Single in Portland: Building the skills and confidence to succeed
PORTLAND, Ore. – Dating in Portland can be hard but many are finding they just need to develop the confidence and the skills that will help them meet that special someone.
Nancie Hines, a local reflexologist and painter, expresses her confidence with the tip of her brush.
“You have to just follow your intuition and not be afraid,” she says about her painting.
But she hasn’t been as courageous in love since her divorce 10 years ago; instead, she focused on raising her daughter, but now that her daughter has grown up and moved out of the house Hines says she’s ready to begin looking for love.
“All of the sudden she didn’t need me like she used to need me, and I thought, ‘Gosh, is there life after children?’” she said. “It takes a deep breath to say, ‘Gosh, I think I’d like to find a companion.’”
In her search for love Hines says she knew that making a connection online wasn’t her style.
“We’re all on the computer so much,” she says. “I don’t want to have to race home and look on the computer and find out if somebody ‘winked’ or didn’t ‘wink’ at me, then have that whole experience all by myself. I just wanted to meet somebody through somebody.”
Her dating and life coach, Donna Dzwonkas, offers a more personal matchmaking touch including “minglers” and movie nights.
“You’re going to spend decades with this person,” Dzwonkas says. “So you really need to have skills that find the right person, but start with knowing yourself.”
Dating coaches are becoming more popular especially around Portland because finding Mr. or Mrs. Right seems oddly difficult.
“In the Northwest it’s harder to meet people than other places,” says Alma Avery Rubenstein who launched PDX Speed Dating in the Pearl District. “I think everyone’s waiting for the other person to talk to them and that’s not happening.”
Rubenstein says to get some guts and get out of the house.
“Prince or Princess Charming is not going to come knocking. They don’t know where you are. You have to put yourself on sale and make yourself known,” she says. “You should go be on (ABC’s) The Bachelor if you can.”
Rubenstein appeared on the sixth season of The Bachelor but didn’t get a rose. But before her stint on The Bachelor she did something even more extreme in her quest to find true love: chaining herself to a guy and three other women on the TV show Chains of Love.
Now she prefers a more low-key approach with her speed-dating business.
“What I find a lot is, ‘Oh, I’ve heard about these kinds of events and would never go to something like this.’ Why not? You’re still single. There’s not a ring on your finger. What else are you doing? Rubenstein says. “People do take dating too seriously. You do want the end-result but if you’re so focused on the end-result, you’re not enjoying the ride. So it’s about loosening up, believing in yourself, believing in love and believing you can get what you want, but you do have to put it out there to get what you want.”
These lovelorn coaches say the key to surviving the dating game is to quickly get over rejection.
“Rejection is the hardest part,” Dzwonkas says. “Especially for people who have not been in the dating world for decades. You have to go out and meet a lot of people in order to find somebody you actually connect with. I always tell my coaching clients [to] just think of it as a numbers game and don’t take it personally, because you have to meet a lot of people to get that right chemistry; to get the right values you’re looking for and don’t settle. Just know this is a numbers game [and] it’s going to be a process and do not take it personal.”
Hines says the process has helped her to grow personally.
“You just have to have courage,” she says. “I’ve met some great people. I’ve met some wonderful women and some wonderful men, but you know what? I met myself. What it did, it gave me back a sense of being a woman, a mature woman, and not somebody’s mom.”
Both dating coaches say, in addition to getting out in the singles scene, you have to be willing to realize your so-called “type” may not be attracted to you. That’s where dating coaches can offer advice your friends won’t.
“I’ll actually be pretty real with them and sometimes they don’t like it, but I’ll definitely tell you what your friends and family and coworkers will not tell you before, because I don’t want them to come to my event and get rejected. I’d rather work on them with their issues and image and help them actually get better results so they can meet more people,” Rubenstein says.
Links to Web sites of dating coaches mentioned in this article: