I recently sat down with “I Kissed a Girl” singer Katy Perry for dinner at the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood, and our conversation appears in the Glamour cover interview this month.

Katy talks about love in "shapes," too.

And while I know it sounds like such a cliché when you read things like this, she rolled in to our meeting looking pretty and fresh-faced, with no makeup, wearing gym clothes and sneaks, the total softer side of what I expected. What also surprised me? How whipsmart, emotionally mature and grounded she was at just 25 years old.

I told her about Meeting Your Half-Orange—which will be in bookstores soon! Or, buy it here now at Amazon.com—and what the term meant. I explained how the half-orange (based on the Spanish phrase mi media naranja) is such a wonderful symbol of a good relationship. If you picture the fruit split open, it’s two sweet halves meeting in the middle. Neither side is bigger or bolder, and neither side is being taken over or engulfed; it’s just two halves that meet in the center and create a full, healthy, round orange of a solid relationship.

Katy, it turns out, had the same picture in mind for what she wanted in her other half. Here is what she said in the interview:

GLAMOUR: You once said you’d wait five more years to get married. What will make you ready to settle down?

KATY PERRY: When I find a partner who is my teammate. I’m not going to play by any rules, I’m just going to go with my heart. Why wait? I just wrote a song [that goes], “They say it’s hard to meet your match, gotta find my other half so we can make a perfect shape.”

Well, over New Year’s, Katy got engaged to her teammate, British comedian Russell Brand (of Forgetting Sarah Marshall fame)! Sounds like she found her other half. And if you still want to find yours, keep that same picture in mind.

If you meet someone and it’s not feeling like their orange half is meeting yours in the middle—you’re always the one doing the texting, or you’re always pushing for an “official” date that’s not coming to pass, or maybe you’re feeling like you’re steamrolling them—then it’s probably not the right relationship. You want to feel equal respect, equal attention and equal affection, and your true half-orange will give you all that and more.

Big love,

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Optimisms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.