Group therapy in a blog.
Relationships
A Resolution
1918 years
Everyone makes New Year’s Resolutions. But there’s no reason you can’t come to a realization, say, in the middle of the fifth month of a given year, and a month in advance of your next birthday, and decide, “You know what? I’m tired of doing this. Enough already.”
This is not an announcement of blog retirement. It’s hope that writing this resolution down–even in the abstract rendering below–and swearing it before you all will keep me honest and true to the spirit behind the conviction.
I’m lucky to have wonderful people in my life–my born family and what I like to refer to as my “acquired family.” (If you’re reading this, you might even count yourselves among the members of that group.) I’ve got a lot going on in my life, and a lot of it is pretty damn great by anyone’s standards. That I’m missing a companion is unfortunate, both for me and for him, whoever he is, because I’ve always tried to be that person who goes out of her way for someone, especially if she sees something special in them. In the past, it hasn’t mattered whether that something’s nature is clearly platonic, mildly murky, or holds some sort of perceived potential. Perhaps my kindness has been calculating and manipulative–my version of “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” or something like that–and that’s why it’s never been rewarded.
But here’s where it stops. I’m tired of exerting myself for people, especially men, who don’t appreciate the effort. I’m going to stop. I’m going to stop reading into what isn’t there, and stop trying to create a deeper connection through excessive kindness. Because if there isn’t even a thank you? I’m just engaging in self-delusion, which is a form of unkindness to the one person I’m really destined to spend the rest of my life with–myself.
So that’s it. Maybe less earth-shaking or life-altering to you than it is to me. But it’s an attitude shift that’s been a long time coming. So there it is.
Brilliant Insight Found
2818 years
In perusing some of my regular dating-related reads, I caught up on my friend JDater Joe, who had the following to say about JDate after corresponding with a woman who then disappeared. (Hilary? Is this another victim of The Bus?)
“When you haven’t met the other party, you end up having a relationship with yourself so it’s always better than it turns out.”
Is this the problem? Should we meet immediately, to avoid becoming lulled into the comfort of a relationship with ourselves, whose company we already love?
Fake Jewess Rides JDate to Closure
118 years
We hear a lot about non-Jews using Jdate to seek out Jewish dates. One more recent post is over at the JTA, actually not written by me. (As the descendants of the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen, we’re not sure why anyone would want to be part of the club that would have us as members, but…) But here’s a new spin, as someone named Fake Jewess writes in the Jerusalem Post about falling in love with a Jewish guy. They’re together, they’re magic, and then they’re over:
We had an awful fight. We said awful things. I cried every day for weeks, until he called. He sounded meek, not the blustering, brainy jokester I knew. “I miss you,” he said. “Me too.” We agreed to be friends. And with some prescience, I made him swear he would be the one to tell me when and if he got married.
Being “just friends” was rough. He scrutinized me for flaws, determined to find them. (I sometimes made this very easy for him.) “You and I are not viable,” he wrote tersely. Soon, we were no longer talking.
Selfishly, I could only think of how achingly I missed him. He had once told me that he used JDate to meet women. I began checking the site to see if any profile rang a bell. It wasn’t long before I recognized him. Oh, he had fudged some facts, but I would know him anywhere, my Jewish Guy.
I had to talk to him. But I was afraid, as “not viable” me. So I created a JDate profile.
What happens next is actually a surprisingly touching story of how love gone wrong remains a mystery and can eat at our curiosity, and the lengths we go to to learn the sources of our disappointment. Not everything has a rom-com ending. And maybe that’s ok.
V-Day Discussion: “Checkbox Commitment,” Kiss and Tell, and Privacy
1218 years
Don’t you love Valentine’s Day?
In response to last week’s Jewish Week column, “Checkbox Commitment,” I received this lovely letter from someone I’m rebranding as “a fan.”
Maybe another reason that so many of you folks are single in your 30s is your compulsion to discuss the intimate details of your relationships with your friends and your relatives. On more than one occasion, a girl did that to me and that usually sent me running the other way. It still angers me, why does what happen on a date become fodder for a discussion between a woman and her friends.
I met my wife via a personal ad in [location deleted]. To this day our friends know that, our families think we met via a mutual friend. I may be old-school, but I am not ancient.
I occasionally would be chided for keeping my private relationships private. I would simply reply that a gentleman does not kiss and tell and neither does a lady. Perhaps your crowd should follow that axiom. You may have a bit less to talk about, but maybe you’d screw up less relationships.
It’s the use of the term “screw up” that shows he really cares. But seriously, I don’t necessarily think he’s all wrong. As I wrote in my response to him, the communication in the relationship, especially starting out, is often so uncertain and confusing–and in some cases demoralizing–that the only way to survive is to ask friends for advice. But I do think that sometimes people take the private into the public too often.
What do you think?
Single Semite of the Month: Evan Marc Katz
2718 years
If Evan Marc Katz‘s name doesn’t sound familiar to you, it should. I’ve certainly mentioned him before–I met him about three years ago, in the early days of my column, at a UJC Young Leadership conference in Washington, DC, where he spoke to a packed room of frustrated daters about what they’re doing wrong with their dating profiles. I’ll admit it now…at first, I thought his advice (particularly about banning adjectives from my online profile) was a lot of hooey. But as I thought about it, I learned that the author of “I Can’t Believe I’m Buying This Book: A Commonsense Guide to Successful Internet Dating” was right–my profile was much better after I took a red pen to it and eliminated some of those murky, non-helpful adjectives. (It didn’t help me get more online dates, but that’s another story.) That’s not the whole secret to fixing online dating profiles, but it’s one of the things Evan covers in the book and also for clients of his company, E-Cyrano.com.
Then Evan published his next book, “Why You’re Still Single: Things Your Friends Would Tell You If You Promised Not to Get Mad,” a title which actually made me a little mad, but the book itself was a funny, relatable “he-said, she-said” of a read that made me feel a little better. Other people were going through this stuff too.
Over the years, Evan and I have become friends, and usually I get to see him when I’m in LA, and we talk about dating and relating and all that. He’s funny, and it’s “smart-funny,” not “stupid-funny.” (Plus, although he woulda been a contenduh even with his long curly hair, the new “clean-cut” style really brings out those eyes, that smile…)
Even so, somehow I never thought of Evan as a SSOTM until I read his latest article in Match.com’s Happen Magazine, chronicling what it’s like to be the “Last Single Guy Standing“:
Then I hit my mid-thirties. I started to take stock of my methods and was forced to wonder whether I was my own worst enemy. I suddenly felt something beyond longing for connection… I found myself with a real sense of urgency about settling down. A strange, deeply buried ticking clock of sorts. I actually found myself thinking things like, “If I fell in love tomorrow, got engaged in six months, got married in a year and had a child a year later, I’d still be in my late fifties by the time my kid graduated college.†I know. It’s nuts.
No more nuts than any of the rest of us who lived our lives imagining our own marriage timelines. Some of us planned to marry at 23, have a kid at 25, then again at 28 and 31, and be cool, hip moms well into our 50s. (Oh, not me; “a friend.”) But welcome to the world of the serious dater, maybe thinking ahead too much, too early, but needing to be serious in order to get serious. And unfortunately, Evan happens to be a dating coach, so there’s always going to be someone who says, “you’re still single, so what do you know?” (Believe me, singles columnists hear that too.)
So here he is, kids. The first in my resurrected series of “Single Semite of the Month.” And the reluctant poster child for Valentine’s Day. And a hell of a good guy.
(Have nominees for Single Semite of the Month? Send your suggestions to Jdatersanonymous at gmail dot com. And join our Facebook group to discuss suggestions and the decisions of the judges as SSOTMs are chosen…)
Good News, Bad News
418 years
“Where are all the men?”
“Why won’t they commit?”
“Marriage is out; men aren’t even looking to settle down.”
Or so goes the conversation for women worldwide.
But the good news, according to this article in GenerationJ.com, is that men are looking for wives. Unfortunately, there’s bad news too: they’re also looking for whores.
According to author Adam Harmon, this tension finds its roots in the story of Adam and Eve and in the mostly untold legend of Adam and Lilit:
Lilit became the prism by which western culture perceives sexually active women. This archetype is responsible, in the past, for labeling specific types of women “witch” and for blaming, today, many rape victims for the violence they have endured. Eve, on the other hand, represents the polar opposite. In spite of all the bad press she still receives for liking apples, the sexual aspects of Eve are mostly repressed. Eve remains the celebrated Wife who was most explicitly loved during the Victorian Era. This image of Eve, already adjoined to that of Mary by the medieval Christians, resulted in wifehood being stripped of its sexual content. As if all proper women should, like Mary, conceive without actual sexual relations.
Harmon makes sure to tell you that guys aren’t the only ones ‘typing’ the ladies. He says that the “Marriage Material”/”Just For Fun” typing is also something women engage in. But how does this archetyping impact dating today?:
[…] the guy is deciding “which is she?” Is she Whore of Wife? This is not always a conscious deliberation. Mostly, it is an instinct dependent both on our emotional needs at the time and the way the woman fits into our personal typing of Whore and Wife. (Personally, you all look the same to me.) Once that decision is made, the guy will treat you according to the way he thinks your type wants to be treated.
Madonna/Whore complex is nothing new to an English or art major. And with today’s tweens admiring Paris Hilton, it may be clear which direction tomorrow’s women will be heading in.
Dating Self-Help Books
2218 years
I’m often sent books about being single, dating, and the relationship between men and women. Most recently, I’m in possession of the new and expanded edition of “He’s Just Not Into You,” and Kristina Grish’s “The Joy of Text,” which is about “mating, dating, and techno-relating.” (Not that any of my readers would know anything about that…)
I’ve added them to a pile of books that I’m in the process of absorbing and processing for an article in PresenTense Magazine.
But what occurred to me is that I’m almost 100 percent sure that I have no male equal. And what I mean by that is, there’s no male singles columnist with a stack of books on his desk, poring over the copies hoping to understand why women do or don’t do something. The covers of such books are pink. Or bright green. Or some other color that screams “I’M READING A DATING BOOK!!” Or maybe has a pair of disembodied legs in stilettos on the cover. No wonder men want no part of that. Or as Greg Behrendt says in one of the new chapters in HJNTIY, “If we wrote a book called ‘She’s Just Not That Into You,’ it would sell eight copies. Men don’t process heartbreak that way….yes it [the concept] applies to men–and as soon as they start reading, we’ll start writing. ”
If you’re a woman (especially if you’re a single woman), which “dating books” have you read and found either helpful or damaging?
And if you’re a single man, have you ever read one of these books, just to find out what women are thinking? Do you have a favorite? Or do you think all these books are just bad news, because they encourage women in our natural propensity–to overthink and overinterpret?
“Single Mom” Takes NYC
718 years
Last night I attended a Barnes & Noble reading by Rachel Sarah, my J dating column colleague and single Jewish mom, not to mention author of the new book “Single Mom Seeking.” Then we met up for breakfast this morning, and schmoozed about my return from Israel, her return to New York from Berkeley, and how dating is different when your daughter is also a factor in any nascent relationship.
The book’s entertaining, with raw accounts that any dater–with or without children–will relate to. Everything from trying to conquer chemistry with rationality to choosing your words carefully when it comes to online dating profiles sounds eminently familiar to the modern dater.
I’m hopefully going to be doing a JW column about her soon, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, check out her website and blog. And if you contact her or leave a comment, make sure to tell her Esther sent you…
“Choosing to Be Single” and Looking Like Carrie
918 years
We don’t need men. Or we don’t need men to be complete. Or we complete ourselves. Or we’re happy that we don’t have someone else living in our space, leaving caps off toothpastes. Or that we like having our own space, our own time, to pursue our own interests. Or that we have the freedom to just be ourselves. Or that it’s not us, it’s them. Or that boys are stupid and we should throw rocks at them. Or that men may come and go, but our girlfriends are forever.
While there are people who believe some of these excuses, to many other people, they are just excuses. They are phrases that we utter to ourselves to make us feel like it might not be our fault, that we might not be fundamentally unlikable, that we’re doing the best we can, and our inability to find that special someone might mean that it’s just not the right time for us, not that it will never happen, even if it feels like never’s the most likely possibility. They are sanity-preserving reframings of things that feel like they’re out of our control.
And then there are people who tell us that we’re too picky (because we won’t endlessly date men we’re not interested in), or that we’re (I love this phrase) “choosing to be single.” This implies that every day we leave our apartments, pick up our New York Times from our doorstep, and step over the lengthy line of suitors waiting with flowers and chocolates and rings and hoping that we’ll give them the matrimonial time of day. It implies that suitable men have proclaimed their desire to commit to a lifetime together, and we’ve said, “sorry, I really like being single. You know, because of Carrie Bradshaw. And you know, because Angelina and Brad don’t have to be married to have fuifilling lives, and so neither do I.” (The analogy to Jolie was apparently invoked by Katie Couric on CBS.)
Now, you all know that I literally can’t even walk down the street without someone mistaking me for Carrie Bradshaw (even though she’s fictional and I’m real) or Angelina Jolie (whose lips, I’m convinced, are fictional, even though mine aren’t). But the realities of single life aren’t always glamorous in the manner of Hollywood, and aren’t always a liberation.
The Columbia Journalism Review comments on some recent reporting by the NY Times about the fact that:
by a margin of one percent, more women are unmarried than married in America. The article, to no one’s great surprise, hinting as it does at the problems of sex and love, was the number one most emailed today (or as Gawker, in its inimitable style, put it this afternoon, “Also, 91% Of Women Are Now E-Mailing Spinster Article To Their Single Friends.”)
Leaving aside what struck us as strange methodology (like the fact that the survey counted anyone over the age of fifteen as a woman), there was something else disturbing about the piece. It had a tone of exuberance that spun the numbers as an unambiguously positive piece of progress for women. A quote from William H. Frey of the Brookings Institute captured the mood of it. The shift away from marriage, Frey said, represents “a clear tipping point, reflecting the culmination of post-1960 trends associated with greater independence and more flexible lifestyles for women.”
But this doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re choosing the single life. It means that our options are more open in terms of timelines and in terms of the men who are (theoretically) available to us. And sometimes, this means making different choices than our mothers and grandmothers might have made.
There are certainly women, especially those who are recently divorced and feeling free for the first time, who choose the single life. But those of us who choose not to marry the first person who asks (or who are stubborn enough to insist on waiting for someone who is actually appropriate and whom we love), are not choosing the single life. We’re choosing life itself.
Unless that’s just one of those things we tell ourselves.
Hiatus to End Imminently: Plus, a Question to Keep You Interested
1118 years
Thanks to all of you who kept checking in here, hoping for new content, finding none, and managing to–in the prolonged interim–check back with some other posts and revisit them. There was a technical glitch or twelve, beginning with erratic internet access and progressing to an issue regarding a lost password. But now it’s all ok. And I’m headed back to NYC, where blogging will re-begin in earnest.
In the interim, I feel that perhaps we need to visit the question of a “dating code” among friends. For instance, it’s been said that “bros” come before “hos.” (Or “sistas” before “mistas.”) So essentially, if your mate likes someone and “calls dibs first,” you back off. This presupposes that the “target” in question would be equally open to both you and your mate, which is not–in most cases–necessarily the case.
Let’s take a hypothetical situation. Consider a tale of three parties: the “target”/object of affection and conflict; the first party, who “discovered” the “target”; and the second party, whose main interest is in maintaining a friendship with the first party, independent of romantic entanglements.
What if the “target” expresses a clear interest for the second party, while the second party might care less and the first party is totally smitten. Does it matter who saw the target first or claimed dibs, if there’s only a real possibility with one person? And should the first and second party agree that their friendship is primary, to the exclusion of all would-be interlopers? And if the first party, acknowledging the “target’s” lack of interest, gives the second party the “all clear,” should the second party employ an above-and-beyond layer of sensitivity and opt out, despite the first party’s AOK?
And does New Year’s Eve ever play a variable?
Don’t pull a muscle discussing this–remember, you’re a little out of shape when it comes to this blog, so re-enter the discussion carefully… see you soon!
Plus, if you want to see photos from the trip, check over at MyUrbanKvetch.com and at my Flickr account.