‘You need to be a whole person looking for another whole person.’

On Friday evening about 30 people gathered in a conference room in an Encino office for a lesson in how to form new relationships in 1985.

The setting was the Sirkin Institute, a counseling center in a small commercial building on Balboa Boulevard. The institute regularly has lectures on such topics as “Are You Addicted . . . to an Unhealthy Relationship?” and “What It Means to Be Male or Female.”

Friday’s lecture, the first of the year, was called “Are You Ready for New Relationships in 1985?” After signing in and paying a $6 admission charge, the audience squeezed into tightly spaced rows of metal chairs in a tiny room. There were all kinds. Some were young, some old. Some were beautiful, some were plain. Some were elegant, others were casual.

The lecturer, Sharyn Simons, was young and beautiful and elegant. She wore red slacks and a gray sweater with a zig-zag red stripe across the front. She sat gracefully on a table at the front of the room and exuded self-confidence, good cheer and great sensitivity, all at once.

“My goal is to increase awareness, to open new ideas and maybe to noodge you a little bit,” she said.

Her prescription for making 1985 a better year wasn’t necessarily an easy one to follow.

First, she said, it would be necessary to contemplate the errors of 1984.

“You need to be thinking about what went wrong in a relationship,” she said. “Do you want a relationship? Are you ready?”

Assuming readiness, the next step is to decide in explicit detail what the relationship should be like, Simons said.

“Write things down,” she said. “Start getting it concrete: ‘I should have a loving, open, committed relationship.’

“I really set down the qualities I want in a man. It’s amazing. That’s what I attract.”

She suggested that everyone look for a relationship built on honesty and trust.

“If the other person doesn’t like who you are, maybe you should pass on that person,” she said.

The final step is for each person to become the kind of person he or she desires.

“The qualities you want in other people are the qualities you can find in yourself,” Simons said. “We can’t get someone else to fill in what we feel is lacking. You need to be a whole person looking for another whole person. That’s about the only way it works well.”

As easy as that may have sounded, Simons spent much of the session responding to doubts.

A woman in the back suggested, for instance, that intimacy doesn’t mean the same to everyone.

“They”--meaning men--”don’t want intellectual intimacy,” she protested. “They only want physical intimacy.”

Simons was ready for that.

“I have a pet belief about sex--that it is just another way of connecting with people,” she said. End of argument.

A man of about 60 didn’t have much confidence in honesty in a new relationship.

“If you let it all hang out, some points might not be so nice and they might turn off the person you are hoping to have this open relationship with,” he said.

“That’s part of the risk,” Simons said.

A woman of about 40 didn’t think people attract what they are.

“How about if you say you want strength and you project strength and you attract people who need it,” she said. “I project strength. I would like to attract strength. Most of the time it doesn’t work that way.”

Simons was ready for that, too.

“Sometimes we go around being so strong we don’t give a man enough room,” she said. “I was always real strong and capable. Then I found out I was attracting only the yuck men. I had to be willing to open the softer side of me. Then I found a lot of strong men.”

Simons was wary of defining tough concepts such as “love” and “strength.”

But she showed that she could risk being open and honest about herself, even in front of 30 people.

At one point, talking about how people let others’ ideas influence their lives, she divulged:

“I got married the first time because I thought if you had sex with someone that meant you were in love with him, and if you were in love with him, you ought to get married with him. At that time I was not paying attention to my heart at all. If I was paying attention to that, I would have backed out.”

She did, soon enough. After her divorce, she went through a period when she wanted her relationships to be exciting, playful and non-exclusionary, she said.

Now she is ready to settle down again, she said, but doesn’t know yet just with whom.

“The picture hasn’t all come together yet,” she said. “But it will.”

Simons said that will happen through affirming and imagining, two devices she advised everyone to use.

“You can imagine yourself the way you want to be,” she said. “Imagine yourself in the relationship. How would you look? How would you move? What would you do? You might be dancing. You might be playing Trivial Pursuit. You might be sitting in front of the fireplace.

“You might imagine yourself letting that person see you being real vulnerable and weak. Do that several times a day.”

“It really works, like magic,” a pretty young woman pitched in when there was some show of skepticism. “One time I even imagined I had a Mercedes, and I got a Mercedes.”

When the hour and a half was up, the 30 people walked into a cold night and went their own ways, in their own cars. Only one drove a Mercedes. But wait till next year.