“A CHANCE TO LOVE”
by
Francine Florette
I sat there stunned, staring at the distressful warning of doom.
Where did this leave me?
At that moment from somewhere inside me a stubborn resolve rose up. “No!” cried a voice deep within me. This cannot be true! I won’t let it be true! Not for me!
My teenaged daughter, sitting across the room noticed my agitation. “What’s wrong, mom?”
When I showed her the offensive missive, she echoed my internal voice. “I don’t believe it for a minute, mom. It certainly doesn’t apply to you. You know you can achieve whatever you want.”
Wow! I had raised her right. I valued her opinion and her words gave me encouragement.
Forty! “I’m forty”, I thought. “College educated career woman” – that’s me. The article had just condemned me and millions of others like me to a life of loneliness.
“A better chance of being killed by terrorists than marrying,” was the fate blithely decreed for all such women.
This was 1986 and I was exactly 40, being on the early wave of the baby boom generation. Since terrorists weren’t much in the news then, in my mind, I somehow transformed this phrase into “a better chance of being struck by lightning.” “This can’t be true,” I said over and over again to myself.
I had been a single parent for 6 struggling years. I hadn’t really been dating or looking for men at all, because it took me a while to recover from a divorce I had not chosen. Still, I had always intended to marry again, had always assumed I could when I was ready. Now this obnoxious article in a respected magazine, quoting a respectable study, said I had waited too long. It went on to state that women with a college degree and a professional or serious career were particularly at risk. They were highly unlikely candidates for marriage. All kinds of graphs and statistics backed up their findings.
I decided right then and there to prove them wrong.
I took stock of my positive credentials and decided that I would put those skills to work for myself to solve my problem. I was a career woman with a significant, if somewhat eccentric, history. This is why I now tell my current clients that it is because of my own history that I can be so certain that they, too, can achieve both love and success.
Way back in the early seventies, in the beginnings of the Women’s Movement, I was the first female manager in AT&T’s Marketing Management Training Department. There was “little me” with 40 men managers. At that time, I was married to my first husband and already had a small child. The fact that I was married and had children made me even more peculiar to my male colleagues.
My background was unique too. I had traveled around the world three times and had served as a Peace Corps Training Director, also one of the first females in this capacity. To do this, I had taken my 2-year-old daughter with me to Yemen, when it had been open to the outside world for only 5 years.
As I sat on the couch that day, I reminded myself that I was the same woman who had done those things. I also reminded myself that I had been married, I thought happily, for 13 years, to my high school sweetheart. I told myself that I had never had trouble attracting the opposite sex before. Why should things be so terribly different now?
I then decided that I would use the same expertise I had applied in Marketing Strategies, Training Design Systems, and Organizational Development to design the process for finding a man. I would create my own “Plan to find my man.” After all, my systems designs and training programs had been distributed all over the world, translated into over eight languages and used to train over a quarter of a million people. Surely my systems must work well.
I set about my love search in a very systematic way, the same way I worked as a Management Consultant. Lo and behold – it worked!
I used my plan to start dating again and found myself to be very successful. Within a couple of years, I had found and married my own second husband. We have been happily married now for 17 years.
Over the years, I have encouraged many others to create their own dynamic and effective Plan to find their man. Many beautiful weddings and happy couples have resulted.
I tell people this story in my workshops and training packages, so that they will know where the design for the Alualove Plan to Find Your Man comes from and to let them know that I, too, was a busy career woman and a single mom. I tell them “you, too, can succeed in love!”
As romantic as this sounds, it is each career women herself who creates her own Plan to find her man, using a very systematic and businesslike approach to a passionate subject. It works. It works over and over again.
The people who wrote the article were wrong, as they themselves admitted in another article published almost exactly 20 years later, in June 2006.
Ultimately, to be successful, you must believe that you can be successful, both in love and in career. You must take control. That is the key.
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Francine Florette is now President and Sole Owner of Alualove Plan To Find Your Man, a company which offers books, CDs training programs and on-going groups to help single career women develop their own Plans to find the love of their lives.
This story is a shortened adaptation from “A Chance to Love,” Francine Florette’s chapter in the book, Wake Up and Live: Finding Your Purpose, just out in July 2007. Francine Florette is a co-author of this book, the latest in the best selling series, “Wake Up and Live.”
The book will soon be available for purchase on this web site, www.plantofindyourman.com or by phone at 909-447-8640.
You can contact Francine Florette through her office at:
Alualove Plan to Find Your Man
2120 Foothill Blvd., Suite 107
La Verne, CA 91750
Phone: 909-447-8460
www.plantofindyourman.com
You can email Francine Florette at francine@plantofindyourman.com.
