Get a Ten: Interpersonal Skills for Success

Meeting a soulmate, finding a great job, starting a high concept business or creating a better you – such things require a great deal of self-knowledge.

I like using the “soulmate metaphor” to describe the process of defining the requirement for success. I’m a man in late thirties, so I’m going to portray my version of a perfect soulmate as “the ideal woman”, but I believe that my metaphor, only slightly adjusted, would work for anyone, gender or age notwithstanding, and would apply not only to dating and relationships, but to any area where requirements for success should be well defined.

This may sound a little too mature to some of my readers, but mutual understanding and emotional closeness, in my opinion, are the two crucial requirements for any relationship, especially for a relationship between lovers. These two things would be important to me even in a most casual relationship, and they become indispensable in a relationship that turns out to be long-term. My woman and I may have different opinions about a lot of stuff, but we still need to be “on the same wavelength”. I remember, quite a few years ago, I had a chance to spend a few hours in a countryside, accompanied by a moderately attractive young woman who I had nothing to talk about with, for some reason. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a skillful communicator and can talk to anyone I want. I did have a passable conversation with that girl, I made her laugh, and so on. Physically, she was my type, I guess. But I was cringing, all the same. There was no real spark, no chemistry, no common points of emotional reference. I knew it, and so did she. We were both relieved when that date was over.

To attract me, a woman must be into art, architecture, literature, classical music, theater and film – and have keen interest in philosophy and religious studies. This may sound pompous to some of my readers, and I’m okay with that – but high spirituality and wide-ranging spiritual interests in her are a must. Obviously, she must be highly intelligent and emotionally perceptive. She must have depth. She must recognize and value beauty. She must be inspired and inspiring. She must be creative.

I am no prude, so I want my woman to be sexually uninhibited, and I want her sexual drive to be compatible with mine. She must be emotionally and physically generous.

I want my woman to be loyal to me and respect my loyalty to her.

I value hygiene. To deserve my attention, a woman should be meticulously neat. She should also be elegant and take good care of herself. She should have healthy habits and be enthusiastic about physical fitness – not obsessively, but to a degree that would keep her healthy and assure that she ages gracefully with me.

She should have musical, melodious voice and beautiful, soft hands. She has to be able to make deep eye contact. I want her to be a good dancer.

I want her to be talented at having fun.

I want a woman who is gentle, but can get tough when it’s necessary. Ideally, it would be great if my woman were able to gracefully and seemingly without effort do things that are considered manly – anything from riding a motorcycle to pistol skills and street fighting – while remaining perfectly feminine. That combination of traits is inevitably a turn-on for me. It wouldn’t hurt if she also loved airplanes and flying.

She must be able to keep her cool in any circumstances: control her emotions and think quick, but think before she does anything. She must be positive and optimistic, and she must have great sense of humor. If a woman doesn’t laugh watching Monty Python, we probably wouldn’t get along.

She must love life and be open to experiencing and learning new things with me. For example, I enjoy studying languages and I want my woman to share that passion.

To earn my respect, a woman should have very straightforward, no-bullshit attitude. No games. She should be able to handle the truth tactfully and carefully when it may harm people, and yet be honest and straightforward with herself, with me and with others. She must have simple dignity and respect others. She must be humble and mentally mature.

She must be naturally compassionate and caring: when she sees someone or something helpless and week or aged, she should have the immediate impulse to compassion.

She must be a skillful housekeeper: good with money, good with solving domestic challenges. It would be great if she’s a decent cook. Nothing too fancy but she should be able to put together edible meal quickly.

I want her to be free-spirited, and to value my freedom. For example, if I need to step out of the house at three in the morning and take a walk or a ride on my motorcycle for a couple of hundred miles or so, just to clear my mind, she wouldn’t bother demanding explanations. She would just understand. Ideally, she shouldn’t have too many socially-imposed limitations – preferably none at all, or at least she should be able to recognize the ones she has and work on overcoming them.

This is not a must, but I would very much like her to want to have children and have the potential to be a good mother.

I want her to have something that I can’t quite put into words: a “spark”. Something that motivates a woman to hide in the closet when she hears me coming in, and jump out of it to startle me, or to pick up sea shells when we walk together on a beach.

I know I wrote quite a bit, and yet I can’t remove anything from that list. Women like that are rare, but they do exist.

My woman doesn’t have to have all those qualities right away, but she has to have the potential to acquire them over time, learning from me – and also the ability to help me to develop the qulities that I do not have but she would want to see in me. So she should be perceptive and patient in equal measure.

And if she also happens to be physically attractive, then I’m truly lucky.