JDaters Anonymous
Group therapy in a blog.
Help Me, Dear Readers: Column Topics Wanted
2319 years
So, dear readers? What topics would you like to see covered by my First Person Singular column in the coming months?
Plus, feel free to contact me if you’ve got opinions or experience on any of the following topics. Your opinions can be kept anonymous, if you wish:
*When we’re on vacation, who are we? are we a purer version of ourselves, or are we an artificial construct of ourselves? Do we go on vacation hoping for romance or relaxation, and which way works better toward forming relationships? Are Jewish singles trips more or less conducive to finding a compatible soulmate, or are they just about vacation relaxation and expanding the social circles of overlap?
*Long-distance relationships (also, how far would you go to find love, either metaphorically or geographically)
*Pre-marital sex in the Modern Orthodox community
*Where is fancy bred: in the heart, or in the head? Do we fall in love independent of our intellect, or do we decide to fall in love and create our own self-fulfilling prophecies?
The Week in Secular Dating
819 years
That’s right, I had so many things to cover this week that I’ve separated them into two categories: The Week in Jewish Dating and the Week in Secular Dating…here’s part one…
Part 1: The Week in Secular Dating
In case you haven’t seen it yet, First Dates chronicles all of First Date Chick’s first dates from 1998 to the present.
Dr. Annie Dennison is an adviser to singles, and her Smart at Love blog is getting a makeover from a group called the Blog Squad.
This MSN article tells you how to avoid the “just-friends†trap with a woman. Of course, you still can’t force her to be attracted to you. And if only the advice were actually translateable for women, as well, but still…
As usual, Dr. Janice has many topics for discussion on her bulletin boards at the new and improved DoctorLoveCoach site, so check it out, post your opinions, and tell her JDaters Anonymous sent ya!
And finally, a shout-out to the Fabulous Blogger Boys, Ken Wheaton and The Anonymous Blogger for being mentioned in the Village Voice this week. Kudos, boys.
Part two to come imminently, as soon as I figure out what technical error keeps making Blogger swallow huge sections of that post–actually, much of this post has been devoured as well…must be delicious stuff. Stay tuned!
New Column: “Traveling on the Guilt Trip”
119 years
From The Jewish Week, 10/11/05
Traveling On The Guilt Trip
Esther D. Kustanowitz – Staff Writer
The most frequent vacation taken by single Jews? The Guilt Trip. We go out to parties and on blind dates because we feel guilty staying home. We have guilt from family and society, guilt for doing what we want and not what we should. We go out with our mother’s best friend-from-college’s son’s friend’s roommate, to help us answer a parental “but are you trying?†with a less guilt-ridden “yes.â€Â
Read more of the article, which proceeds to profile two excellent reads–Shanda, by Neal Karlen, and The Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt, edited by Ruthie Ellenson– here.
WTF? VH1 Sponsors Jewish Speed Dating?
919 years
This is just weird. I mean, I knew about the “Totally Awesomely Jewish” show (I believe my brother was interviewed for it), but VH1 is somehow involved in this upcoming speed dating event for Shoshanna’s Matches:
Wednesday Oct 19 2005 – 7 pm to – 10:45 pm
JOIN VH1 AND ACTRESS ANDREA ROSEN AT SHOSHANNA’S MATCHES JEWISH SINGLES SPEED DATING & DINNER PARTY FOR AGES 21-38.
Event at Gente Ristorante Italiano Website: http://www.genteny.com 153
East 45th Street (Between Lexington and 3rd Avenue) New York, New York
10017
(The reason they will continue to be Shoshanna’s Matches is because Esther cannot afford Shoshanna’s services or events. This event, for instance, is $90. Yes, it includes dinner and wine tasting and speed dating, very nice. But I still can’t afford it. Plus, it’s like right after the conclusion of the first days of Sukkot, and I’m busy.)
Anyway, here’s the info. If you go, let me know how it went…
Rumors of My Optimism Are Greatly Overexaggerated
1119 years
Expect the best, aim high, make your own dreams come true. To an extent, I believed it. I absorbed it and lived it. But the truth is that optimism ruins everything.
If you aim low, and good things happen, you’re surprised.
If you aim high, and miss the mark, you’re supposed to make do with “at least I tried.”
If you meet someone with no expectations and that person is amazing, then you’re twice as happy as you would be if you always expected it. However, when you have high expectations, you’re almost always bound to be disappointed.
I’d like to believe in magic, always look at the bright side of the penny, know in my gut that the next opportunity is right around the corner, if only I could be patient. But everytime I dip a tentative toe into optimism, reality, like a snapping turtle, tries to bite my legs off.
And it’s like I said earlier, you think I would have learned by now: horse first, then cart. Somehow, it never seems to work the other way round.
Hate Children? Good News!
1019 years
Tired of waiting for your soulmate? Think you would have gotten away with having met her or him already, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids? Well, good news for you! BellaOnline informs us of the founding of dinklink.com:
Launched on August 21, 2005, Joe Pazo came up with the idea for Dinklink (derived from the phrase “Double Income No Kidsâ€Â) five years ago. “I was incredibly frustrated with my own pursuit of a ‘dinklink’ and decided to look around online,†says Joe. “I was amazed to see the dating sites at the time basically ignoring people like me. I mean sure, most offered little check boxes in the profile section to the effect of ‘do you want kids?’ or ‘do you have kids?’ Both were typically buried near the bottom. For me, these were two of the most important things.â€Â
[…]These issues are especially present in the child free singles scene. “From a dating perspective specifically, the biggest challenge I’ve seen is the perception that being child-free is some sort of a ‘phase’ you go through that could be changed by the ‘right’ person,†says Joe. “But being child-free is a lifelong commitment, and something we don’t take lightly.â€Â
A lifelong commitment to being child-free. Ain’t the internet great?
Again
419 years
I’m doing it again. It should be an easy thing to remember not to do. But every time I’m here, I forget, or subconsciously make a decision to try the old configuration again, even though it never works. Juggling carts and horses in my mind, I’ve put the wrong one first again.
The same is true of eggs and baskets. And birds in hand. My imagination often seems to be its own entity, barely connected to me at all, and certainly having no relationship with logical thought. It sprints away from me toward a future that I see, but that may not be likely. It reads into words and gestures and intonations, parsing them on an impossibly analytical level. And as it happens, I know it’s counterproductive. It invests my emotional energy in figments, in fragments of hope reborn, and lodged in the realm of the vaguely possible, but not bloody likely.
What I want and what is possible are not always the same thing. But someday, I think, they may not be mutually exclusive either. And in this thought, and in this situation, the cart pulls the horse instead of the other way round.
Kiss Anticipation
519 years
Nice Jewish Girl’s back, and she who has “never been kissed” is anticipating and fearful of what may be an impending first liplock with her quasi-boyfriend of a month. (Hat tip to Annabel Lee for letting me know.) She’s nervous, but she’s doing the smart and brave thing: talking with him about it beforehand. That’s right, she told him about what she calls her “non-history,” and he seems to be reacting to it fairly well:
He has never dealt with a woman before who had never even been kissed. He kept asking me if I am OK with that and I told him no, I hate it, it is very hard, I have the same hormones as everyone else. But also I know that I have made my decisions and that I cannot change the past and that Hashem has reasons for making my life turn out the way it has. I have to believe it is for the best. I accept it because I have no choice.
But why I am writing about it is that he keeps saying that the next time he sees me he is going to kiss me, that it is about time I had my first kiss. I am excited but confused. First of all I do not know exactly what he means, you know? He said “oh, what you mean is that you have never gotten the kind of kiss that lasts for 15 minutes.†But he did not then say “well I will have to correct that.†I think he means to kiss me on the cheek or something.That would be nice but it is not really what I am aiming for. What I want is the 15 minute kiss! I want a kiss that makes me have to come up for air!
Of course, since it’s a matter of the intersection of human sexuality (and its pervasiveness in contemporary Western culture) with halakhah, there’s still considerable guilt, especially before the High Holidays.
I wish I could say that the thought of doing this possibly on my very next date makes me feel guilty about breaking halacha. Especially because it is almost Rosh Hashanah and we are supposed to be atoning for our sins not planning to do new ones. But honestly I do not feel so guilty. I cannot explain why. I know I should say that no matter how old I am I should at least feel guilty about breaking halacha especially at this time of year.
I spend every year parsing the Al Het prayer, in which we enumerate a list of sins so long that we can’t possibly have committed all of them (but we can’t possibly emerge from reading the litany feeling completely pure and innocent). I don’t think kissing itself–or brushing up against someone–is a sin (“v’iadat znut” or “giluy arayot“). But I do recognize the concept of siyag laTorah, the rabbinic practice of “placing a fence” around the rules of the Torah; in other words, forbidding certain activities not because they themselves are morally wrong, but because they lead to other actions or behaviors which halakhah condemns. (See here for a technical halakhic discussion of what Judaism has to say about pre-marital sex–hat tip to Drew for the reference.)
Anecdotally, it seems (at least in New York City) that pre-marital sex is Modern Orthodoxy’s dirty little secret, in that many people are having it, but no one is talking about it; many people who are unflinchingly careful when it comes to kashrut or Shabbat observance are more cavalier when it comes to physical relationships. Unsurprisingly, there also seems to be a gender imbalance: men are freer to talk about it than women are.
I know, I know. The evidence is anecdotal, at best. I don’t have names and sources for you to support this claim. And last time I made a comment like this, I got reamed by a few blogs, but I’m still convinced it’s true. And if it is, I don’t necessarily think it needs to be eradicated, and the sinners expelled to “outside the camp,” as it were, but there needs to be an acknowledgment that–for whatever reason, be it an increased influence from outside culture, or the increase in people who have already been in marriages that failed, or the delay in single people finding soul mates–there’s been a shift in how today’s “traditional” single Jews view issues of dating and sexuality.
I’m not advocating rampant casual sex for Orthodox singles, but I don’t think it’s acceptable for someone like NJG to reach the age of 34 without having experienced some basic human tenderness, and I don’t think it’s acceptable that her Jewish life and observance has created in her this package of fear, guilt and longing that consumes her, even in anticipation of one long-overdue kiss.
The Week in Romance
619 years
The first topic I must mention is that somehow, this singles columnist/blog proprietress missed the fact that last week was National Singles Week. How this escaped my attention is completely beyond me. I must have been in a Windy City. Or in La-La Land.
Biopics are huge. With The Aviator (Howard Hughes) and Ray (Ray Charles) dominating much of the Oscar buzz last year, and with the imminent arrival of the already-critically-acclaimed Walk the Line, the upcoming biopic about Johnny Cash starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, it wasn’t surprising to me to read about the following deal:
JANE HAWKING’s book about the turbulent years of her romance with astrophysics genius and A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME author STEPHEN HAWKING is being turned into a movie. Bosses at Hollywood’s Film And Music Entertainment Inc have acquired the film rights to MUSIC TO MOVE THE STARS and now hope the story will become an Oscar-worthy epic.
Moving on to the Grand Romantic Gestures Department, cosponsored by Bad Idea Jeans…”Lovelorn widower Hugh Ramage has taken out newspaper advertisements to try to find the mystery Welsh woman he fell for on holiday.” After chatting with the woman, who he now describes as his “perfect match” for hours over the course of his vacation, poolside in Bulgaria, he made a tactical error: he didn’t ask her name. All he has to go on is that she’s from Wales. (Actually, that’s more like “Bad Planning Jeans.”) So, he’s decided to “take out advertisements in a last-gasp bid to claim a holiday romance.” The Scottish grandfather added, “We talked about our families, where we lived, what we did. I have never met anyone before that I can talk to so easily – it was if we had known each other for ever.”
“I was going to ask her if she would like to keep in touch,” he explained, “But for some reason, I lost my bottle.” [I love that phrase.-EDK] Mr Ramage, of Belshill, Lanarkshire, said he would be happy to travel the 400 miles from his home to Wales to meet the woman of his dreams again.
He then added, “And I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more, just to be the one who walked a thousand miles to be there at your door.” (The Proclaimers….look it up.)
But not all is bad for single women…Forbes reports that “Married women are more likely to report ongoing sexual difficulties than either single women or married men, according to an eye-opening new survey from Britain.” Want all the details on how functional or dysfunctional you are? Check it out here…
Frustrated movie romance of the week: (Serenity spoiler here, so consider yourself warned)…Mal and Innara. Come on! She’s a frickin’ courtesan! Stop your shomer negiah smoldering at each other, get over yourselves and get yourselves a room already…that’s all I’m saying. Want more Serenity spoilers? Try MyUrbanKvetch.
As for someone who (I hope) is one of your favorite singles columnists, she’s had a good week. Her new column, Homing in on Change, is in this week’s Jewish Week, and she’s been profiled on Jmerica’s YoYenta blog. And she’s apparently begun referring to herself in the third-person.
Have a wonderful weekend, everyone.
In-Flight Romance, Please
419 years
Ahh, airplane travel. That oasis of pure serenity that comes with knowing that the inflight snack will be salty, the inflight movie will inevitably be Herbie: Fully Loaded, and that odds are good that you probably won’t plummet 30,000 feet into someone’s empty swimming pool.
Flying solo often means sitting next to people we don’t know, and, given our druthers (whatever druthers are), might never hope to meet. This last journey of mine, I was pretty lucky. Aside from my first seatmate, NY to Chicago, a man who laughed when another passenger hit me in the head with his bag and then promptly fell asleep, I shared space with good people: Chicago to LA was a lovely woman named Melissa, who was going to visit her sister, and LA to NY was a Duchovnian-looking teacher named Josh (shoutout to Josh, if you’re reading) who was just returning to NY from a Buddhism conference in Tokyo. It’s a good thing we were both willing to talk to each other; I even took some notes.
In the good old days, when airplanes served actual meals, Jewlicious passengers could pick each other out by the kosher or vegetarian meals they ordered; if your seatmate asked “is there meat in that?” you’d fall in love instantly. But these days, things are more difficult…
Enter AirTroductions. (Why they didn’t call it “Love is in the Air” is beyond me. Dude, people so need to hire me for this stuff.)
According to the Washington Post, “The recently launched site has described itself as “JDate meets the Mile-High Club,” though participation presumably is not limited solely to those of the J-ish persuasion.”
“Having taken over 500 flights in the past four years, I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve been seated next to someone I actually wanted to talk to,” site founder Peter Shankman said in a release. “Creating AirTroductions was a labor of love. Hopefully, people can match themselves up and sit next to someone they want to talk to! Imagine what kind of success can come from this, on a business, personal, and friendship level!”
You buy your ticket as usual, then go to AirTroductions, log in and create a profile. You can post a photo, just like JDate, Match.com or any other computer dating service, then are encouraged to say what kind of person you would like to sit next to.
So, be honest, kids. And specificity is your friend. Don’t just say single, or odds are you’ll end up next to a ten-year-old kid or an octogenarian. And be careful with those long flights, or you could end up on an eleven-hour date with someone with no rescue calls from friends or escapes through bathroom windows. (Not that I’ve ever done either of those things.) But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
(Cross-posted to My Urban Kvetch)