Esther Kustanowitz

…sometime over the next two days, I’ll probably post the next edition of Mars & Venus Go To Shul: the Jewish Singles and Dating Blogcarnival. Things are starting a little slow with this carnival, because I’ve been traveling so much. But if you’d like to submit to this edition, please let me know. And if you’d like to host the blogcarnival on your blog, please speak up, kids!

In the interim, here’s something you might appreciate…

We all say we’re looking for someone who speaks our language. But maybe that’s just a metaphor. Now we don’t have to limit ourselves. Or at least men don’t have to thusly limit themselves: A new service called CuteOnly.com introduces Russian women to men all over the world using an online, automated translation feature. Hooray.

(via Online Personals Watch)

A recent post by Chayyei Sarah, titled “No More Creepy Old Guys,” has inspired me to reopen the earlier discussion on older men/younger women. She notes that on one of the internet dating services she frequents (although I’m not sure she’d love my using that term), DosiDate, they’ve just instituted age limits to their member searches.

“Given how many men in their 50’s have “initiated contact” with me through the various dating websites on which I’m a member,” she says, “you can bet I went into my Dosidate account right away to set up an acceptable age range.” She says she was “extremely liberal,” in both directions, when setting the boundaries, but that her “policy has long been that if a man is closer to my father’s age than he is to mine, he’s just out of luck. My father was 24 when I was born. You do the math.”

She also makes some important distinctions, that there’s a difference between slightly older and creepy older men looking for trophy wives, that men and women should both be a little more open-minded in the dating process, but that both sides have to be realistic. Feel free to go over there and comment, or carry on the conversation here, as you’ve been doing, even while I was away.

I know that people feel very passionately about this issue, and that’s leading to some people being accusatory and judgmental, and others becoming defensive…let’s keep the discussion civil, and agree to disagree where we have to.

I maintain, as I said on CS’s site, that online dating, although good at expanding the circles, which is unquestionably the name of the game in Jewish dating, also offers us a chance to reject someone based on a different set of criteria than we might observe if our original encounter is face-to-face.

Picture it…thirtysomething you goes to a party. Friends introduce you to a man who has a friendly, open smile, a warm sense of humor and an engaging demeanor. As you talk, you determine an intellectual–and, what’s that?–a religious/spiritual compatibility. Then later, you find out that the person is in his late forties or early fifties. You may feel a momentary disappointment that the person doesn’t share your immediate frame of reference, but if there’s enough “else” there, you probably won’t care. Because it’s about connecting with a person. One friend of mine married a man in his fifties who already had five kids, one of them with a child…The couple had a baby about a year later, a few months after one of the other kids had a baby, rendering my friend a grandmother before she was even a mother.

There are, of course, exceptions. A friend of mine recently told me about a man who was in his late fifties who wanted to date her; she liked him, but she was concerned. If things worked out, he’d be in his sixties when their kids were born, seventies when they were in high school and college, and it was likely that my friend would at some point, end up bearing the lion’s share of the parenting, either through infirmity, or decreased energy due to aging, or G-d forbid, even because of an early widowhood.

True, no one can know what life has in store. Philanthropists become victims in fatal traffic accidents, and terrorism cuts off lives in their prime. Illness knows no good timing or age or circumstance. Those are things we cannot control. But is it any wonder that for women in their thirties, what they’re ideally looking for is to maximize their chances with a partner they can build a life with, and with whom they can grow old, together?

A radical idea? Eliminate the age range entirely, and have people respond solely to picture and profile content. Rumor has it people mostly respond to pictures anyway…

About this Friends-with-Benefits situation…

I know what the components are: friendship + fooling around. But I’ve never been able to understand it fully. Maybe I’m looking at things in black-and-white, but the way I see it, if you’re attracted to someone, and you like their personality and want to hang out with them, why isn’t that called–or why wouldn’t you want it to be called–a relationship?

Which of these elements is present in a relationship that is not present in a FWB scenario?

• Trust
• Attraction
• Mutuality
• Convenience
• Understanding of the rules
• Respect
• Concern

I suppose if both people are equally invested in the casual nature of the relationship as FWBs, then it’s fine. But how do you ensure that both of those people are on the exact same wavelength at the exact same time? And how do you prevent attachment?

Is such a relationship by definition limited in duration, until the whim of either party expires, or can it go on for years as long as both parties acquiesce? And again, absent the formal declaration of an agreement, does such a tacit arrangement constitute the very commitment the pair of FWBs are seeking to elude?

One last question…is FWBs more generally acceptable in the college-age population? Can people in their thirties and forties engage in these kinds of relationships with impunity, or is there always ultimately a price to pay?

I’m sure other people will have opinions on this. So I’m going to board a boat and let the sparks fly while I’m away…who knows? Maybe I’ll even give you some guest bloggers…

OK, so I’ve missed a column or two. So here are the last two columns I’ve not linked to yet…coincidentally, the first two columns of 2006:

What You Can’t Leave Behind

Last Friday night, a few blocks from home, I sat in a row of chairs along a sanctuary wall. This particular synagogue was not some place I’d normally go, but accompanied by the excuse of friends from out of town, I tried something new-ish along with my Jewish. It wasn’t the traditional service I was used to; many congregants danced as they celebrated the incoming Sabbath, and a few white-clad, barefoot Jews reminded me of the hordes I had seen emerging from L.A.’s Kabbalah Centre in September. It was foreign but spirited, revealing an enthusiasm for prayer and Shabbat that I hadn’t felt in a while.

After the Jews had been seated, the rabbi asked us to close our eyes. As we headed into Shabbat — which happened to coincide with the weekend of Rosh Chodesh, the new moon, and which was also marked on the Gregorian calendar as “New Year’s Weekend” — the rabbi asked us to think about what we could leave behind during this transitional moment. As I tried to clear my head of weekday clutter, sensory over-stimulation and the teeming army of germs conspiring to attack my sinuses, one word came into my mind: a proper name. As the year slipped away, I knew what I had to leave behind…

Soul (Mates) on Ice (no, I don’t understand the title either)

Four 30-something women sat at a table, talking about relationships — it all seemed very “Sex and the City,” only with maki sushi instead of martinis. The subject was soulmates. “You have a net of available soulmate options,” someone
said. “But some of them are quick minnows. You think they’re there and available, but they dart away.” The soulmates-as-fish-in-the-sea metaphors seemed appropriate, if a little insensitive to the spicy tuna rolls on our plates.

One married friend maintained that soulmates were defined by commitment. “If the commitment readiness isn’t there, he’s not your soulmate.” But did that mean that soulmate was just another synonym for commitment or love? If something is bashert, meant to be, isn’t it always meant to be? And what of fizzled relationships that seemed promising before they plummeted; what of the perceived soulmates gone inexplicably AWOL? ….