Blast from the Past

Can revisiting your past relationships help you get the one you really want?

By Anna David

When you're single and frustrated, you consider all kinds of options: Internet dating, speed dating, lowering your expectations. At some point -- possibly after the awkward coffee date with the five-foot-four-inch guy who swore he was six feet on his Nerve profile -- you start reminiscing about your past relationships and maybe even toy with the idea of rekindling one of them.

This kind of thing gets a bad rap among some who consider "re-treading" the act of the truly desperate. But Susan Shapiro, the author of Five Men Who Broke My Heart, believes that revisiting your past relationships can get you to the one you really want.

Shapiro knows of what she speaks. One of her other books is Secrets of a Fix-Up Fanatic: How to Meet & Marry Your Match, and she's responsible for 14 marriages (including that of Michelle Mead and John Armor, whose Times "Vows" story credits Five Men Who Broke My Heart as the reason Mead contacted Armor after 30 years).

The impetus to write Five Men came after Shapiro and her husband had been married for several years. "I was having something of a midlife crisis," Shapiro says now. So she went and met up with the five men who'd caused her the greatest heartbreak, quizzing them about what went wrong and ultimately pinpointing "where I screwed up." She ultimately realized that "love doesn't make you happy -- you make yourself happy."

The soul searching strengthened her marriage so much that she now considers fixing people up her karmic duty. She and her husband met, after all, on a blind date. "At first I told my friend he wasn't my type," Shapiro recalls. "She said, 'Your type is neurotic and not interested in you.'"

Now Shapiro understands what people mean when they talk the way she used to. "When they say, 'He's really great but he's not my type,' I can hear that's someone who's not really ready for a relationship," Shapiro explains. "Or when they say, 'I want someone who makes $200,000 a year, is a lawyer or doctor and is at least six feet tall,' it's obvious that they're not looking for a person but for a fantasy. It's like, 'Look, you're 44 and single and you're saying you have to be with someone who's Jewish. Why don't you open up and consider someone Latin?'"

While Shapiro believes on some level that finding the right guy is simply a numbers game, she also shares some of the philosophies of Nancy Slotnick and her Cablight Theory. "If your head is closed off," says Shapiro, "there can be a million people right there and you'll gravitate toward the jerk in the room."