Do you feel lucky? Well, do you?

Sara and I were out for a bite the other night, catching up, when she asked me how a mutual friend was doing.

"Great," I said. "Kids are doing well in school, she just signed a big client and she's been seeing a really great guy for a few months now."

"She's so lucky in love," Sara sighed.

I started to agree but then stopped. Just what does it mean to be lucky in love?

People lump together luck and love a lot, or so it seems.

The dictionary defines luck as:

1. The chance happening of fortunate or adverse events; fortune
2. Good fortune or prosperity; success.
3. One's personal fate or lot

That puts love into someone else's hands other than our own. But is that how it works?

I think we're confusing a serendipitous meeting as "lucky in love" — the charming, smart, handsome man visiting from New York who happens to be in same San Francisco restaurant at the same time you are, sparks fly and months later you're strolling Fifth Avenue together. But the guy could have just as easily ended up being a two-timing, Vicodin-addicted spousal abuser.

So when you meet someone, randomly or purposefully — like online — and there's a connection, you enter the tentative beginnings of a romance. When exactly does the luck factor in?

I have met men, felt the connection and then, a few dates or months later realized that he _____ (fill in the blank): drinks too much, treats waiters and others "below him" rudely, talks like a homophobic racist — take your pick. Or maybe we not sexually compatible. And then, he and I part ways because I have decided that someone who talks or acts like that is not someone I want to be with, friend or lover.

That frees me to meet someone who isn't that way instead of trying to make something "work" with someone by hoping he'll change or trying to ignore it or staying with him because there's no one else around right now — aka the BTN (better than nothing) boyfriend.

Isn't that choice and not luck? Because if you continually make choices like that, I think at some point you chose the someone who seems more in tune with what you truly want — and that isn't luck. And if you choose to stay with that guy who drinks too much or puts down gays and blacks, and then you're unhappy sometime later, that does not make you "unlucky" in love, especially he was like that all along whether or not you saw it.

Do you think luck has anything to do with love?
Do the lyrics to Primus' song "Is It Luck?" say it all?
Would getting married in Vegas increase your odds of being lucky in love?
And if you truly believed you were lucky in love, would you ever wear it on your chest?