The Price of Being Marriageable

I have discovered a strange dichotomy.

Outside of Flatbush, I am considered an excellent dresser. In Flatbush, I am considered an eyesore. All things considered, I think I will spend more time outside of Flatbush.

At the Jewish company where I used to work, I would occasionally receive a surprised “Oh I like your [article of clothing],” as if this was an astonishing event. And then there’s my family reputation as an eyesore. “You’re a diamond – you just need polishing,” my grandmother likes to tell me. More recently, a non-Jewish colleague elsewhere complimented me on “looking nice” upon which another pointed out, “Bad4 always looks nice.” General agreement all around. Ya know – I could get used to this.

Why am I thinking about clothing again? Well, who couldn’t, after finding out that the Republican Party bought Palin a $150,000 wardrobe?

Honestly, can’t a group of men see a pretty woman without wanting to play paper dolls with her?

Anyway, I wonder if any woman read that and didn’t turn neon green in envy. (Maureen Dowd certainly was jealous. I bet nobody’s ever bought her a $150k present. I bet nobody’s ever bought her any gift that didn’t make ominous ticking noises.) Naturally, I was too. OK, granted, I probably wouldn’t know how to spend $150,000 in a clothing store (hey – that’s an activity for a rainy day: see if I can rack up a $150k fantasy bill at Bergdorf Goodman). But that doesn’t mean I can’t wish. Or just be annoying about it.

I mentioned to my father that he hasn’t even spent a tenth of that on my wardrobe.

“You’re not campaigning for vice presidency,” he pointed out. This is true. But my situation is even more dire. I’m a kallah-moed.(sp?) Everyone knows that maidels of a certain age must look like they’re off to an Upper East Side luncheon every waking moment.

A vice president only has to wear something new/or gorgeous to public speeches and events. A girl of marriageable age doesn’t have a campaign jet where she can relax with her feet on the table.

The get-up that got me compliments outside of Flatbush would have had the denizens of Avenue J checking Onlysimchas on their smartphones to ensure that I haven’t been married for three weeks already.

And that just won’t do. Because if they think I’m married, they won’t set me up! (Because everyone is a potential shadchan. Didn’t you hear the story about the girl who was set up by the grocery cashier? Or the guy who took a suggestion from his garbage collector – and it was The One?

Oh, here’s a true one, told by a high school teacher:

One day she was feeling rebellious. She put on her favorite denim skirt (“back in those days, girls, denim skirts weren’t like today” – or at least, we didn’t consider them as off-limits to BY maidels as we do today) and left her hair in a ponytail and went shopping with her friends. While on the train her friend elbows her and says, “That woman is looking you up and down.” Said the teacher: “I don’t care, let her look.” The friend elbows again. “She’s really pulling you apart. And she doesn’t look happy.” Said the teacher, “I don’t care, let her be unhappy.”

Put on the creepy sound track now… dumdadadum…

Turns out the woman was the mother of a guy she’d just been redt to.

Dumdadadum…

And despite having seen this future teacher on the train looking like ah shlump, she permitted her son to go out with her anyway! (Fancy that!)

But even to this day, whenever her mother-in-law compliments her on her appearance, she always adds a wink-wink-nudge-nudge, “You look so much nicer than when I first saw you on the train!”

“And the moral of the story is,” the teacher concluded, “You really have to be careful what you wear.”

Um. Right. How did I come to the opposite conclusion?

But I think it’s time to get out of these parentheses. Where was I?)

So I mention this to my father and he is not convinced.

“You don’t need a six-digit wardrobe to get married.”

“How do you know?”

“Well I don’t think it really makes a difference.”

“How can you tell? The contents of my closet, including shoes, would total under four digits. And I’m still single. A correlation if I ever saw one!”

OK, OK, it wasn’t the best of arguments. And the proof is in the credit line – still a measly four digits long.

 

Can You Recognize a Loser When He Texts You?

Texting before the first date?

Nebach of the Week: Savta Simcha

Overheard:

“What’s with Savta Simcha? Why does she live with her brother?”

“She must not be married. She’s one of those older singles you hear about.”

“But what’s wrong – why isn’t she married?”

“Well, she brings that samovar everywhere. It must be pretty weird on a date.”

Looking

Every now and then you can’t help but lament the loss of a perfectly good English word due to its growing use in slang. There are many, and for obvious reasons I won’t list them, but for those in the shidduch parsha, there are even more. Something about the system starts playing around with your brain, making the synapses whir when nothing unusual has been said. Innocent questions require extra processing to ensure that they’re really innocent, while commonplace events make you cover your eyes or giggle.

I was sitting in a career planning seminar and the topic du jour was the 30 second pitch, something that, in my experience, you rarely get to use, but everyone tells you to prepare. “Things to include in your 30-second commercial?” asks the seminar-giver. “Name, class, major, and what you’re looking for.”

Eugh. Now I’m going to have nightmares of approaching a recruiter and saying, “Hi my name is Bad4, I’m a junior studying somnambulism, I’m looking for a ben Torah and yarei shamayim who is a knock-out and worth at least $2 million.”

Though actually, my mother seems to think the two searches are not at all mutually exclusive. When I mentioned that I might pop out of town to visit a career fair on Friday and stay the weekend, she thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to visit the shadchanim in the area. I said if I could show up in business formal and hand them my job resume I was up for it. Otherwise, let’s not mix business and pleasure.

Then my mother and sister went shopping for wedding gowns a few days ago while I stayed home and indulged my desire to manipulate vector subspaces.  I get a phone call about halfway through the day. “We’re in a store and there’s tons of stuff here. What are you looking for?” Naturally, I gave her the whole nine yards: someone intelligent, six feet tall, and preferably red-headed. `

“Sooo funny,” came the sarcastic reply.

But it’s not like you’ve been welcomed to the Hotel Shidduchim: you can check out even if you can’t leave. I’m glad to say that one can be, slowly, deconditioned to the phrase. It seemed like last week all anybody ever asked was “what are you looking for?” (an epidemic of lost items?) and for the first few days I would jump and think “Oh no, not here…” But eventually it wore off. I learned to look for items, positions, and other non-human things. They were easier to find, too.

Then I recieved an intriguingly posed spin-off: “Where are you looking?” Meaning, MIT? Caltech? NYU? YU? Mir? I hadn’t even thought of that possibility, to be honest. Do they let you post personals on college bulletin boards? “Wanted: big nerd and p/t learner. Should appreciate Donne. Email bad4shidduchim@datenet.com”

Does one look in a specific place for a shidduch? Most people I know try the shotgun method, visiting shadchanim everywhere and anywhere. Then again, yesterday I heard one guy explain that he’s only willing to consider a “cute, petite, out-of-town girl.” (Note: he’d probably have to look for her in a Brooklyn attic.)

Do you have geographic limitations to your dating?

Are You a Jung Single Woman?

There are loads of single Jewish women out there, so one of them must fit the Jungian INFJ description. If you do (there’s a test over here), head on over to this page to submit your information: someone wants to go out with you.

An odd way to look for a mate, but hey, odd ain’t automatically bad.

Out-Aideling the Aidel

This post over at the FrumGirl blog made me laugh. Apparently, a non-Jewish girl, trying to blend in at a Jewish wedding, did such a resoundingly successful job that she managed to do what most Jewish girls would kill to do: attract the direct attention of a Woman in Black (aka: Wandering Shadchan). She’s managed to outdo Jewish girls at their own game, and without any conscious effort. What’s her secret?

(Title paraphrase explanation here.)

The Girls are Special, the Guys are Unique

I begin to understand that I am not a wellspring of tact.

Partially, this is because I tend to call them as I see them, and I often see them differently than most people. And partially this is because when I call them, I seem to choose the worst possible phrasing. A coworker once observed, “I can’t believe you’re an English major. You always use the wrongest words possible.” This was in reference to my use of “disappear” as a synonym for “step out,” eg: “The project is done? The records are filed? Everything’s under control? Then I’m going to disappear for a half-hour lunch break.” That one, at least, I can blame on my parents. They always called it disappearing when there was work to be done and they’d find that I’d just stepped out. But the rest of my choice phrasing is all my own fault.

So I guess it’s a miracle that I haven’t mortally offended someone in the shidduch system yet. Probably this eventuality has been postponed because of the numerous degrees of separation between a dating girl and the actual process that arranges her date. But misfortune put me in direct contact with a would-be shadchan and I commented that the potential date in question “sounds like everybody else.” I mean that in a positive way, but as usual, nobody saw things quite the same way I did.

Quothe the shadchan: “He sounds like everybody else”? [thud]

Quothe the father: “He sounds like everybody else? Why on earth did you say he sounds like everybody else?!”

I explain that my mother made some preliminary phone calls and that was pretty much what I got out of the results.

Quothe the mother: “I said he sounded like everybody else?!”

I explain that though she hadn’t said it in so many words, that was the summary of the information gleaned.

“I said he was very bright, learns well, and comes from a good family,” replied she.

“And how many guys have I gone out with who didn’t come with that exact description?” I responded. Since there was no answer forthcoming, I provided it myself: “Two – and those were mistakes. It’s good that he sounds like everybody else – he sounds like just the kind of guy I’d go out with.”

Why am I the only one who thinks that sounding like everybody else is a positive thing?  I know that girls are all supposed to be “special,” but was unaware that guys all need to be unique. I pass on this tale in the hope that it will prevent others from making the same embarrassing error in the future. As Aesop would put it:

Moral: Never say that a date sounds like everybody else, no matter how likeable everybody else is.

Blegh on the Brain

What does surfing the internet, eating ice cream, and cleaning one’s room have in common?

 

All three are mind-numbing activities engaged in by returned daters as a way of postponing bedtime. They are not the only ones available, of course. Some prefer to watch a movie until their eyes close, while I once found myself doggedly trying to render blue cheese edible until early in the morning. (A hopeless cause.) There are a myriad ways to numb the human mind, and daters have tried most of the legitimate ones. (Drugs are bad for shidduchim.)

I owe a bit of readership to this habit of self-anesthesia. Apparently it is quite common for people to return from dates and pound into a search engine “bad shidduch stories” in the hope of consoling themselves with someone else’s misfortune; or “shidduch crisis” to assuage the glimmering suspicion that there’s something wrong with themselves; or even “I hate shidduchim!” in the desperate hope that Google will respond like a trained therapist, “And how does that make you feel?”

 

Instead, they spend the night trawling half a blogosphere full of rantings about shidduchim, as well as some calmer posts regarding the best animal to be, why good people remain single, and why being single isn’t so bad after all. (The self-promotion ends here.)  Or else they wind up on YouTube following the links to videos on related topics until it’s 3 am and they’re staring with glazed eyes at a video on how to train a flea circus. Then, feeling disgusting as well as disgusted, they drag themselves off to bed, wake with a groan a few hours later feeling rotten, and give a snippy response when their parents ask how it went.

 

It’s not that the mind is really going at a mile a minute. At least, mine doesn’t seem to move at an unusual clip after dates. Not until I try to read a book or study Jungian psychology or go to sleep. It’s not that my mind is doing anything profound; it just won’t read, think like Jung, or turn itself off either. There’s really nothing you can do with the darn thing except distract your senses until it powers down involuntarily. Kind of like holding down the startup button on a computer until it’s forced off. But with fewer health repercussions.  

What did daters do before the internet?

 

I guess they had to make do with ice cream or blue cheese or something else entirely. What do you usually do after dates?

From the Yom Tov Table

Setting: up to the dates in the simanim (no, nothing as bad as you’d think…)

Father: Wow, these dates are really good.

Daughter: (chewing) I haven’t had a good date in a long time.

(All look at daughter and snigger.)

Daughter: Wha-at? Did I say something?