Group therapy in a blog.
The Single Life
“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.”
Tough Economy: Date, or Look for Work?
815 years
Many of us are out of work, and are spending all day and likely evenings and nights cruising the internet looking for the right job. We’re preparing and sending resumes and interviewing in person, and waiting for a callback when we think it’s the right fit. We experience the disappointment of having interviews that we tank, and others that seem to go well, but the interviewing company either tells us “it’s not you, it’s us” or just gets hit by the equivalent of the Bus.
And then, for a change of pace, we’re on JDate or Match or anywhere else, going through exactly the same process – creating our online resume, contacting potential people who might be interested in our services and experience, waiting for a response or a callback, praying that we get a face-to-face meeting, and hoping for the right chemistry…sometimes ending again in “the Bus.”
The Boston Globe notes in a recent article that “it’s hard to find a date when you don’t have a job.” It notes the problems, particularly from men who like to pick up the check but who can’t afford more than a beer at the end of the day.
In tough economic times, do you pay JDate or a headhunter? Is “between jobs right now” the kiss of death (or rather, no kissing at all) for potential daters? Or does a happy love life make for a happier jobhunter? And should we create an “economic stimulus package” or “bailout” for singles to make our dating lives a little easier? Or maybe we should just enact legislation that until both parties are gainfully employed, we’ll all pay for our own drinks?
“The Rules” Redux?
615 years
I was really happy when “The Rules” disappeared. The book, which had espoused what seemed to amount to a plan of playing hard to get, was one of those things that grated: Could it be that simple and calculated, that it was all a game? How do you play a game without playing with your or other people’s emotions? How could there be a game if everyone is playing by different rules? Perhaps “The Rules” book was trying to codify those rules. But if only women read it, then all it achieves is feeding the stereotype that women are playing games.
But if it wasn’t a game to begin with, it is now. The dating book industry has made it just that.
In case the boxes of books I gave away or stored when I moved or the dating-related volumes I still receive in the mail (most recent title: “Saying No to Naked Women,” published by A Healthy Relationship Press and according to its PR, a “new anti-pornographic novel that raises critical issues for the Jewish community”) weren’t an indicator, I recently went to a buck-a-book store to make my bookshelves seem less lonely, and found a whole new bunch of titles that I hadn’t seen: Engaging Men, Date Like a Man, and The Idiot’s Guide to Interfaith Relationships. (I haven’t read any of them yet, and the total impact so far is that I am now $3 poorer.)
Here’s what I think. If you want a game plan, you can create one to follow. If you need rules to keep you focused, great. But be aware that not everyone is playing by the same rules, and even if they’re in what seems like the same game, they might be operating with an entirely different scoring system. While it might be difficult at times, or seem insensitive, maybe honesty is still the best policy and all the game-playing should be left to those who are getting paid to do it.
The Age Thing
1315 years
If asked, most people would say that they try not to judge people by their age. I was born in the 70s, and most of my friends were born in the 80s. Fine. No problems, except for when they refer to 80s music as “oldies,” which makes me wince a little.
If age is really relative, it might seem strange to establish age as a determinant in either dating or not dating a person. If theoretically, you’re only looking for someone to age 40, it makes no sense to reject someone just because he’s 41 – in all likelihood, he’s no different in terms of his ability to enjoy life and act young than any 40 year old is. And also, we all know people who act way older or younger than their actual calendar age, and so we know not to judge a book by how old its birth certificate says it is. (Yes, enjoy that mixed metaphor.)
But what’s happening online is something different. Everyone who fills out an online dating profile indicates a preferred age range for potential partners. And a woman in her thirties who indicates that she’s looking for a man in his thirties or forties will likely encounter that the men in their thirties and forties are looking for women in their twenties. Then comes the next part: men in their fifties contacting women in their thirties, even if that’s not the age range they’d prefer.
Of course, we’ve already said that age doesn’t matter. But is a woman still entitled to reject a man’s advances online if he’s over a certain age? After all, some of the men online are employing artificial age cutoffs themselves, mostly because it’s required by most dating services. Does this make her a judgmental person? Or is she just using her best judgment?
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.
Divergence
115 years
After years of enmeshment, our lives diverged,
as if in poetic woods
and silently, we parallel parted.
I thought there’d be closure, but there was no treaty signed —
just the slow vanishing
into separate horizons.
At unexpected intervals, the unbidden returns
to haunt the empty mansion, spook my creativity
and whistle at me — half-encouragement / half-mockery.
The visitation echoes
longer than it actually lasts
and in those ripples, expectation and desire
still beckon Picasso-like
all angles, fluid borders, and jagged edges.
Those edges create shadows, where irritants
lodge as immigrants, vagrants seeking shelter.
Now there are other things there.
With repeated revisiting, I fade-float
into the vision, grasping at the asymmetry
that most resembles reality.
Gone Prospectin’
116 years
So I haven’t written in a while. But there’s a good reason. After more than a decade in New York, I’ve moved West, to a state as predictable as the sunshine and as volatile as the earthquakes that it experiences. Like those who sought the gold rush in them thar hills of California, I’m prospecting.
There will be more posts, but I’ve been trying to reestablish a home base, a source of stability to draw on in the life that I intentionally uprooted and relocated. Here’s hoping that these intervening weeks have proven stimulating to you, on and offline. Looking forward to seeing you back here for regular singles-related discussion over the next few months…
Stay tuned for refrigerator poetry. Seriously.