankets and a gong–it felt like a cross between a Bombay temple and a youth hostel. We soon discovered there was a pattern to the day: Clothes on, learn something, clothes off, test it out. Do this, rub it that way with a little twisting action, your partner will probably think this feels good. Somewhere during the day the trainer gathered everyone together and asked if any couples wanted to comment. We didn’t really have anything to say. Then she looked directly at us and said, “What about you two? Based upon the information you sent, I wasn’t expecting anything. You have some very advanced energy movement happening over there! Where does that come from?” Um, I dunno….but we did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
All in all, it wasn’t so terribly uncomfortable. Yeah, there were naked couples learning different ways to relax and touch each other. Maybe for some couples this was groundbreaking work. As for us, we found our own secluded corner, largely ignored everyone else, and concentrated on massaging each other up for a couple of days—more of our usual, just in a different place.
It was nice to have Judy back home.
Click here for Episode 12: We Get a Therapist
The Death of Online Dating 