Group therapy in a blog.
Funny/Sad or Sad/Funny
Holy Shidduch! The New “FML”?
115 years
Those of you who have never heard the f-word might want to skip this post.
Some of you may be familiar with a site called “F___ My Life,” in which people write in complaints about all the ways their life sucks, and then end each post with the signoff, “F___ My Life,” or simply, “FML.” The subheader reads: “your everyday life stories.” The tagline: “Get the guts to spill the beans.”
Now we have Holy Shidduch! – I don’t exactly want to call it a “ripoff,” although the site’s design and concept do seem rather similar to the original FML site, so let’s go with the kinder “homage” – which centers such “my life is so nuts” – FML-style stories within the religious dating world, and ends each post with “HS.” The subheader reads: “your everyday dating stories.” And the (somewhat less catchy) tagline at HS is (emphasis, including caps and color directly from that site): WELCOME TO ALL THOSE WHO WISH THE MATCHMAKER WOULD STOP CALLING!
OK. We get it.
I know people who are obsessed with FML, and there are undoubtedly those who will become addicted to these short tales from the Jewish dating battlefield. As someone who’s never been a fan of FML, I can’t say I am going to add HS to my list of daily must-reads – most of these stories, on both sites, do seem more “everyday” than uniquely appalling. I’ve heard far worse stories, and the boxiness of the design – while perhaps an homage to the current Twitter trend, seems a little unsophisticated to me. But I’m one of the first people to admit that a site doesn’t have to be gorgeous or a runaway success in order to tap into the pop culture zeitgeist.
As readers and consumers of dating-related culture and sites, do you have any insight, comments or insights? Are these stories compelling enough to keep you coming back? Or is it just a massive complaining competition (“you think that’s bad, my life is worse…”)?
How to Celebrate Tu B’Av: The Ten Suggestions
015 years
Arriving imminently, the Jewish holiday of love.
To celebrate, you can:
1) Watch Benji Lovitt try to get a date for the holiday
2) Go to a local Jewish singles party celebration of the holiday, like tomorrow night’s LoveFest 2009 sponsored by JConnectLA or Bangitout’s NY White Party (now to be held on Thursday because of a rain threat).
3) Find. Me. Somebody to Loooove.
4) Remember that last year, Madonna and Guy Ritchie used Tu B’Av as a chance to rejustify their love.
5) Read about how I once jinxed the Bangitout Tu B’Av party.
6) Reassess the pros and cons of speed dating, created by Rabbi Yaacov Deyo in 1998.
7) Listen to Galgalatz, Israeli radio, for a menu of songs including “All You Need is Love” (The Beatles), “I’m Yours” (Jason Mraz) and – of course – Lady Gaga’s “Love Game,” with the immortal love lyric “I want to take a ride on your disco stick.”
8) Go through your iPhone/BlackBerry address book and let your eyes linger on each name, remembering how you were treated and how you treated others, and promise yourself it’s going to be different this time. If you’re feeling benevolent and find worthy candidates, recycle people by matching them with each other based on things they have in common. If you’re not feeling benevolent, don’t bother…
9) Go old school: Wear white and frolic in the fields, waiting for a special someone to come along and fall in love with you. Make sure it’s your field, though. Because otherwise it’s just called trespassing. And bring some Shout wipes. Because grass stains like a bitch.
10) YOUR IDEAS HERE.
Happy Tu B’Av, everyone. And please, as always, love responsibly.
JDA Roundup: This Week in Dating and Relationships
015 years
Greetings sports fans. Here’s your vital roundup of dating- and relationship-related stories, and yes, even a little humor thrown in at the end.
The Husband, His Wife, and His Other Wife (Her Sister): If you think there’s tough competition in the dating world, at least you’re not married to the same guy your sister is. Brad Greenberg, formerly of the Jewish Journal and the award-winning God Blog, now writes at GetReligion.org about such a situation. And no, he’s not the husband in question. But his shock comes not from the prospect of a polygamous relationship featuring two sisters, but at the job the Telegraph reporter did in reporting the story:
While the Telegraph delivered a surprising story here, the reporter for this un-bylined article does a poor job of including the religious context needed for this story. In fact, we’re never even told in this story that the Mormon Church has banned polygamy, only that it is banned in the United States and, apparently, that “Fundamentalist Mormon families†favor polygamy.
She Brought Lewinsky Back (Yeah!): Over at Jewcy, Shula Reinharz gets the credit for bringing everyone’s favorite former White House intern back (a full week before former President Clinton flew over to N. Korea to get two American journalists freed), as the symbol for Jewish women who may have been raised in an overly sexually aggressive manner. In “Sex and the Suburbs,” Prof. Reinharz says that when the Clinton-Lewinsky story broke, she had been focusing on the wrong story.
Everyone was rightly talking about Bill. What he did wrong – and wrong he surely did. But what about Monica? Had she been doing this kind of thing back in Beverly Hills or was this an entirely new extracurricular activity for her? Can we generalize to Jewish girls in Weston or Westfield or Westwood from what Monica was doing in the West Wing?
The piece continues to consider whether today’s young people consider sex to mean only in the non-Clintonian definition, in the process noting that the practice of oral sex “is so rampant that the Reform Jewish movement has taken it on as a national policy concern.”
I checked that piece of information out on Google, and sure enough there is an article to that effect dated November 19, 2005. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, addressed 4,200 people in Houston for its biennial convention and explicitly talked about oral sex and hooking up. Bravo, Rabbi Yoffie. For him the issue was that girls are “defining their worth by how they please boys.” The degradation of girls flies in the face of the Reform Movement’s dedication to the equality of women, he said.
Can’t Touch This: And now, from oral sex, we go to the concept of shomer negiah, meaning the abstention from all premarital physical contact with the opposite sex. If you’re shomer negiah and have been looking for a loophole, we’ve got one for you. (Hat tip to Miriam Shaviv at the JC.com.)
And lastly, since this is “J”Daters Anonymous, I would be remiss if I didn’t bring out the J factor by mentioning the imminent arrival of Tu B’Av, the Jewish holiday of love (often called the “Jewish Valentine’s Day”). So look for a post about that auspicious day soon.
Hareidi Singles Strategy: Marry By 20, Or You’re Out!
315 years
Today, the Telegraph blog over at the JTA shared a story from the Hareidi (Ultra-Orthodox) world (via YnetNews): that older bachelors who were not married (and who were not yeshiva students) be punished: with banishment from the city of Jerusalem. This class of toxic older bachelors, shirking their responsibilities to be fruitful and multiply consists of those over the wizened age of 20.
The ruling was issued by Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, head of the Hazon Yaakov yeshiva and son of Shas’ spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who noted that:
[…] in the past it was customary to banish “older” single men from the capital as punishment for their refusal to marry and provide for a family.
In recent generations, Sephardi rabbis decided to annul this regulation, but according to Rabbi Yosef it should be reinstated. “Only a yeshiva student who studies Torah has an exceptional permission to postpone marriage, if he fears that marriage might distract him from his studies. But normally one must not delay marriage till after 20, and those who do had better leave Jerusalem and go study somewhere else,” he wrote.
Banishment. Somewhere, Jewish demographers and those who are obsessed with the singles crisis are saying, “Wow. We totally should have thought of that.”
“Shtetl-Lovely” – The Allure of Jewish Women
715 years
And now, for something completely different…
If you’re tired of all the negative stereotyping of Jewish women as overinvolved, shrill, shrewish (“funny, she doesn’t look shrewish”), superficial harpies (and why wouldn’t you be?), here’s something a bit unusual. Friend of JDaters Anonymous Van Wallach has now published a treatise on the appeal of the Jewess, titled “Smart, Vulnerable, and Shtetl-Lovely: The Allure of Jewish Women.”
While the titular love Wallach describes was no doubt something that he had within him, he was inspired to write this piece after reading a Matchup column by Chicago-based freelancer Abigail Pickus (who once wrote for PresenTense) in the Jewish Week (where someone else used to write a column). The column shared her experiences on the receiving end of a litany of reasons why her Jewish male friend wouldn’t date Jewish women. Wallach didn’t just get angry – he got writing:
Why […] did I turn to and stay with Jewish women? Something about them clicked with me on a deep level. I once described a woman as “smart, vulnerable, and shtetl-lovely.†That’s my highest praise for the appeal of the Jewish woman’s mind, heart, and body. They are all allure, and if they freshen their lipstick over a sushi dinner, I’ll follow them anywhere – and I have. A Jewish man who dismisses such women as a group is, in technical terms, meshuggenah.
I’ll just add that anyone who dismisses Jewish men or Jewish women as a group isn’t helping. Let’s acknowledge that there are trends, and there are exceptions. And most of us are really looking for someone who is – in some way, even if it’s a small way only perceptible to us – exceptional.
Check out the whole piece over at Blogcritics.
“Ph.D. in Him” – Hebrew Mamita at the Def Poetry Jam
415 years
For anyone who feels like they’ve spent too much time obsessing over an ex…and who suspects that the wasted hours in question might have been equivalent to degrees in something else…experience the Hebrew Mamita, Vanessa Hidary, spoken word poet who’s appeared on Def Poetry Jam and the Nyuorican Cafe. People have been sending me these clips all week, so I guess the DVD must be out, but I’ve heard (at least the second of) the two pieces before. She’s outstanding, truly.
The first piece is about ex obsession and all the time we waste in contemplating past relationships. But stay tuned for piece #2, which is a great treatise on Jewish identity and whether people “look Jewish” or not.
“JDaters Anonymous Live” Yields Strange Results
1015 years
It’s been a while since I posted here, I know. I’ve been running around presenting at conferences like a crazy person, or at least the type of crazy person who’s asked to speak at conferences. And a quarter of those presentations centered on our topic at hand: dating and relationships.
This past weekend, I spoke to a crowd of 200 people – most of them students in their early 20s – about the challenges of dating in the age of technology. The session was titled – somewhat obscurely – “JDaters Anonymous Live,” which led people to make their own assumptions about what the session would address. Some thought it was going to be speed dating, or me talking about my dating horror stories, or an opportunity for the participants to share their horror stories. And as a result, although I tried to keep the conversation to the topic at hand – technology, and how it complicates our communication process even as it keeps communication more frequent and varied – people just wanted to vent.
They were angry. Angry about being rejected. Angry about being deceived. Angry about not being called back, or being passed over in favor of a friend. But one of the comments made by a twentysomething male really gave me pause. He stated that he knows, definitively and always, whether it’s going to work (he meant a date) within the first five minutes of meeting someone. Shocked, I polled the room, and most of them agreed, not just about a date/potential romance, but about a potential friendship. When I suggested that perhaps it was because the people in the room were under 25, I almost had a mutiny on my hands. The room was fairly united. Five minutes. And they’d know.
Maybe I err on the side of believing that first impressions, while often fairly accurate, do also contain a margin of error – some of the people I met and instantly liked I’ve since fallen out of like with, and others, who were slow starters for one reason or another have emerged as some of my nearest and dearest. While I’m talking about friendships mostly, I find the same is true for me in dating…I think most people become more interesting as you spend time with them, and it’s not fair to judge someone from five minutes of interaction.
Here’s the part where all y’all weigh in and tell me what you think…
What the World Needs This Valentine’s Day Is….JDateTV?
315 years
JDate‘s launching their new reality web series about JDaters starting February 14th. Tune in to meet some of JDate’s finest, like “Guy Who Prefers Brunettes But Would Also Be Game For Redheads,” “Woman in Love Who Sits on Couch With Boyfriend and Smiles,” and “Woman in Bathtub.”
The Kid Who May Put Me Out of Business
315 years
There comes a time in every dating columnist’s life when she must acknowledge that her time is past and that a new generation has risen. You just always expect that the new generation wouldn’t be quite so new.
Perhaps, now that I’m going into a third year of working on a book proposal, and a nine-year-old has managed to take time out of his busy schedule to write a book on how to talk to girls, that time is now.
Barely-a-middle-schooler Alec Greven has penned a reference book for how to talk to girls, and includes sage advice like “beware of pretty girls” and to go for regular girls because “pretty girls are like cars that need a lot of oil.”
He advises, “The best choice for most boys is a regular girl. Remember, some pretty girls are coldhearted when it comes to boys. Don’t let them get to you.”
If the article is to be believed, the writer took the kid to a bar for Shirley Temples. Priceless.
Why Men Think Women Are Crazy
1116 years
Look, everyone has the potential to get a little bit crazy about dating habits and preferences. But this article in New York Magazine – whether or not it’s true — is one of the reasons why men think women are bats*&it insane.
An excerpt, for entertainment purposes only.
-PUT the lid DOWN. Animals have better manners than most men
-no stockbrokers, unemployed musicians, actors, or baristas
-no ravers, goths, punks, or rude boys
-musical taste must include, but not be limited to, Kingston Trip [sic], Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Judy Collins
-name must not begin with an R, a J, or a B (Js are negotiable; Rs are not. Bs should consider that if they treat a cat nicely, it will respond accordingly; but if you scare it by approaching too fast, of course it will attack)
Sounds like a joke to me, especially as you get into the “certification” requirements and other pieces of insanity. If you must, read the whole thing here.