Group therapy in a blog.
The Single Life
How to Be a Player
618 years
Over the last few Jewish holidays, I’ve met a whole slew of new people. That’s been good, but mostly it’s been interesting. Within five minutes of being introduced to me and told what I do and what I write about, everyone talks about being single.
One dude I met said that he “used to be a player, but isn’t anymore.” This being a Jewish gathering, I immediately understood that he didn’t mean professional sports. Ever the unlicensed amateur anthropologist, I asked what I thought was an obvious question:
EK: “How do you define a ‘player’?”
Dude: “Someone who sleeps around.”
EK: “Isn’t that called promiscuous?”
Dude: “Well, it was with women I was dating.”
EK: “You were dating all of them? Did they know about each other?”
Dude: “Some of them knew, others didn’t.”
Does this mesh with your understanding with what a “player” is? Is it someone who is secretly casually with other people? Someone who just “doesn’t talk about exclusivity,” and assumes that this means nonexclusivity? Or is there an active deception involved? (“No, baby…you’re the only one for me…hang on–call waiting…”)
I’ve heard dudes call each other “player,” as a compliment, in the same vein as “stud” or “party animal” or “chick magnet.” But I’ve never heard a woman refer to another woman as a “player.” Can women be “players”? And do we want to be?
Why would a guy be happy to call himself a player? And is it like being “cool,” that if you’re truly cool, you don’t have to tell people you’re cool? But then again, I have t-shirts that proclaims me alternately “Jewlicious” and a “celebrity,” so maybe I’m not the best source on this.
“When You’re Happy and You Know It, Let the Lawyer Speak for You”
018 years
Have a contract for a new film? Call your lawyer. Got a romance that everyone’s talking about? Call your lawyer. You gotta hand it to celebrities for conducting their romances like a business. If someone publishes a photo of you kissing a “mystery blonde” right as your DVD comes out on video, instruct your attorneys to sue the three newspapers who are trying to expose you and split up the Vaughniston. Vince Vaughn did, and we all know how much people dig Vince Vaughn.
Personally, I love a headline that reads “Lawyer Says Aniston and Vaughn a Happy Couple.” I mean, who would know more about whether or not two people are in love than a lawyer? Maybe I should contact my crack legal team, to find out if I’m in a happy couple with someone. I might be off the market and not even know it…
Post-It, Out: UBreakup, In
118 years
If you can’t get Shannen Doherty to do your dirty work for you, and you think breaking up via Post-It is so three years ago, now cowards everywhere have a better way to break off sub-par relationships.
With UBreakup.com, now you can record your breakup message and schedule its delivery–for say, the day after Valentine’s Day, so you don’t have to disappoint anyone in person. And if you’re one of those people who records and rerecords her phone’s voice mail message until she gets the words and tone just right, you can do that here too–no need to feel locked into the first vocalization of your message. Rerecord as many times as you like! Need help figuring out what to say? The site also offers help, in the form of “prerecorded messages.”
Days like these, I’m glad I am Jewish, so I can offer an authentic “Oy.”
(via Netscape)
“Date Now, Meet Later”–Romance Meets Skype
018 years
Are you a Montreal-based Raelian who “gets tested in medical experiments for a living” and believes that aliens are among us, but–somehow, inexplicably–you still can’t find love domestically? The good news is that there’s likely a lovely 42-year-old Guatemalan nail technician out there for you, and you can use a combo of online dating and Skype to date her without ever meeting her. You can even watch each other sleep using Web cameras. [brief pause for creepy shudder]
Or maybe you’re a “5.5 or 6″ on a scale of looks. No reason you shouldn’t get yourself someone who could be a model. (This coulda-model was apparently under 5 feet tall, but still.) Or maybe you’re a dude from Michigan who falls in love with a Cairo girl. Forge a relationship that’s true, and maybe her parents will like you so much that they’ll let you stay with them in Cairo instead of relegating you to a hostel.
These are today’s hopes of modern romance, informeth the L.A. Times, with an interesting piece about the role that digital phones have in revolutionizing the way people date online. Sort of. [“Harvey, would you roll those soundbites about creepy phone sex and people who reek? Thanks…”]
Skype Me, which invites strangers to contact one another, […] has a seedier side as well. Some female users complain that signing onto Skype Me mode invites a barrage of men looking for phone sex who send vulgar pictures or messages. One user complained on an online forum: “I’m sure that at least half of the people who Skyped me could probably be considered clinically insane.”
Some psychologists say a relationship created and sustained by Net phone can be incomplete. Net phone contact is “simultaneously allowing people to become more intimate and yet have less patience with real life and real-time human fumbles and foibles,” said Linda Young, a psychologist at Seattle University who has counseled many students who have sustained or developed relationships over Skype. Not having to deal with another person’s bad temper or foul-smelling habits makes the Internet pal seem more perfect than he or she actually is, Young said.
Maybe it’s easier to stick with Craigslist after all, no matter what an endeavor like that brings…ÂÂ
National Singles Week Recap
418 years
As you all may know, September held a week dedicated to us, all the singles out there… was it as fun for you as it was for me? I believe I met a few deadlines, earned a few theoretical checks that haven’t arrived yet, attended a wedding where I was the only single person there, and looked in the mirror every morning, saying “Hey you. You’re single. But it doesn’t matter. Because you’re good enough, smart enough, and goshdarnit, people like you.”
How did you celebrate?
I also started a top five list of the best things about National Singles Week, and only came up with three.
1. No one knows about it, so no one will know if you don’t have a date for it.
2. No cards or flowers necessary–all you need to celebrate is your own overwhelming sense of solitude! Just curl up in your bed alone and cry…hey, you’ve just celebrated National Singles Week!
3. It’s the only weeklong holiday that doesn’t require you to change your routine at all–just continue to register for online dating sites that you have no intention of paying to become a member of, sit around the house with your two favorite men (Ben & Jerry), and watch TiVoed episodes of Grey’s Anatomy.
Anyone else?
Last Nights
218 years
Last nights have always been difficult. One tends to get caught up in the details of departure, and within those details are layers of doubt and lingering regret–over the undone or underdone, over the potential for intrinsic change, and for the vanishing moments of the now in the stark awareness that the present becomes past in the instant it happens.
Being here has been everything and nothing I’d anticipated. The anxieties were mostly unfounded, and the experience overwhelmingly positive. Friendships were forged and realizations discovered. To an extent, I feel younger–as if some sort of vital essence were recaptured and, to my great surprise, reinvigorates me. I’m infused.
And now, because it’s a last night of this, a genus of freedom that I’ve lived through the last few weeks, I fear its imminent pastness, the moment at which this becomes that thing that once was; and puzzle at the fact that the life I left behind is again my future.
More characters will be typed, but only after departure.