Get Smart with Your Heart: The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Love, Lust, and Lasting Relationships

In this ambitious how-to on dating and mating for women willing to apply a businesslike discipline to choosing the right partner, psychotherapist Lopez blends pragmatism with an Enneagram-based personality profiling system. She claims many successes among her L.A. clients who have used her strategic method, which requires objectivity about past relationships, focusing on one's goals and values and assessing prospective partners according to those standards. Combining a modern attitude toward monogamy with very traditional dating rules (i.e., let the man pick up the check), she is direct, optimistic and lively, and makes her points with helpful personal and professional stories. Nearly a third of the book is devoted to using the Enneagram, the symbol introduced to the West early in this century by G.I. Gurdjieff, to classify personality types and compatibility between them. Readers will either buy this (increasingly popular) application of the Enneagram--and indeed the entire concept of personality types--or they won't, but in any case Lopez offers hard-nosed, warm-hearted advice. Author tour. (Apr.)