I Paid Someone $15,000 To Help Me Find The Right Man. I Was Shocked By What She Taught Me.

Does anyone really know how to successfully date? How do we know if the valuable, vulnerable time we spend putting our best self out there will lead to a committed relationship? In the wake of 20 years of being involved with the wrong men, I found myself at age 40 with two divorces and a defeatist outlook on dating. After failing for so long, I was tempted to call off the search.

Throughout my career I’d been a successful corporate marketing executive, navigating highly complex global organizations while building new departments and enterprise-wide capabilities. I was a leader and mentor. I spoke on panels and took the stage at industry events. I was taught to tackle an objective with a specific strategy, backed by a budget. Perhaps this logical, solutions-oriented approach steered me to my eventual (enormous) dating investment.

But as I climbed to corporate success, my personal life was a conventional catastrophe. I married my first husband at 29 and completely missed many flagrant red flags. The second time, it was worse.

Deconstructing the life I built with my second husband helped me realize I was the one who got it all wrong. Reckoning with my own inherent anxiety about romantic relationships wasn’t pretty. After each time down the aisle, I regretted it almost instantly. My destructive pattern was to recklessly look the other way and commit quickly so I could get off the dating app merry-go-round. I should have known better than to ever marry either one of my ex-husbands. I didn’t want to risk potentially marrying another person so intrinsically wrong for me, yet I knew I wanted to share my life with someone.

That’s when I met Bela. This beautiful, middle-aged woman, partial to bold silk blouses and bejeweled