AUDREY SMALTZ said that she wanted to stop being a “complainer,” as she put it, and that she needed to know who she was. “I really had no idea,” she said.

So in January 1997, she signed up for a seminar with Landmark Education, a personal training and development program in New York. During one session, Ms. Smaltz was asked what she was looking for in a relationship. A black man, she replied, “someone taller than me, who likes to dance and travel.”

When she met Gail Marquis in February 1999 at another Landmark seminar, she thought nothing of it. Why would she? Ms. Marquis, after all, was a woman. And Ms. Smaltz, who had been married briefly and had shared a 14 1/2-year relationship with the musician Lionel Hampton, had never dated a woman.

Still, there was something she liked about Ms. Marquis, a former professional basketball player who had won a silver medal in the 1976 Montreal Olympics and is in the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame. Maybe it was her quiet strength. Maybe it was her gentle disposition. Or maybe it was her 6-foot-2 frame, no small thing for Ms. Smaltz, who is an even 6 feet.