What is a successful date? Does it mean it leads on to relationship and romance? Well you that would be cool.  But it doesn't have to mean that. A successful date can be one where you got on very well, had a great time and things ended on excellent terms. Not every date we go on will end this way, but they should if we plan our dating a little more carefully.

My main concern is that we often just accept dates from the next person who shows and interest and we hope that we get on okay. The problem here is that we are being passive in our dating game. We are receivers without a game plan. Our dating is bound to be far more successful if we are the ones going out and choosing who we would like to date from a selection of those who are compatible.

To do this successfully you first have to have an idea of who you are most likely to get on with and be truthful when you do it. If you insist on dating everyone, 50% of the people you meet won't be compatible straight away. In which case you will have half of all your dates as a complete waste of time. Stop doing that and start analyzing what kind of people you get on with. Okay I could say the following@

I like people who are aged 29 to 36, single and never previously married, no children but would like a child sometime. Should be Christian to an extent, well educated, reasonably tall and have long blonde hair. They should be receptive to the idea of marriage like winter sports and live within 100 miles of my home.

Okay if I do this then I can be accused of many things here but this is just an example. The effect though is to set some criteria by which I can date and from which I am likely to see some successful dating. If I don't make a dating profile then its open to all comers. That's okay. Maybe you simply don't care and want to meet anyone you can., In which case spread your net widely. The problem is though that you are not going to please everyone and once again 50% of your dates will be a complete waste of time.

Recognize that none of us are compatible with everyone. Reclines your minimum dating requirements and then ensure you match the requirements you set. There is absolutely no point in setting the following if you don't match yourself.

I am looking to meet a guy who is 6 feet 2" or taller, must be athletic and a professional sportsman with an income of over $200k a year. They must be extremely attractive, own their own house and sports car and be able to surf.

If you are five feet 1", out of shape and maybe overweight with no career and a low income and cannot swim then what you have done is just describe your ideal fantasy figure not your probable dating criteria. I am not for one second saying you won't be attractive to the character you have described but to date successfully you must establish ground where you are most likely to be compatible and will easily match.

The next thing to consider when looking at successful dating are your expectations. If you are expecting instant love at first sight followed by a perfect romance and children then that's great. The issue here is that it may not happen that way. I wish it would but it doesn't. So being realistic and expecting little is often the best way to date. If you do then one of these days you are in for a nice surprise. Greet every date with optimism but don't go over the top. If you make a new friend then you have done well. Don't expect Cupid at every turn. It will happen but maybe not just yet.

Successful dates are simple dates. They are casual and fun. Believe me when I say that desperation comes across as though you have  a placard over your head announcing it. Never ever be desperate to date. If you are then this is the time to take a breather ironically. How many times has someone said that you meet a person when you least expect it. Its true, that's why. So successful dating is when its part of your monthly routine but not the be all and end all.

Successful dates are when you are at your most casual and most upbeat and most relaxed. Successful dates happen when you are focused but in a good mood. Put the rest of your house on order and your dates will naturally take on a new glow because you will be far more positive and organized.

To summarize:

•          Successful dating involves setting realistic match criteria
•          Successful dating involves establishing dating boundaries
•          Successful dating means being prepared and upbeat
•          Successful dating means keeping things simple and fun
•          Successful dating means dating the right people for you
•          Successful dating means being realistic about your expectations
•          Successful dating means being patient

 

Dear Members,

It's hard not to get discouraged when we turn on the news or read the newspaper. Unemployment rates are up, the stock market is down.  The recession can be downright depressing.  But a small glimmer of optimism can be found in every negative headline.  With every new challenge comes opportunity for growth, for change, for improvement. In these difficult times, the relationships we have with our friends, family and associates make all the difference.  

TheRelationshipCompany.com

Through the use of Google Maps, members of The Relationship Company can find potential matches that are literally around the corner. The program completed its Beta testing phase, and is now available as a new tool members can use to find potential matches. 

 

Finding love locally has never been easier thanks to new Google Maps-based application

What began as small, quiet walk-in businesses years ago morphed into a billion dollar industry as Internet-based dating services came to dominate the singles market. These days, however, the industry has come full circle. Singles prefer access to like-minded adults close to home over million-member registries spread out nationally. Potential customers in this flourishing market respond better when they see familiar street and business names pop up in a search engine.

The Relationship Company, started in September 2008, offers personal, local matchmaking services and facilitates introductions for single adults in search of healthy, potentially long term commitments through in-house and online services. But CEO Cameron Barrett Sharpe isn't content to stop there. The Relationship Company's latest member success upgrade makes finding local singles even easier.

 Through the use of Google Maps, members of The Relationship Company can find potential matches that are literally around the corner. The program completed its Beta testing phase, and is now available as a new tool members can use to find potential matches. 

"What we're doing is pretty innovative. It takes dating and technology to another level," Sharpe explained. "People want to meet locally, and we're making that possible in a way never before seen with online or brick and mortar dating services."

The Relationship Company intends to remain on the forefront of technology that will give clients a more convenient way to meet like minded singles for a healthy, compatible and successful relationship. The dating business is booming, In a few short months, The Relationship Company is already writing success stories throughout the country. "Our purpose goes beyond making money, staying focused on how we can provide a better service is and always will be at the top of our priority list. explained Sharpe.

For more on the company, visit http://www.therelationshipcompany.com

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A chance meeting might seem like a fluke, but as Ben Sherwood explains, scientific research backs up the notion that you can influence your own destiny. Step one: Smile.
On a Saturday morning February 1994, Colleen Seifert, PhD, woke up early and ate her usual breakfast: half a bagel, fruit, and coffee. She walked her Russian wolfhound, Bandit, and tidied her apartment. Seifert was an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Michigan, and for six years her life had been entirely focused on a single goal: earning tenure. She was a work machine, putting in seven-day weeks and sleeping fewer than six hours each night. Even when she left the lab, her mind was consumed with academic research. "I couldn't walk into a shopping mall without feeling I should have been at work," she says. Her big indulgence was running errands on Saturday mornings.

On this Saturday morning, however, her life was about to catapult in a new direction. Seifert's first stop was Pittsfield Cleaners, a couple of blocks away from her home. It was a splendid, sunny day, she remembers; the university was on spring break, and the streets of Ann Arbor were quiet. She pulled up to the dry cleaner's drive-through window and handed over a tangle of clothes. The man at the cash register sorted through the items and held up a hot pink blouse.

"Is this a dress?" he asked.

"It's a shirt," Seifert said. "I wouldn't wear a dress that short."

The man had a handsome face, and dimples; he wore his hair in a ponytail. "If you've got it, flaunt it," he said with a smile.

Seifert was 34 years old, and it had been a long time since a man had even noticed her. Her 60-hour workweeks left neither time nor energy for taking care of herself. She was overweight and overstressed. She hadn't been on a date in more than two years. Friends had tried to fix her up, but when it came to flirting, she was "out of practice." And yet when the man asked for her phone number to include on the dry cleaning ticket, she blurted out: "So? Are you going to call me?"

He looked confused but recovered quickly. "Sure," he said. "I'll do that."

Flustered but "flushed with the daring" of what she'd said, Seifert drove off. She figured the man would never call, but it was thrilling to have done something so out of character. And then, around 7 o'clock that evening, the phone rang. It was him. He introduced himself—his name was Zeke Montalvo—and asked Seifert to go to the movies that night. She said yes. They had a good time. It turned out that Montalvo was only 25 and hadn't gone to college, but the two started dating. Then they fell in love. And six years after they met, on a cold Christmas Eve at a house by a lake, Montalvo proposed with an heirloom ring. They were married the next month.

At the most unlikely time, in the least romantic place, Seifert met the man of her dreams. It was a random event that changed her life forever. A classic chance encounter. Or was it?

Seifert's academic specialty is cognitive psychology, the science of why people think the way they do. And to understand what really happened the day she met Montalvo, she says you need to start the day before her trip to the cleaners.

That afternoon, in her office, she had received a bouquet of flowers from the chair of the psychology department. The note read, "Congratulations! Your tenure has been approved." If someone else had been in the room, she might have hugged them, but she was alone, so she simply cried with relief. After six years of single-minded obsession, her work had paid off. To celebrate, she went for a drink with a colleague that night. But even as she sat sipping her margarita, a feeling of anticlimax set in. She wondered if the achievement had been worth the sacrifice.

When Seifert awoke the next morning, everything felt different, as though a weight had been lifted. "I don't have to go to work today," she thought. Drinking coffee in her breakfast nook, she asked herself: "Now what? How do I want my life to go? How do I make something good happen?" She told herself that her future started today, and that there had to be something better. She promised herself that in 10 years, she wasn't going to be alone like this. From now on, she would celebrate important occasions with a crowd of friends, not just one colleague. All of a sudden, she had new goals, and she recognized that she would need to take specific steps to reach them. An introvert by nature, she decided to interact more with people. She would shake their hands, look them in the eye, engage in livelier conversation.

For Seifert, these weren't just idle thoughts. Through her research, she had come up with a concept she called "predictive encoding"—the anticipation of when a particular piece of knowledge is going to be useful—and it described exactly what she was doing as she sat at her kitchen table. Research has shown that most people aren't very good at recalling information—or intentions—when they need to. For instance, you know you're out of toilet paper, you go to the store to pick some up, and somehow you manage to come home without it. Or you know you want to meet someone and fall in love, but when you're out and about interacting with people, you somehow manage to come home without having connected with anyone. Though you know what you want, Seifert says, that knowledge doesn't always come to mind at the right time to guide your behavior. But if, when you're thinking about what you want, you imagine the situations in which you'll need to remember it, you're more likely to succeed. Preparing your mind for a certain behavior increases (by as much as 50 percent) the chance that you'll pull that behavior off. And that's what Seifert was attempting: to prepare—or encode into memory—her plans to change her behavior in a way that might change her future. By imagining a new role as a "people person," she was giving herself a better chance of behaving like one whenever the opportunity arose.

Of course, if anyone had told her she would go on a date that night with a man who worked at the dry cleaner, she would have thought it preposterous. Still, even if she wasn't expecting to meet Mr. Right when she pulled up to the drive-through window, she did know she wanted to engage the world differently. And she believes she met her husband because she had mentally prepared for a chance encounter. By seeding her mind with the vision of more connected and fulfilling relationships, Seifert says, she gave her mind instant access to this information when she ran into someone new. And that, in turn, helped her change her behavior and take action.

Seifert isn't alone in believing that if you prepare yourself to make the most of chance encounters, good things are waiting to happen all around you. Other experts agree that with a few simple steps, you can significantly increase the chances of meeting your soul mate, finding the right business partner, or steering your life in a new direction. That might sound unlikely or even naive, but there's real science to prove that while you can't control the randomness of life, you can definitely create your own luck.

Why do some people find love at the dry cleaner while others simply move on to the next errand? Why do some travelers make new business contacts on airplanes while others just hunker down to watch the in-flight movie? By definition, a chance encounter is a random event. Our actions, however, play a crucial role in the outcome. When we hear about people who manage to turn chance into opportunity, we think of them as lucky. But that explanation may be too simple.

Richard Wiseman, PhD, has spent more than a decade investigating why some people have more luck than others. A professor at the University of Hertfordshire in England, he holds Britain's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology. (That's his actual title.) His job is to study the ways in which psychological concepts become known to the general public, but he's also conducted international searches for the funniest joke and best pickup line. A former magician, he has explored the role of chance in our lives and discovered that some people really do have all the luck while others are "magnets for ill fortune."

Luck is usually defined as an unpredictable phenomenon that leads to good or bad outcomes. But after years of experiments, Wiseman disagrees. "Luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods," he writes in The Luck Factor, his 2003 book about the essential principles of changing your fortune. "Instead, it is a way of thinking and behaving." He insists that we have far more control over the element—and outcome—of chance in our lives than we realize. In fact, he argues that only 10 percent of life is truly random. The remaining 90 percent is "actually defined by the way you think."

To investigate this idea, Wiseman devised an experiment for which he recruited a pair of test subjects, Martin and Brenda (their names have been changed). Martin described himself as lucky; Brenda insisted that she was not. Wiseman asked them to go, at different times, to a coffee shop near his university, ostensibly to meet someone else involved in the research project; in reality, they were going to be exposed to identical "chance" opportunities.

Of course the setup was rigged. First, Wiseman had taped a crisp £5 note to the sidewalk outside the coffee shop. Next, he'd planted actors at each of the four tables inside. One of the plants was a "millionaire"; the others were not. Each was instructed to behave in exactly the same way.

Walking up to the store, Martin immediately spotted the money on the sidewalk and picked it up. He ordered coffee and took a seat next to the millionaire. After introducing himself and offering to buy a round of coffee, Martin found himself engaged in spirited conversation with the man; soon they were exploring the possibility of doing business together.

Brenda, on the other hand, marched right past the money without noticing it. She bought her coffee and sat down next to the millionaire, but they didn't exchange a word.

Later, when asked to describe his day, Martin reported that he'd been very lucky, finding £5 and meeting an interesting businessman. Brenda's report: It was an uneventful morning.

"Same opportunities," Wiseman says. "Different lives."

So why did Martin and Brenda have such different experiences? "Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in their lives," Wiseman notes. If luck means being in the right place at the right time, he adds, "being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind."

In psychological terms, lucky people tend to be more extroverted, a word whose Latin roots mean "turned outward." Typically, they're gregarious. They have the power to draw others toward them. They're adept at maintaining friendships. And they cultivate what Wiseman describes as a "strong network of luck" that helps promote opportunity in their lives.

Ultimately, Wiseman believes, the bigger your circle of acquaintances, the more opportunities you have. A typical person knows about 300 people on a first-name basis. So if you go to a party and meet someone new, he explains, you're "only two handshakes away from 300 times 300 people; that's 90,000 new possibilities for a new opportunity, just by saying hello." By the same logic, if you meet 50 new people at a conference, you're just a couple of introductions away from 4.5 million opportunities to change your life.

But handshakes aren't the only way to increase the odds of a life-changing encounter. Wiseman claims that 80 percent of the people who try to increase their serendipity are successful. It takes only a month, he says, and most people report their luck increases by an average of 40 percent. A few keys to success:

Prepare your mind. Don't leave chance encounters entirely to chance, says Colleen Seifert. Instead, try doing a little predictive encoding and get your mind ready for good things to happen. "Chance favors the prepared mind," Seifert says, quoting Louis Pasteur. If you lay the groundwork, then when something happens by chance, your memory goes right to work and "you notice it for free."

Give chance a chance. If you always pick apples in the same part of an orchard, Wiseman notes, you'll eventually run out of fruit. The same applies to luck. Pursue an active life—get out there and do things—and you'll increase the likelihood of good things happening. Go apple picking—or grocery shopping, for that matter—somewhere new. Eat your lunch on a different park bench. You never know who will be sitting next to you.

Relax. If you're anxious, stressed, or preoccupied, Wiseman believes, you probably won't notice good things waiting to happen. You'll walk right past money on the ground or miss an opportunity to speak with someone in a coffee shop. A laid-back attitude can lead to all sorts of possibilities, but you have to be ready to go with the flow.

Build your network of luck. Stay connected to the people you know, and try to meet new people. You can become more of a social magnet by paying attention to your body language. It may sound obvious, but make smiling a habit. "Remember that you are surrounded by opportunities," Wiseman writes. "It is just a case of looking in the right places and seeing what is really there."

Colleen Seifert used to think it was "inefficient to invest in people you were never going to see again." Why chat with someone on an airplane—or at the dog park, or at an academic conference—if your paths were never going to recross? But she now believes that "people are opportunities. The gift is in the interaction and the connection with another person, whether it lasts forever or not." And you never know where that gift might lead.

Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/relationships/200902_omag_making_your_own_luck/4

A chance meeting might seem like a fluke, but as Ben Sherwood explains, scientific research backs up the notion that you can influence your own destiny. Step one: Smile.
On a Saturday morning February 1994, Colleen Seifert, PhD, woke up early and ate her usual breakfast: half a bagel, fruit, and coffee. She walked her Russian wolfhound, Bandit, and tidied her apartment. Seifert was an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Michigan, and for six years her life had been entirely focused on a single goal: earning tenure. She was a work machine, putting in seven-day weeks and sleeping fewer than six hours each night. Even when she left the lab, her mind was consumed with academic research. "I couldn't walk into a shopping mall without feeling I should have been at work," she says. Her big indulgence was running errands on Saturday mornings.

On this Saturday morning, however, her life was about to catapult in a new direction. Seifert's first stop was Pittsfield Cleaners, a couple of blocks away from her home. It was a splendid, sunny day, she remembers; the university was on spring break, and the streets of Ann Arbor were quiet. She pulled up to the dry cleaner's drive-through window and handed over a tangle of clothes. The man at the cash register sorted through the items and held up a hot pink blouse.

"Is this a dress?" he asked.

"It's a shirt," Seifert said. "I wouldn't wear a dress that short."

The man had a handsome face, and dimples; he wore his hair in a ponytail. "If you've got it, flaunt it," he said with a smile.

Seifert was 34 years old, and it had been a long time since a man had even noticed her. Her 60-hour workweeks left neither time nor energy for taking care of herself. She was overweight and overstressed. She hadn't been on a date in more than two years. Friends had tried to fix her up, but when it came to flirting, she was "out of practice." And yet when the man asked for her phone number to include on the dry cleaning ticket, she blurted out: "So? Are you going to call me?"

He looked confused but recovered quickly. "Sure," he said. "I'll do that."

Flustered but "flushed with the daring" of what she'd said, Seifert drove off. She figured the man would never call, but it was thrilling to have done something so out of character. And then, around 7 o'clock that evening, the phone rang. It was him. He introduced himself—his name was Zeke Montalvo—and asked Seifert to go to the movies that night. She said yes. They had a good time. It turned out that Montalvo was only 25 and hadn't gone to college, but the two started dating. Then they fell in love. And six years after they met, on a cold Christmas Eve at a house by a lake, Montalvo proposed with an heirloom ring. They were married the next month.

At the most unlikely time, in the least romantic place, Seifert met the man of her dreams. It was a random event that changed her life forever. A classic chance encounter. Or was it?

Seifert's academic specialty is cognitive psychology, the science of why people think the way they do. And to understand what really happened the day she met Montalvo, she says you need to start the day before her trip to the cleaners.

That afternoon, in her office, she had received a bouquet of flowers from the chair of the psychology department. The note read, "Congratulations! Your tenure has been approved." If someone else had been in the room, she might have hugged them, but she was alone, so she simply cried with relief. After six years of single-minded obsession, her work had paid off. To celebrate, she went for a drink with a colleague that night. But even as she sat sipping her margarita, a feeling of anticlimax set in. She wondered if the achievement had been worth the sacrifice.

When Seifert awoke the next morning, everything felt different, as though a weight had been lifted. "I don't have to go to work today," she thought. Drinking coffee in her breakfast nook, she asked herself: "Now what? How do I want my life to go? How do I make something good happen?" She told herself that her future started today, and that there had to be something better. She promised herself that in 10 years, she wasn't going to be alone like this. From now on, she would celebrate important occasions with a crowd of friends, not just one colleague. All of a sudden, she had new goals, and she recognized that she would need to take specific steps to reach them. An introvert by nature, she decided to interact more with people. She would shake their hands, look them in the eye, engage in livelier conversation.

For Seifert, these weren't just idle thoughts. Through her research, she had come up with a concept she called "predictive encoding"—the anticipation of when a particular piece of knowledge is going to be useful—and it described exactly what she was doing as she sat at her kitchen table. Research has shown that most people aren't very good at recalling information—or intentions—when they need to. For instance, you know you're out of toilet paper, you go to the store to pick some up, and somehow you manage to come home without it. Or you know you want to meet someone and fall in love, but when you're out and about interacting with people, you somehow manage to come home without having connected with anyone. Though you know what you want, Seifert says, that knowledge doesn't always come to mind at the right time to guide your behavior. But if, when you're thinking about what you want, you imagine the situations in which you'll need to remember it, you're more likely to succeed. Preparing your mind for a certain behavior increases (by as much as 50 percent) the chance that you'll pull that behavior off. And that's what Seifert was attempting: to prepare—or encode into memory—her plans to change her behavior in a way that might change her future. By imagining a new role as a "people person," she was giving herself a better chance of behaving like one whenever the opportunity arose.

Of course, if anyone had told her she would go on a date that night with a man who worked at the dry cleaner, she would have thought it preposterous. Still, even if she wasn't expecting to meet Mr. Right when she pulled up to the drive-through window, she did know she wanted to engage the world differently. And she believes she met her husband because she had mentally prepared for a chance encounter. By seeding her mind with the vision of more connected and fulfilling relationships, Seifert says, she gave her mind instant access to this information when she ran into someone new. And that, in turn, helped her change her behavior and take action.

Seifert isn't alone in believing that if you prepare yourself to make the most of chance encounters, good things are waiting to happen all around you. Other experts agree that with a few simple steps, you can significantly increase the chances of meeting your soul mate, finding the right business partner, or steering your life in a new direction. That might sound unlikely or even naive, but there's real science to prove that while you can't control the randomness of life, you can definitely create your own luck.

Why do some people find love at the dry cleaner while others simply move on to the next errand? Why do some travelers make new business contacts on airplanes while others just hunker down to watch the in-flight movie? By definition, a chance encounter is a random event. Our actions, however, play a crucial role in the outcome. When we hear about people who manage to turn chance into opportunity, we think of them as lucky. But that explanation may be too simple.

Richard Wiseman, PhD, has spent more than a decade investigating why some people have more luck than others. A professor at the University of Hertfordshire in England, he holds Britain's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology. (That's his actual title.) His job is to study the ways in which psychological concepts become known to the general public, but he's also conducted international searches for the funniest joke and best pickup line. A former magician, he has explored the role of chance in our lives and discovered that some people really do have all the luck while others are "magnets for ill fortune."

Luck is usually defined as an unpredictable phenomenon that leads to good or bad outcomes. But after years of experiments, Wiseman disagrees. "Luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods," he writes in The Luck Factor, his 2003 book about the essential principles of changing your fortune. "Instead, it is a way of thinking and behaving." He insists that we have far more control over the element—and outcome—of chance in our lives than we realize. In fact, he argues that only 10 percent of life is truly random. The remaining 90 percent is "actually defined by the way you think."

To investigate this idea, Wiseman devised an experiment for which he recruited a pair of test subjects, Martin and Brenda (their names have been changed). Martin described himself as lucky; Brenda insisted that she was not. Wiseman asked them to go, at different times, to a coffee shop near his university, ostensibly to meet someone else involved in the research project; in reality, they were going to be exposed to identical "chance" opportunities.

Of course the setup was rigged. First, Wiseman had taped a crisp £5 note to the sidewalk outside the coffee shop. Next, he'd planted actors at each of the four tables inside. One of the plants was a "millionaire"; the others were not. Each was instructed to behave in exactly the same way.

Walking up to the store, Martin immediately spotted the money on the sidewalk and picked it up. He ordered coffee and took a seat next to the millionaire. After introducing himself and offering to buy a round of coffee, Martin found himself engaged in spirited conversation with the man; soon they were exploring the possibility of doing business together.

Brenda, on the other hand, marched right past the money without noticing it. She bought her coffee and sat down next to the millionaire, but they didn't exchange a word.

Later, when asked to describe his day, Martin reported that he'd been very lucky, finding £5 and meeting an interesting businessman. Brenda's report: It was an uneventful morning.

"Same opportunities," Wiseman says. "Different lives."

So why did Martin and Brenda have such different experiences? "Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in their lives," Wiseman notes. If luck means being in the right place at the right time, he adds, "being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind."

In psychological terms, lucky people tend to be more extroverted, a word whose Latin roots mean "turned outward." Typically, they're gregarious. They have the power to draw others toward them. They're adept at maintaining friendships. And they cultivate what Wiseman describes as a "strong network of luck" that helps promote opportunity in their lives.

Ultimately, Wiseman believes, the bigger your circle of acquaintances, the more opportunities you have. A typical person knows about 300 people on a first-name basis. So if you go to a party and meet someone new, he explains, you're "only two handshakes away from 300 times 300 people; that's 90,000 new possibilities for a new opportunity, just by saying hello." By the same logic, if you meet 50 new people at a conference, you're just a couple of introductions away from 4.5 million opportunities to change your life.

But handshakes aren't the only way to increase the odds of a life-changing encounter. Wiseman claims that 80 percent of the people who try to increase their serendipity are successful. It takes only a month, he says, and most people report their luck increases by an average of 40 percent. A few keys to success:

Prepare your mind. Don't leave chance encounters entirely to chance, says Colleen Seifert. Instead, try doing a little predictive encoding and get your mind ready for good things to happen. "Chance favors the prepared mind," Seifert says, quoting Louis Pasteur. If you lay the groundwork, then when something happens by chance, your memory goes right to work and "you notice it for free."

Give chance a chance. If you always pick apples in the same part of an orchard, Wiseman notes, you'll eventually run out of fruit. The same applies to luck. Pursue an active life—get out there and do things—and you'll increase the likelihood of good things happening. Go apple picking—or grocery shopping, for that matter—somewhere new. Eat your lunch on a different park bench. You never know who will be sitting next to you.

Relax. If you're anxious, stressed, or preoccupied, Wiseman believes, you probably won't notice good things waiting to happen. You'll walk right past money on the ground or miss an opportunity to speak with someone in a coffee shop. A laid-back attitude can lead to all sorts of possibilities, but you have to be ready to go with the flow.

Build your network of luck. Stay connected to the people you know, and try to meet new people. You can become more of a social magnet by paying attention to your body language. It may sound obvious, but make smiling a habit. "Remember that you are surrounded by opportunities," Wiseman writes. "It is just a case of looking in the right places and seeing what is really there."

Colleen Seifert used to think it was "inefficient to invest in people you were never going to see again." Why chat with someone on an airplane—or at the dog park, or at an academic conference—if your paths were never going to recross? But she now believes that "people are opportunities. The gift is in the interaction and the connection with another person, whether it lasts forever or not." And you never know where that gift might lead.

Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/relationships/200902_omag_making_your_own_luck/4

A chance meeting might seem like a fluke, but as Ben Sherwood explains, scientific research backs up the notion that you can influence your own destiny. Step one: Smile.
On a Saturday morning February 1994, Colleen Seifert, PhD, woke up early and ate her usual breakfast: half a bagel, fruit, and coffee. She walked her Russian wolfhound, Bandit, and tidied her apartment. Seifert was an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Michigan, and for six years her life had been entirely focused on a single goal: earning tenure. She was a work machine, putting in seven-day weeks and sleeping fewer than six hours each night. Even when she left the lab, her mind was consumed with academic research. "I couldn't walk into a shopping mall without feeling I should have been at work," she says. Her big indulgence was running errands on Saturday mornings.

On this Saturday morning, however, her life was about to catapult in a new direction. Seifert's first stop was Pittsfield Cleaners, a couple of blocks away from her home. It was a splendid, sunny day, she remembers; the university was on spring break, and the streets of Ann Arbor were quiet. She pulled up to the dry cleaner's drive-through window and handed over a tangle of clothes. The man at the cash register sorted through the items and held up a hot pink blouse.

"Is this a dress?" he asked.

"It's a shirt," Seifert said. "I wouldn't wear a dress that short."

The man had a handsome face, and dimples; he wore his hair in a ponytail. "If you've got it, flaunt it," he said with a smile.

Seifert was 34 years old, and it had been a long time since a man had even noticed her. Her 60-hour workweeks left neither time nor energy for taking care of herself. She was overweight and overstressed. She hadn't been on a date in more than two years. Friends had tried to fix her up, but when it came to flirting, she was "out of practice." And yet when the man asked for her phone number to include on the dry cleaning ticket, she blurted out: "So? Are you going to call me?"

He looked confused but recovered quickly. "Sure," he said. "I'll do that."

Flustered but "flushed with the daring" of what she'd said, Seifert drove off. She figured the man would never call, but it was thrilling to have done something so out of character. And then, around 7 o'clock that evening, the phone rang. It was him. He introduced himself—his name was Zeke Montalvo—and asked Seifert to go to the movies that night. She said yes. They had a good time. It turned out that Montalvo was only 25 and hadn't gone to college, but the two started dating. Then they fell in love. And six years after they met, on a cold Christmas Eve at a house by a lake, Montalvo proposed with an heirloom ring. They were married the next month.

At the most unlikely time, in the least romantic place, Seifert met the man of her dreams. It was a random event that changed her life forever. A classic chance encounter. Or was it?

Seifert's academic specialty is cognitive psychology, the science of why people think the way they do. And to understand what really happened the day she met Montalvo, she says you need to start the day before her trip to the cleaners.

That afternoon, in her office, she had received a bouquet of flowers from the chair of the psychology department. The note read, "Congratulations! Your tenure has been approved." If someone else had been in the room, she might have hugged them, but she was alone, so she simply cried with relief. After six years of single-minded obsession, her work had paid off. To celebrate, she went for a drink with a colleague that night. But even as she sat sipping her margarita, a feeling of anticlimax set in. She wondered if the achievement had been worth the sacrifice.

When Seifert awoke the next morning, everything felt different, as though a weight had been lifted. "I don't have to go to work today," she thought. Drinking coffee in her breakfast nook, she asked herself: "Now what? How do I want my life to go? How do I make something good happen?" She told herself that her future started today, and that there had to be something better. She promised herself that in 10 years, she wasn't going to be alone like this. From now on, she would celebrate important occasions with a crowd of friends, not just one colleague. All of a sudden, she had new goals, and she recognized that she would need to take specific steps to reach them. An introvert by nature, she decided to interact more with people. She would shake their hands, look them in the eye, engage in livelier conversation.

For Seifert, these weren't just idle thoughts. Through her research, she had come up with a concept she called "predictive encoding"—the anticipation of when a particular piece of knowledge is going to be useful—and it described exactly what she was doing as she sat at her kitchen table. Research has shown that most people aren't very good at recalling information—or intentions—when they need to. For instance, you know you're out of toilet paper, you go to the store to pick some up, and somehow you manage to come home without it. Or you know you want to meet someone and fall in love, but when you're out and about interacting with people, you somehow manage to come home without having connected with anyone. Though you know what you want, Seifert says, that knowledge doesn't always come to mind at the right time to guide your behavior. But if, when you're thinking about what you want, you imagine the situations in which you'll need to remember it, you're more likely to succeed. Preparing your mind for a certain behavior increases (by as much as 50 percent) the chance that you'll pull that behavior off. And that's what Seifert was attempting: to prepare—or encode into memory—her plans to change her behavior in a way that might change her future. By imagining a new role as a "people person," she was giving herself a better chance of behaving like one whenever the opportunity arose.

Of course, if anyone had told her she would go on a date that night with a man who worked at the dry cleaner, she would have thought it preposterous. Still, even if she wasn't expecting to meet Mr. Right when she pulled up to the drive-through window, she did know she wanted to engage the world differently. And she believes she met her husband because she had mentally prepared for a chance encounter. By seeding her mind with the vision of more connected and fulfilling relationships, Seifert says, she gave her mind instant access to this information when she ran into someone new. And that, in turn, helped her change her behavior and take action.

Seifert isn't alone in believing that if you prepare yourself to make the most of chance encounters, good things are waiting to happen all around you. Other experts agree that with a few simple steps, you can significantly increase the chances of meeting your soul mate, finding the right business partner, or steering your life in a new direction. That might sound unlikely or even naive, but there's real science to prove that while you can't control the randomness of life, you can definitely create your own luck.

Why do some people find love at the dry cleaner while others simply move on to the next errand? Why do some travelers make new business contacts on airplanes while others just hunker down to watch the in-flight movie? By definition, a chance encounter is a random event. Our actions, however, play a crucial role in the outcome. When we hear about people who manage to turn chance into opportunity, we think of them as lucky. But that explanation may be too simple.

Richard Wiseman, PhD, has spent more than a decade investigating why some people have more luck than others. A professor at the University of Hertfordshire in England, he holds Britain's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology. (That's his actual title.) His job is to study the ways in which psychological concepts become known to the general public, but he's also conducted international searches for the funniest joke and best pickup line. A former magician, he has explored the role of chance in our lives and discovered that some people really do have all the luck while others are "magnets for ill fortune."

Luck is usually defined as an unpredictable phenomenon that leads to good or bad outcomes. But after years of experiments, Wiseman disagrees. "Luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods," he writes in The Luck Factor, his 2003 book about the essential principles of changing your fortune. "Instead, it is a way of thinking and behaving." He insists that we have far more control over the element—and outcome—of chance in our lives than we realize. In fact, he argues that only 10 percent of life is truly random. The remaining 90 percent is "actually defined by the way you think."

To investigate this idea, Wiseman devised an experiment for which he recruited a pair of test subjects, Martin and Brenda (their names have been changed). Martin described himself as lucky; Brenda insisted that she was not. Wiseman asked them to go, at different times, to a coffee shop near his university, ostensibly to meet someone else involved in the research project; in reality, they were going to be exposed to identical "chance" opportunities.

Of course the setup was rigged. First, Wiseman had taped a crisp £5 note to the sidewalk outside the coffee shop. Next, he'd planted actors at each of the four tables inside. One of the plants was a "millionaire"; the others were not. Each was instructed to behave in exactly the same way.

Walking up to the store, Martin immediately spotted the money on the sidewalk and picked it up. He ordered coffee and took a seat next to the millionaire. After introducing himself and offering to buy a round of coffee, Martin found himself engaged in spirited conversation with the man; soon they were exploring the possibility of doing business together.

Brenda, on the other hand, marched right past the money without noticing it. She bought her coffee and sat down next to the millionaire, but they didn't exchange a word.

Later, when asked to describe his day, Martin reported that he'd been very lucky, finding £5 and meeting an interesting businessman. Brenda's report: It was an uneventful morning.

"Same opportunities," Wiseman says. "Different lives."

So why did Martin and Brenda have such different experiences? "Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in their lives," Wiseman notes. If luck means being in the right place at the right time, he adds, "being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind."

In psychological terms, lucky people tend to be more extroverted, a word whose Latin roots mean "turned outward." Typically, they're gregarious. They have the power to draw others toward them. They're adept at maintaining friendships. And they cultivate what Wiseman describes as a "strong network of luck" that helps promote opportunity in their lives.

Ultimately, Wiseman believes, the bigger your circle of acquaintances, the more opportunities you have. A typical person knows about 300 people on a first-name basis. So if you go to a party and meet someone new, he explains, you're "only two handshakes away from 300 times 300 people; that's 90,000 new possibilities for a new opportunity, just by saying hello." By the same logic, if you meet 50 new people at a conference, you're just a couple of introductions away from 4.5 million opportunities to change your life.

But handshakes aren't the only way to increase the odds of a life-changing encounter. Wiseman claims that 80 percent of the people who try to increase their serendipity are successful. It takes only a month, he says, and most people report their luck increases by an average of 40 percent. A few keys to success:

Prepare your mind. Don't leave chance encounters entirely to chance, says Colleen Seifert. Instead, try doing a little predictive encoding and get your mind ready for good things to happen. "Chance favors the prepared mind," Seifert says, quoting Louis Pasteur. If you lay the groundwork, then when something happens by chance, your memory goes right to work and "you notice it for free."

Give chance a chance. If you always pick apples in the same part of an orchard, Wiseman notes, you'll eventually run out of fruit. The same applies to luck. Pursue an active life—get out there and do things—and you'll increase the likelihood of good things happening. Go apple picking—or grocery shopping, for that matter—somewhere new. Eat your lunch on a different park bench. You never know who will be sitting next to you.

Relax. If you're anxious, stressed, or preoccupied, Wiseman believes, you probably won't notice good things waiting to happen. You'll walk right past money on the ground or miss an opportunity to speak with someone in a coffee shop. A laid-back attitude can lead to all sorts of possibilities, but you have to be ready to go with the flow.

Build your network of luck. Stay connected to the people you know, and try to meet new people. You can become more of a social magnet by paying attention to your body language. It may sound obvious, but make smiling a habit. "Remember that you are surrounded by opportunities," Wiseman writes. "It is just a case of looking in the right places and seeing what is really there."

Colleen Seifert used to think it was "inefficient to invest in people you were never going to see again." Why chat with someone on an airplane—or at the dog park, or at an academic conference—if your paths were never going to recross? But she now believes that "people are opportunities. The gift is in the interaction and the connection with another person, whether it lasts forever or not." And you never know where that gift might lead.

Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/relationships/200902_omag_making_your_own_luck/4

A chance meeting might seem like a fluke, but as Ben Sherwood explains, scientific research backs up the notion that you can influence your own destiny. Step one: Smile.
On a Saturday morning February 1994, Colleen Seifert, PhD, woke up early and ate her usual breakfast: half a bagel, fruit, and coffee. She walked her Russian wolfhound, Bandit, and tidied her apartment. Seifert was an assistant professor in psychology at the University of Michigan, and for six years her life had been entirely focused on a single goal: earning tenure. She was a work machine, putting in seven-day weeks and sleeping fewer than six hours each night. Even when she left the lab, her mind was consumed with academic research. "I couldn't walk into a shopping mall without feeling I should have been at work," she says. Her big indulgence was running errands on Saturday mornings.

On this Saturday morning, however, her life was about to catapult in a new direction. Seifert's first stop was Pittsfield Cleaners, a couple of blocks away from her home. It was a splendid, sunny day, she remembers; the university was on spring break, and the streets of Ann Arbor were quiet. She pulled up to the dry cleaner's drive-through window and handed over a tangle of clothes. The man at the cash register sorted through the items and held up a hot pink blouse.

"Is this a dress?" he asked.

"It's a shirt," Seifert said. "I wouldn't wear a dress that short."

The man had a handsome face, and dimples; he wore his hair in a ponytail. "If you've got it, flaunt it," he said with a smile.

Seifert was 34 years old, and it had been a long time since a man had even noticed her. Her 60-hour workweeks left neither time nor energy for taking care of herself. She was overweight and overstressed. She hadn't been on a date in more than two years. Friends had tried to fix her up, but when it came to flirting, she was "out of practice." And yet when the man asked for her phone number to include on the dry cleaning ticket, she blurted out: "So? Are you going to call me?"

He looked confused but recovered quickly. "Sure," he said. "I'll do that."

Flustered but "flushed with the daring" of what she'd said, Seifert drove off. She figured the man would never call, but it was thrilling to have done something so out of character. And then, around 7 o'clock that evening, the phone rang. It was him. He introduced himself—his name was Zeke Montalvo—and asked Seifert to go to the movies that night. She said yes. They had a good time. It turned out that Montalvo was only 25 and hadn't gone to college, but the two started dating. Then they fell in love. And six years after they met, on a cold Christmas Eve at a house by a lake, Montalvo proposed with an heirloom ring. They were married the next month.

At the most unlikely time, in the least romantic place, Seifert met the man of her dreams. It was a random event that changed her life forever. A classic chance encounter. Or was it?

Seifert's academic specialty is cognitive psychology, the science of why people think the way they do. And to understand what really happened the day she met Montalvo, she says you need to start the day before her trip to the cleaners.

That afternoon, in her office, she had received a bouquet of flowers from the chair of the psychology department. The note read, "Congratulations! Your tenure has been approved." If someone else had been in the room, she might have hugged them, but she was alone, so she simply cried with relief. After six years of single-minded obsession, her work had paid off. To celebrate, she went for a drink with a colleague that night. But even as she sat sipping her margarita, a feeling of anticlimax set in. She wondered if the achievement had been worth the sacrifice.

When Seifert awoke the next morning, everything felt different, as though a weight had been lifted. "I don't have to go to work today," she thought. Drinking coffee in her breakfast nook, she asked herself: "Now what? How do I want my life to go? How do I make something good happen?" She told herself that her future started today, and that there had to be something better. She promised herself that in 10 years, she wasn't going to be alone like this. From now on, she would celebrate important occasions with a crowd of friends, not just one colleague. All of a sudden, she had new goals, and she recognized that she would need to take specific steps to reach them. An introvert by nature, she decided to interact more with people. She would shake their hands, look them in the eye, engage in livelier conversation.

For Seifert, these weren't just idle thoughts. Through her research, she had come up with a concept she called "predictive encoding"—the anticipation of when a particular piece of knowledge is going to be useful—and it described exactly what she was doing as she sat at her kitchen table. Research has shown that most people aren't very good at recalling information—or intentions—when they need to. For instance, you know you're out of toilet paper, you go to the store to pick some up, and somehow you manage to come home without it. Or you know you want to meet someone and fall in love, but when you're out and about interacting with people, you somehow manage to come home without having connected with anyone. Though you know what you want, Seifert says, that knowledge doesn't always come to mind at the right time to guide your behavior. But if, when you're thinking about what you want, you imagine the situations in which you'll need to remember it, you're more likely to succeed. Preparing your mind for a certain behavior increases (by as much as 50 percent) the chance that you'll pull that behavior off. And that's what Seifert was attempting: to prepare—or encode into memory—her plans to change her behavior in a way that might change her future. By imagining a new role as a "people person," she was giving herself a better chance of behaving like one whenever the opportunity arose.

Of course, if anyone had told her she would go on a date that night with a man who worked at the dry cleaner, she would have thought it preposterous. Still, even if she wasn't expecting to meet Mr. Right when she pulled up to the drive-through window, she did know she wanted to engage the world differently. And she believes she met her husband because she had mentally prepared for a chance encounter. By seeding her mind with the vision of more connected and fulfilling relationships, Seifert says, she gave her mind instant access to this information when she ran into someone new. And that, in turn, helped her change her behavior and take action.

Seifert isn't alone in believing that if you prepare yourself to make the most of chance encounters, good things are waiting to happen all around you. Other experts agree that with a few simple steps, you can significantly increase the chances of meeting your soul mate, finding the right business partner, or steering your life in a new direction. That might sound unlikely or even naive, but there's real science to prove that while you can't control the randomness of life, you can definitely create your own luck.

Why do some people find love at the dry cleaner while others simply move on to the next errand? Why do some travelers make new business contacts on airplanes while others just hunker down to watch the in-flight movie? By definition, a chance encounter is a random event. Our actions, however, play a crucial role in the outcome. When we hear about people who manage to turn chance into opportunity, we think of them as lucky. But that explanation may be too simple.

Richard Wiseman, PhD, has spent more than a decade investigating why some people have more luck than others. A professor at the University of Hertfordshire in England, he holds Britain's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology. (That's his actual title.) His job is to study the ways in which psychological concepts become known to the general public, but he's also conducted international searches for the funniest joke and best pickup line. A former magician, he has explored the role of chance in our lives and discovered that some people really do have all the luck while others are "magnets for ill fortune."

Luck is usually defined as an unpredictable phenomenon that leads to good or bad outcomes. But after years of experiments, Wiseman disagrees. "Luck is not a magical ability or a gift from the gods," he writes in The Luck Factor, his 2003 book about the essential principles of changing your fortune. "Instead, it is a way of thinking and behaving." He insists that we have far more control over the element—and outcome—of chance in our lives than we realize. In fact, he argues that only 10 percent of life is truly random. The remaining 90 percent is "actually defined by the way you think."

To investigate this idea, Wiseman devised an experiment for which he recruited a pair of test subjects, Martin and Brenda (their names have been changed). Martin described himself as lucky; Brenda insisted that she was not. Wiseman asked them to go, at different times, to a coffee shop near his university, ostensibly to meet someone else involved in the research project; in reality, they were going to be exposed to identical "chance" opportunities.

Of course the setup was rigged. First, Wiseman had taped a crisp £5 note to the sidewalk outside the coffee shop. Next, he'd planted actors at each of the four tables inside. One of the plants was a "millionaire"; the others were not. Each was instructed to behave in exactly the same way.

Walking up to the store, Martin immediately spotted the money on the sidewalk and picked it up. He ordered coffee and took a seat next to the millionaire. After introducing himself and offering to buy a round of coffee, Martin found himself engaged in spirited conversation with the man; soon they were exploring the possibility of doing business together.

Brenda, on the other hand, marched right past the money without noticing it. She bought her coffee and sat down next to the millionaire, but they didn't exchange a word.

Later, when asked to describe his day, Martin reported that he'd been very lucky, finding £5 and meeting an interesting businessman. Brenda's report: It was an uneventful morning.

"Same opportunities," Wiseman says. "Different lives."

So why did Martin and Brenda have such different experiences? "Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in their lives," Wiseman notes. If luck means being in the right place at the right time, he adds, "being in the right place at the right time is actually all about being in the right state of mind."

In psychological terms, lucky people tend to be more extroverted, a word whose Latin roots mean "turned outward." Typically, they're gregarious. They have the power to draw others toward them. They're adept at maintaining friendships. And they cultivate what Wiseman describes as a "strong network of luck" that helps promote opportunity in their lives.

Ultimately, Wiseman believes, the bigger your circle of acquaintances, the more opportunities you have. A typical person knows about 300 people on a first-name basis. So if you go to a party and meet someone new, he explains, you're "only two handshakes away from 300 times 300 people; that's 90,000 new possibilities for a new opportunity, just by saying hello." By the same logic, if you meet 50 new people at a conference, you're just a couple of introductions away from 4.5 million opportunities to change your life.

But handshakes aren't the only way to increase the odds of a life-changing encounter. Wiseman claims that 80 percent of the people who try to increase their serendipity are successful. It takes only a month, he says, and most people report their luck increases by an average of 40 percent. A few keys to success:

Prepare your mind. Don't leave chance encounters entirely to chance, says Colleen Seifert. Instead, try doing a little predictive encoding and get your mind ready for good things to happen. "Chance favors the prepared mind," Seifert says, quoting Louis Pasteur. If you lay the groundwork, then when something happens by chance, your memory goes right to work and "you notice it for free."

Give chance a chance. If you always pick apples in the same part of an orchard, Wiseman notes, you'll eventually run out of fruit. The same applies to luck. Pursue an active life—get out there and do things—and you'll increase the likelihood of good things happening. Go apple picking—or grocery shopping, for that matter—somewhere new. Eat your lunch on a different park bench. You never know who will be sitting next to you.

Relax. If you're anxious, stressed, or preoccupied, Wiseman believes, you probably won't notice good things waiting to happen. You'll walk right past money on the ground or miss an opportunity to speak with someone in a coffee shop. A laid-back attitude can lead to all sorts of possibilities, but you have to be ready to go with the flow.

Build your network of luck. Stay connected to the people you know, and try to meet new people. You can become more of a social magnet by paying attention to your body language. It may sound obvious, but make smiling a habit. "Remember that you are surrounded by opportunities," Wiseman writes. "It is just a case of looking in the right places and seeing what is really there."

Colleen Seifert used to think it was "inefficient to invest in people you were never going to see again." Why chat with someone on an airplane—or at the dog park, or at an academic conference—if your paths were never going to recross? But she now believes that "people are opportunities. The gift is in the interaction and the connection with another person, whether it lasts forever or not." And you never know where that gift might lead.

Original Source: http://www.oprah.com/article/relationships/200902_omag_making_your_own_luck/4

Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday? The history of Valentine's Day — and its patron saint — is shrouded in mystery. But we do know that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. So, who was Saint Valentine and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.

According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first 'valentine' greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl — who may have been his jailor's daughter — who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed 'From your Valentine,' an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It's no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman 'lottery' system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February — Valentine's Day — should be a day for romance. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting, which was written in 1415, is part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England. Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. By the end of the century, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America.

According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.)

Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to the United States, Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages (written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400), and the oldest known Valentine card is on display at the British Museum. The first commercial Valentine's Day greeting cards produced in the U.S. were created in the 1840s by Esther A. Howland. Howland, known as the Mother of the Valentine, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap".

Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday? The history of Valentine's Day — and its patron saint — is shrouded in mystery. But we do know that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. So, who was Saint Valentine and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.

According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first 'valentine' greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl — who may have been his jailor's daughter — who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed 'From your Valentine,' an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It's no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman 'lottery' system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February — Valentine's Day — should be a day for romance. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting, which was written in 1415, is part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England. Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. By the end of the century, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America.

According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.)

Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to the United States, Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages (written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400), and the oldest known Valentine card is on display at the British Museum. The first commercial Valentine's Day greeting cards produced in the U.S. were created in the 1840s by Esther A. Howland. Howland, known as the Mother of the Valentine, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap".