Uncategorized

If the title of my latest column in the Jewish Week seems a little familiar to regular readers of this column, it’s because it originated as a post here…except here, we met a “dating hermit.” Well, my editor wasn’t fond of “hermit,” so it became a “guru.” But the concept is the same, and some of your opinions are represented in this piece, so thanks for the help you didn’t know you were giving me. Keep visiting and commenting…your feedback helps JDaters Anonymous maintain its place as a dynamic community.

Interrogating the Dating Guru
by Esther D. Kustanowitz
May 5, 2006

When people find out that I write about the single life, they often ask me dating questions. I try to answer on a case-by-case basis, always with the caveat that they understand I don’t have all the answers.

Recently, someone asked me, “Why aren’t people meeting each other?” I thought about this. Was it true? I mean, it felt true. But what of the myriad parties, blind dates and Jewish events? Surely people were meeting, weren’t they? “The opportunity to meet new people is always there, every moment you are out in public,” says Aryeh Goldsmith, founder of free Jewish dating site TwentyFourSix.com. “But people aren’t even trying anymore; you can’t meet people if you don’t even talk to them.”

He explains that new people are immediately assessed for relationship potential and written off. “They aren’t given the option of becoming your friend because you don’t want more friends — you’re looking for a significant other. This is basically the act of becoming less and less social.”

In effect, the questions may actually be, “Why can’t I meet anyone special?” or “Where do I go to meet someone?” They could be “Will I ever meet anyone?” or “What the hell is he/she thinking?” or “Why am I always confined to the Friend Zone?” And I don’t have any of the answers — if I did, I’d likely skip this Jewish Week gig and go straight to Oprah.

On my JDatersAnonymous blog, I asked readers to imagine that they’d climbed to the top of a remote mountain to seek an audience with the Dating Guru — a person who held all the answers to all questions regarding the courtship process. What questions would they ask?

One man in his 30s asked how he could “overcome the issues I know I have, and how will I know if I’ve found the right one?” One reader asked if he would be “happier single than waiting around for ‘good ones’ to show up.” Others wanted to know if they’d made a mistake by breaking up with someone who might have been “the one.”

One male reader wondered why women don’t give shorter guys a chance; and one female reader asked why men have such difficulty opening up emotionally. One woman just shy of 30 wondered, “If I am as wonderful, beautiful, interesting, funny, intelligent and loving as everyone says I am (and if I know it’s true too) then why don’t I have the relationship I deserve?”

A 20-something woman wants to know if she’s wasting her time. “Have I missed my chance or is my bashert still out there? If he’s still out there, I’ll keep trying. But if I know for sure that he’s not, I might take up some new addictions.”

The good news is that, on paper, people are meeting. As the New York Times Sunday Styles section or Times Square billboards will tell you, everyone knows someone who met on JDate. Or Match.com. Or at a party. Or through a blind date. But there’s no guarantee that any of those venues will be right for you, and that’s disappointing.

Sure, you try to reframe it. You’re waiting for your bashert, the timing hasn’t been right; you declare a moratorium because you’re too busy for relationships, anyway. You try to take the power back from the ether, hoping it will make you feel better. But with every denial, uttered with the best of intentions — emotional self-preservation — you may be taking a step backwards, retreating from the relationship that you want. By convincing yourself that love will find you when you’re not looking for it (another untrue cliché) you stop looking for love. And that may seem like a positive move, but it’s not very goal- or action-oriented.

“We all need to identify the things that trap us and do our best to take responsibility,” says dating consultant Evan Marc Katz. “The right person is out there, somewhere, but tends not to magically appear in your living room with a red ribbon on his head. If he does, you should probably call the police.”

Perhaps because there’s such a fine line between doing all the right things and not becoming obsessed with something that’s largely out of our control, these festering questions can drive us right up to the edge of that hazy border between love and insanity. But most of us are just asking “Why is this taking so long?” And that, unfortunately, is a question that only the Dating Guru can answer. Too bad gurus, like a good match, are so hard to find.

Esther D. Kustanowitz does not aspire to fill the shoes of any active or retiring Dating Gurus. Still, you can reach her at jdatersanonymous@gmail.com.

This time I’m reprinting the whole column here, for your convenience…and I have to say that given the tax I had to pay on this year’s purported income, the column turned out to be remarkably prescient. May your days be filled with the sweetness of freedom.–EDK

Free to Be...
by Esther D. Kustanowitz

Growing up, I often listened to a work of feminism undercover as children’s album and book — “Free to Be You and Me.” From “Free to Be,” I learned that I could be anything, that parents were people and that “every boy in this land learns to be his own man, and in this land every girl grows to be her own woman.” I learned that partners should not be your superiors, but equals, running neck-and-neck with you until you both cross the finish line together. I learned that those who expect to be treated like royalty because of their looks and who demand “ladies first” will probably be eaten by a pack of hungry tigers. (Metaphorical tigers, I’m sure.)

Today, with the girl in me having grown to be her own woman, living single and independent, even my profession has liberation in its name: I am a freelance writer. Friends are envious. I am my own boss, I choose my projects and my hours, and I’m flexible — able to work at a coffee shop or a library. When summer arrives early, I can take an hour to enjoy the sunshine or sit in the park, while my peers are chained to their desks.

But with no central employer, I’m also free to worry, buy my own health insurance, and to wonder if my doctors will suddenly decide — as they recently did —that they’re no longer accepting my coverage. I wonder if I can stretch this month’s earnings to cover next month’s expenses. I’ve got to stay on top of my invoices, or my clients will feel free to not pay me. And if I can’t make freelancing work, I’m free to either get a full-time job or, although I haven’t asked them, to move back in with my parents.

So freelancing isn’t really free. With no such thing as a free lunch, there are always obligations, strings attached, although they might not be visible at the time. Pessimists say that’s what dating’s all about — determining if the inevitable strings attached to supposedly free meals are strings you can live with. I don’t love that definition, but it makes me realize that for all of my professional independence, financially, I’m not all that free.

I have often wished that I were part of a creative commune, where we would all work to provide each other with sustenance and shelter, with enough to enable us to focus on our creative work without worrying about financial security. We could judge each other by the content of our characters rather than have our perceptions tinted through money-colored glasses. On this creative kibbutz, a basic stability would free our minds. We wouldn’t need excess, only comfort, to create. And by being more in touch with our inner muses, we’d be truer versions of ourselves, more open to relationships, and, to paraphrase the Bard, we would not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds.

For artists and other miscellaneous creatives, the search for comfort is constant. They hope that a deep enough excavation will uncover love, happiness or some other great truth. But once a dream is achieved or a truth is attained, everything shifts, compelling the creation of a new dream, a higher goal, a deeper truth. Writing itself — as profession, leisure activity, spiritual exercise, intellectual inquiry or demonic exorcism — is not a right; it’s a luxury, living in the domain of the independent and the land of the free.

Every spring, Jews revisit freedom as a concept. And we don’t think solely of our literally enslaved ancestors: we think of the restrictions that we have placed on ourselves, metaphorical enslavements of the heart, will and mind. We understand that our inability to move forward in relationships or our fear of change isn’t slavery of the make-bricks-from-mud-and-straw variety. Actual slavery still exists throughout the world — from poverty in New York to Indian children born into brothels, from Russian prostitutes in Israel to poverty, violence and atrocities in Darfur. And here I am, pondering my metaphorical freedom and my own professional “enslavement” to Manhattan rents and sub-par insurance plans and complaining that a month of JDate is too expensive.

My freedoms aren’t rights. They’re luxuries. And all of the smaller enslavements of daily existence for a single youngish American Jewish freelancer — even JDate — are insignificant when you consider the major benefit to living in a free society: I have the luxury to keep on dreaming.

This time I’m reprinting the whole column here, for your convenience…and I have to say that given the tax I had to pay on this year’s purported income, the column turned out to be remarkably prescient. May your days be filled with the sweetness of freedom.–EDK

Free to Be...
by Esther D. Kustanowitz

Growing up, I often listened to a work of feminism undercover as children’s album and book — “Free to Be You and Me.” From “Free to Be,” I learned that I could be anything, that parents were people and that “every boy in this land learns to be his own man, and in this land every girl grows to be her own woman.” I learned that partners should not be your superiors, but equals, running neck-and-neck with you until you both cross the finish line together. I learned that those who expect to be treated like royalty because of their looks and who demand “ladies first” will probably be eaten by a pack of hungry tigers. (Metaphorical tigers, I’m sure.)

Today, with the girl in me having grown to be her own woman, living single and independent, even my profession has liberation in its name: I am a freelance writer. Friends are envious. I am my own boss, I choose my projects and my hours, and I’m flexible — able to work at a coffee shop or a library. When summer arrives early, I can take an hour to enjoy the sunshine or sit in the park, while my peers are chained to their desks.

But with no central employer, I’m also free to worry, buy my own health insurance, and to wonder if my doctors will suddenly decide — as they recently did —that they’re no longer accepting my coverage. I wonder if I can stretch this month’s earnings to cover next month’s expenses. I’ve got to stay on top of my invoices, or my clients will feel free to not pay me. And if I can’t make freelancing work, I’m free to either get a full-time job or, although I haven’t asked them, to move back in with my parents.

So freelancing isn’t really free. With no such thing as a free lunch, there are always obligations, strings attached, although they might not be visible at the time. Pessimists say that’s what dating’s all about — determining if the inevitable strings attached to supposedly free meals are strings you can live with. I don’t love that definition, but it makes me realize that for all of my professional independence, financially, I’m not all that free.

I have often wished that I were part of a creative commune, where we would all work to provide each other with sustenance and shelter, with enough to enable us to focus on our creative work without worrying about financial security. We could judge each other by the content of our characters rather than have our perceptions tinted through money-colored glasses. On this creative kibbutz, a basic stability would free our minds. We wouldn’t need excess, only comfort, to create. And by being more in touch with our inner muses, we’d be truer versions of ourselves, more open to relationships, and, to paraphrase the Bard, we would not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds.

For artists and other miscellaneous creatives, the search for comfort is constant. They hope that a deep enough excavation will uncover love, happiness or some other great truth. But once a dream is achieved or a truth is attained, everything shifts, compelling the creation of a new dream, a higher goal, a deeper truth. Writing itself — as profession, leisure activity, spiritual exercise, intellectual inquiry or demonic exorcism — is not a right; it’s a luxury, living in the domain of the independent and the land of the free.

Every spring, Jews revisit freedom as a concept. And we don’t think solely of our literally enslaved ancestors: we think of the restrictions that we have placed on ourselves, metaphorical enslavements of the heart, will and mind. We understand that our inability to move forward in relationships or our fear of change isn’t slavery of the make-bricks-from-mud-and-straw variety. Actual slavery still exists throughout the world — from poverty in New York to Indian children born into brothels, from Russian prostitutes in Israel to poverty, violence and atrocities in Darfur. And here I am, pondering my metaphorical freedom and my own professional “enslavement” to Manhattan rents and sub-par insurance plans and complaining that a month of JDate is too expensive.

My freedoms aren’t rights. They’re luxuries. And all of the smaller enslavements of daily existence for a single youngish American Jewish freelancer — even JDate — are insignificant when you consider the major benefit to living in a free society: I have the luxury to keep on dreaming.

One of the toughest questions in dating is also one of the shortest, and seemingly, one of the simplest. But the reality is that in today’s world, where we pay lip service to equality, the question of who pays for dates is not as simple as it seems.

So, who pays? One of these is the correct answer, so consider each one carefully.

1) The man pays. Every time. No excuses, unless it’s his birthday and his woman wants to buy him dinner. Aww, shucks–ain’t she sweet?
2) Whoever did the asking does the paying. It’s a modern world–if a woman asks a man out, she should assume the responsibility of paying.
3) Whoever makes the most money should foot the bill.
4) Whoever chooses the restaurant should pay.
5) If you’d like to make a gesture that says “I like you and it was my pleasure to sit here with you,” no matter what your gender, or whether you were the asker or the askee, you should pick up the check.
6) None of the above and all of the above. We’re all screwed.

Over at the E-Cyrano blog, Evan posts about this issue of the expectation of payment. (Feel free to weigh in over there as well…) He hits many of the issues, but for me, the issue of who pays establishes a strange kind of power dynamic that I’ve never been 100 percent comfortable with–in dating and with my other friends too.

But in dating, payment feels especially like a contract, like I’m expected to deliver something that I might not yet (or at all) be comfortable delivering. Maybe that’s a sign I’m watching too much Law and Order SVU. But because money has a disproportionate value for me–I tend not to spend it because I don’t have that much post-rent-and-utilities wiggle room in my budget–it’s therefore a big deal when someone (even my parents) treat me to dinner. With friends, I feel obligated to “get them next time,” and usually manage to keep that promise even though I’m budgetarily limited…but this is probably my issue and not everyone else’s.

Is money power? And does the forking over of cash for dinner establish any other kind of contract? What do you all think? Because the more I think about this, the more I think I have the answer.

The answer is 6).