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Turning 31 and having been single for over a year. I always get the apparently obligatory question… “so you are an intelligent, funny, pretty, ambitious lady… Why are you STILL single” btw those traits are quoted and not always how I see myself. Somedays I feel like a complete moron with the personality of a pencil and the mirror does not always reflect an image I am happy with. P.S my ambition is sometimes limited to wanting to be a housewife and baby mamma.

The problem is. Most often I like being single. My own space and time, no jealous monster on my shoulder or clinging clown attached to my hip. But the question has recently got me thinking and perhaps a little worried about my eternal singledom. I guess as much as I claim to never take baggage into a new relationship I do! I have had mostly awful relationships…. Those stories though are saved for another blog or in fact a book- I’m doing the female species an injustice by not sharing my horrific and hilarious tales.

So back to that baggage. I have so many “do not wants” “won’t put up withs” etc. etc. etc. that short of being able to design the perfect male…. I really don’t think anyone could match up to the criteria I have put in place and lets just say at 30 the finer specimens are taken and the options limited too
Married
Divorced with I hate woman issues
I want to date a 20 year old to prove my manliness
I need a show pony
I have 5 kids all taller then you
I’m 28 …. What’s the rush
I want a friend with benefits

Looking at the afore mentioned. My baggage is like a grain of rice in China… Negligible.

So I get put in the she is too fussy, a player, definitely involved with a married man, in love with an ex, easy, difficult blah blah blah. I’m none of those things. I just want a real MAN.

Someone who protects not tries to own me, who deals with the bills but doesn’t try buy my love (I like having my own money), a family man, someone who doesn’t need to drink to be funny or have a personality, who likes putting his hand in my pocket not living in it, who still opens the door for me because I will still wear feminine clothes for him….. I guess a good old fashioned gentleman… Who can change a tyre and laughs because when he asks for the jack to do so I can’t quite figure out how mr Daniels (jack) could possibly assist with lifting my car.

Yes I want be a young pretty bride. I want kiddies. I want affection. I want company. I want to grow old with someone. I want to travel the world with my soulmate. No I won’t marry for only love or only love or only money … That’s not fussy it is realistic. One by itself can’t sustain a lifetime of happiness.

I’ve always liked the movie “500 Days of Summer.” I’m a sucker for any good love story, but I especially appreciate when the love story doesn’t follow the typical chick flick plot. I like “500 Days” because, rather than being a story about how 2 people fall in love with each other, it’s a story about how 2 people learn and grow and ultimately get to a point where they’re ready to fall in love—even though it’s not with each other. This is what I believe in …. Learning to love. Love at first sight oes blind very quickly.

When I first watched this movie, I got that it was ultimately happy, that both characters would ultimately end up in a better place. But I admit that the movie mostly left me feeling sad. I felt that I, like Tom, had gotten my heart broken. I had been strung along and had spent too much time pining for something that never was to be. Even though the movie did end somewhat happily for Tom, as he pursues his dream job and takes another chance in love, I couldn’t help but feel sad for all the time he lost and all the heartache he had suffered. Moreover, I’d wondered if he’d truly be able to give love a fair chance or if he would be forever tainted by his experience with Summer.
I hadn’t seen that movie in a long time, but today I watched it This time instead of feeling frustrated with Summer’s character for leading Tom on, or feeling sad for Tom’s heartache, I saw 2 people doing the best they could to find love. Summer claimed she didn’t actually believe in love, but obviously she held out some sort of hope as she pursued things with Tom, however “casual” she wanted to take it. And Tom, for his part, probably pushed too hard for love, but he was only following his heart and doing what seemed right to him. Summer just wasn’t the right one for him.

This time I felt happy that Summer, who had obviously been hurt by her parents’ divorce and didn’t believe in love, was able to find it so quickly and so unexpectedly. At the end of the movie she tells Tom about meeting her husband. She asks rhetorically, what if I hadn’t been at the coffee shop that day, what if I’d gone to see a movie, or had come 10 minutes later. She then tells Tom that he had been right about love—it just wasn’t between him and her.

And I felt happy that Tom used the experience to improve himself by seeking a career that truly fulfilled him. I felt happy that, even after getting his heart broken, even after spending 500 days of his life in love with Summer, he was able to move on and find hope for the future.

And so i have spent a lot of time on this blog trying to figure out why I was still single. I still don’t really have an answer for myself or for anyone else. Maybe it is just as simple as meeting the right person at the right time for both of us. Simple and serendipitous at the same time.

Maybe there’s just a lot of luck involved. So many factors are out of our control. But I think the idea is to keep myself in the best place i possibly can—most importantly. But also so that i will be in the right place when the right person shows up.

Last week, Google+ announced some small updates to its platform. The news hasn’t made huge waves, but these two new features could spark some big changes in the way people create and find content on the web. (Attention, content marketers!)

Here’s what last week’s updates will change, and what it means for you:

Author Attribution for content makers: Giving credit where credit is due, the Google way. With this update, anyone who creates and publishes content on WordPress and Typepad (and, coming soon, About.com and other platforms) will be able to link their work to their Google+ profile.

On the most basic level, this means that people will always know you’re the author of your content— no matter how far it ends up going on the web, according to Google. Deeper still, brands and publishers can increase credibility and add context to content by putting a face to it.

But there’s a potentially huge SEO payoff in all of this: Linking to Google+ might just improve your all-important Google search rankings. According to WordPress’ Justin Shreve: “Google may also use this information to make your posts stand out more in search results by including your Google+ Profile information next to your listing.”

What does this mean for content marketers? The worst case scenario is that spammers will be the first to pick up on it, creating fake Google+ profiles and linking them to their spammy content in an attempt to move up the SEO rankings. However, if this doesn’t happen, Google+’s update could actually let credible, referenced content float to the top of Google search results, granting us all greater access to valuable, high-quality information. This kind of outcome, which I’m rooting for, could be huge.

Embedded Posts: New audiences for people who publish on Google+. While this isn’t an entirely ground-breaking move by Google (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have all already done it), for Google+ enthusiasts, it’s big. With this update, website owners can now take any public Google+ post—whether a photo, text, or media—and add it directly onto their pages. These posts are fully interactive wherever they go, which means people can comment directly on the person’s Google+ update and follow them right from the external source.

What does this mean? This update will give anyone who produces content on Google+, whether an individual or business, a lot more opportunity to expand their audiences across the web. Think about it this way: a journalist can now stumble upon your personal or business update on Google+ and plug it right into a story. Anyone who reads that story can +1 or comment on your post directly via that article, and choose to follow you as well.

Of course, behind both of these moves is a push by Google to make Google+ ever more integral to your Internet experience. By tying Google+ to SEO results and pushing Google+ posts out into the broader web, Google hopes to boost use of its home-grown social network, which currently has over 500 million registered users, but—according to some estimates—only 135 million active users. If the network can gain a foothold on content distribution on the web, it might stand a chance of closing ground on Facebook.