JDaters Anonymous

Renatt Brodsky, a fellow freelancer, is working on an upcoming Glamour story titled, “Hate at first sight” – It’s about women and how they ended up falling for “that jerk!.”

She writes:

I need quotes from women in their TWENTIES about their personal experiences with a guy who did something so unbelievable that they just can’t believe they wanted to see him again and give him another chance. Like… insulted her, called her fat, vomited on her, tripped her, accidentally set her hair on fire… you get the picture.

Here are some good examples:

“I thought RD’s accent sounded just like Forest Gump when I first met him at a work event,
and he was everything I swore I would never date–he was a hunter, drove a pickup truck, and liked chicken-fried steak. Still, I thought he was cute and a few days later we were emailing and talking on the phone. Because I didn’t write him off, I found out that he was witty and smart. And even though my gastronomical parents are horrified, six years later, I actually like
chicken-fried steak.” – Marcy John, 26, Dallas, Texas

“I met this guy on vacation in Cabo San Lucas. He was acting like a total frat boy–talking really
loud and telling jokes that weren’t funny. Then he bought me a beer and spilled it on me! After the trip, we reconnected again back home in San Francisco over email (he was on an email list of people I met on the trip), and a few days later I reluctantly invited him to dinner with some friends. Everyone thought he was so great and said I was crazy if I didn’t go on a date with him. It turned out, though, that away from the beer and the bar, he was charming and down to
earth. Forget Mexico, he turned out to be the great treasure of San Francisco.”
-Michelle Marlin 29, San Francisco, California

If you have a great anecdote about a jerk you lusted after again and again–please email me the
following information by Wednesday, June 8 2005, 9 a.m.
1. first and last name
2. age
3. city, state
4. email
5. number
6. your quote.

Please email her with any questions, and tell her you found out about it from Esther, from JDatersAnonymous…

…to disappointment:

1) Cry. It’s all right to cry. Crying takes the sad out of you. OK, so it doesn’t. But it still beats holding it in for years and having it surface during an NBC re-airing of Titanic.

2) Phone a friend. Important to have someone there to counter the self-deprecation and negativity that you’ll undoubtedly hurl at yourself. Also important to make sure that you’re not alone when you…

3) Find glass, add ice, pour Jack Daniels into glass. Consider adding Diet Coke, but you only have caffeinated and you don’t want your elixir to keep you up all night.

4) Turn off all instant messengers and screen your phonecalls. Make outgoing calls to female friends only; male friends who are married are okay to call too. But do not call or otherwise communicate with single male “friends.” You don’t want to drink-and-dial (or imbibe-and-IM) when you’re in this state of mind. This way, madness lies.

5) Go to bed earlyish, and realize that you haven’t been to sleep before midnight in months. Resolve to get more sleep in the future, even as you know you’re swearing oaths to yourself that you’ll never keep. As you fall asleep, listen to music that contains a soothing rhythm, soaring passion, and a subtle melancholy.

6) Wake to find yourself in possession of two empty boxes of tissues, two puffy eyes and one big headache, which you decide to address by the name of Mr. Daniels. Promise yourself that yesterday’s frustration will fuel today’s workout, and load up the MP3 player with blisteringly popalicious Top 40 tunes mixed with old school heavy metal.

7) Go through the motions, even as you realize that there’s still lots to work out, and that only time, if anything, will remove the splinters of pain and disappointment from the soft undersides of your feet. You know that every step will hurt until it doesn’t. Buy insoles. Cover nascent blisters with band-aids. But do everything in your power to keep walking.

In case anyone was concerned for Seth Menachem, who proposed to his girlfriend in a Singles column, he’s written another column in which he reveals that she accepted the proposal.

Mazal tov to the happy couple.

If you haven’t been there, you’re lucky.
I have been on non-dates more times than I can count. Now that I think about it, most of my dates (and all of my best dates) have been non-dates.

It always starts off as fun, promising, with a palpable potential, that by date’s end (or “non-date’s non-end” as the case may be) you’re emotionally shredded by your confusion, self-doubt and by the messages that you’re perceiving as mixed, but which in fact may not be clear, but which you are certainly resisting absorbing.

It’s like an episode of SNL’s “It’s Pat,” where you’re trying to figure out what that person is, and how they fit into your understanding of your life, and everytime you get a (romantically or) sexually charged clue, the person counters it with a term of neutrality.

So why not just ask? Just summon up some courage from a nether dimension where courage abounds as a natural resource, and spit out the words into the air? Because courage is in short supply, and we’re petrified.

And we have good reason to be scared. Most declarations of romantic intent are met with a less than enthusiastic reception, and whatever friendship was beginning to take root usually ceases to grow; it’s like our expression of honesty and yearning was death to fertile soil, the emotional equivalent of sowing the earth with salt, so that nothing will ever again grow there.

Or, as Ken puts it:

So, instead of making a fool of yourself, you go on a series of these nondates and with each passing one get progressively crazier, act increasingly weirder–you fret, you hope, you worry, you moon, you envy and, yes, you even pine–until finally you just snap and say “HOLY SHIT I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE.
YOU’RE DRIVING ME CRAZY AND I THINK I LOVE YOU.”

And when that happens? Well, there’s a very, very slim chance that the other person will say, “Oh my god. Me too!” But the smart money goes on the other response: He or she shouts “Hey, look over there! It’s Steve Perry from Journey!” and then, the minute you turn your head, runs away, never to be seen from again.

Or, in the case of living in a densely packed community like the Upper West Side, you will continue to see that person everywhere. At every social event, at ever synagogue you visit, at every Shabbat dinner everywhere. Frankly, you’re going to see them anyway, so there’s no point in accelerating the misery by making them uncomfortable too. Better to pull away slightly, for the sake of your own sanity. Besides:

If you find yourself on the third or fourth hang-out, nondate or whatever, chances are you are dating this person only in your own mind. If the other person were as into you as you are into him or her, you’d already be holding hands on the subway, playing tonsil hockey in the park and generally making a nuisance of yourself in public.

And you, being a smart person, have realized that you are doing none of these things. Even if the other person makes you feel like no one else, even if there’s a connection there you haven’t felt with anyone in years, even if you have a strange conviction that this person is someone who was meant for you, you stay quiet. You wait for the signal, the one sign that will translate into a romantic green light. Sometimes you see glimmers of this everywhere…hints that the feelings run deep on both sides. But nine times out of ten, that’s called denial. The signal you’re waiting for will never come.

You learn that marinating in your own misery is preferable to cutting yourself open and plucking out your heart to offer it to a non-receptive audience. You continue your pining and mooning, and everything else, but treat it as a process of grief. All you can hope for is that after your denial and anger, eventually acceptance will come.

In the interim, you paint on your smile, hope it fools everyone else, and try to beat back the sadness.

[Inspired, obviously, by Ken’s post.]