LAURIE S.

Laurie is a pale, dark-haired, angular beauty with huge expressive eyes and a waif-like quality. This 31-year-old Manhattanite originally comes from California but has spent the last five years in New York after graduating from the University of Wisconsin and traveling the world — hiking through India and the Middle East, working as a hostess in a strip club in Japan, and going through a bad spate of crashing on friends' couches.

Signs of her adventurous past have disappeared under the veneer of a well-groomed, beautifully dressed woman. She is a highly successful writer who contributes to a number of magazines.

Laurie is outgoing, opinionated, but also has a vulnerable air about her. She dates often, trying on-line services, hooking up with friends of friends, and even meeting men on the street. Like a lot of successful, driven New York women, she is not on a husband hunt -- rather, she says, "I like to keep the doors open and let every possibility in."

"I'm just not scared to get out there," she continues. " You know that feeling you get in your gut when you see someone on the subway or in a bar and you think, oh my God -- that could be the love of my life and I'm never going to see him again if I don't do something. Well, sometimes I get that and I just have to react. I was having dinner with my ex-boyfriend when I made eye contact with this guy across the restaurant. But I couldn't say anything to him, so when my ex and I left the restaurant and went to a movie, I ran out during the previews and found a pay phone. I called the restaurant and made the waiter give the guy my e-mail address and tell him I was the girl in the green sweater who he'd been making eye contact with. He e-mailed me that night!"