I look forward to when the timing syncs and my life dovetails with the girl who also can’t believe what amazing sparks we have. And over time the sparks will morph into something different, maybe something more like embers which seem less spectacular at first glance but with work are constant and actually much hotter than any spark.

And then we’ll be old and ashy to everyone else, but we’ll still be glowing inside for each other, and hopefully we’ll show something right to our kids and they can start that fire all over again with their own awesome love story.

I think this kind of thing is a lot easier to figure out — the mutuality of the sparks, I mean — if we take the male/femaleness out of it. If you think about it, we feel sparks all the time with people … I can tell right away whether I’m going to really bond with my clients, for example, and whether they’re “getting” me. I have no hesitation in saying that my male friends and I have “sparks” for each other, or else we wouldn’t hang around. Obviously the sparks have a different probable consequence when it’s two people who are potentially dating, but interpersonal chemistry exists, and isn’t hard to figure out, in every single human relationship we have.

But for some reason, because the stakes are higher with dating, we lose our ability to assess whether sparks are felt on both sides. We also feel guilty when someone appealing feels it, and we don’t, because most of us are so kind of beaten down by life that we feel we shouldn’t turn down a good thing, otherwise another one might never come along.

Yes, share sparks when possible to improve your dating karma!

And who knows; maybe one day someone will send sparks your way.

So sometimes even mutual spark isn’t enough…

But I also have to applaud you for your matchmaking skills. My friends are starting to try to match me up too and it scares the bejeezus out of me!