New Year

The new year is generally a time of introspection and resolution. People begin to wonder what they’ve been doing for the past 365 days, and resolving to spend the next 365 more productively. This is why search engine terms like “how to lose weight” and “wedding planning” and “getting pregnant” go through the roof around January 1st (kid you not).

I don’t do much resolving around January 1st, so instead of looking ahead, I’ll be looking back, dredging up some posts from the past year, particularly January, and making them “sticky” for a couple of days.

Unconditional Acceptance

While skimming the Pink Book, a friend came across a piece of advice so profound that it ought to be the results of a multi-million dollar government funded study. The advice was, “Accept a proposal unconditionally.”

I guess what she meant was that it shouldn’t be something like “I’ll marry you if you stop smoking” because that’s bound to cause strife, but it got everyone thinking about conditional acceptances to proposals.

“My friend is happily married and has three kids, and her acceptance was conditional,” said the friend. “She said she’d marry him if he took care of all the bills and stuff.”

“My friend also had a condition,” threw in another friend. “She said she’d marry him as long as he was ok with eating burnt food.”

I don’t know if it counts as a condition, but I do know that my mother’s response was something like, “Are you sure?” because she wanted to make sure my father knew what he was getting into.This is a very smart move for anyone who enjoys saying “I told you so.”

Of course, some people enable the proposal to be unconditional by covering all ground beforehand. One friend made sure to list all her worst faults and shortcomings when she suspected a proposal was forthcoming, so he’d be forewarned. After all, she liked him, and didn’t want him to be miserable. Isn’t that sweet?

Endangered: The Male Specie

Once upon a time I worked at a publishing company. One of the more interesting books we printed was  Boys Adrift: the five factors driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys, by Leonard Sax.

Sax basically takes something we all know – too many boys these days are total losers – and gives five reasons why, ranging from computer games to PCBs. I found this interesting because I’ve always assumed that guys were always losers, but nobody noticed it until they were in direct competition with women. But according to people who are older, wiser, and have seen more generations of males pass under the crook, men were once pretty good stuff.

The editors (predominantly female) had some good fun with the marketing department (predominantly male) over this book. But then the senior editor said that she was going to “smooth away” some of the “weird edgy” stuff about PCBs. After all, a book that tells people to keep their boys away from plastic is bound to get made fun of.

What he said about PCBs was basically that it fiddles with hormones so men these days may have more female hormones in them and less male. (Results seem contradictory on how PCBs affect females.)

I never read the entire book (I was gone by the time it came out, so no free copy), but I was reminded of it because the PCB thing is no longer “weird” and “edgy.”  There are a number of recent articles about “gender bender” chemicals, and I’ve found dozens of papers on the subject in the college database with reams of weird side-effects listed. The side-effect of interest here is the fact that women exposed to PCBs during pregnancy are 1/3 less likely to have a baby boy, and PCBs are found in most of our food.

This popped into my head because Michelle just posted about NASI, the shidduch initiative, which is based on the idea that there are an equal number of girls and guys in every age bracket, and if they’d just marry each other the crisis would go away.

In actually, there are supposed to be more males than females in any given age bracket, but if the PCB business is true, that is a very dated statistic.

In a mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide, areas heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia and Italy [Bad4 - Japan and USA in other studies] have given birth to twice as many girls than boys, which may offer a clue to the reason.

…The ratio [of boys to girls] is lowering. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the US and Japan alone.

With this in mind, I think it may be time we thought about some more heavy handed ways to deal with this crisis. Polygamy has already been boo’d down, as practical as it is. How about drawing lots? Or, even better, a merit system? You know, we’d have people rated for physical, emotional, and cognitive characteristics, and those who score the highest are allowed to date, and the rest become the babysitters?

There are distinct advantages to this. First of all, there’s no uncertainty. People destined to be single won’t have to date and won’t have their hopes being constantly dashed. Plus, they’ll be freed from saving money for their future nuptials, family, and children’s college funds, so they’ll get high flying careers that aren’t family friendly and donate the proceeds to charity, in between Caribbean vacations.

You know, it could be nice…

Saying No

Looking back at my dating career so far, I’m surprised and a bit pleased to find that I’ve rarely had to say “no.”

OK, granted, the “pleased” is somewhat dampened considering that, by default, it means I’ve been “no’d” even when my own answer was “sure why not.” But I remain optimistic because I know (from my own “no’ing” experience) that “no’d” is not synonymous with “rejected.” A “no” doesn’t mean “If you were the last maiden in the kingdom I wouldn’t propagate the species.” It just means “I don’t think we’d be mutually compatible in the long run.”

Now, when this “no” comes after a long and enjoyable date, one may be inclined to retire to their bower moaning “What did I do? What did I say wrong?” Which is kind of missing the point. The point isn’t to make this guy marry you. The point is to find a guy to marry you. Preferable one with goals and habits in harmony with your own. Though you may not see the incongruities yourself, a “no” means your date did, and he’s saving you time and effort by not prolonging things.

I doubtless sound like a smug know-it-all in the above paragraph. I’m just yattering along to reassure myself. This is inspired by a combination of having given my second “no” ever, reading a Chronicles of Crisis (CoC) opinion that most older singles wish they’d given a past date another chance, and reading this post, where the author wonders if she should have ruined the date after her instantaneous decision that the relationship was going nowhere.

My answer is, “No!” Sheesh. I remember one date where the guy decided about halfway through that things weren’t going anywhere, so he might as well cease to be charming. On a date, there is very little gray zone between trying to make it pleasant and being downright rude. IMHO, if you aren’t doing the former, you are almost certainly the latter. In this (dubious) gentleman’s case, he proceeded to answer in monosyllables when he couldn’t make an argument out of what I said. We rode home in silence.

Now, about saying “no” after a great date… well, both the “nos” I gave followed great dates. And I’m unrepentant. On a great date, both parties act more like themselves and exchange more personal information without knowing it. So when you get home, instead of saying, “Yeah, he seems ‘nice’, I think,” you can actually say something solid about him, and, “He’s a great guy, but…” Well, truth be told, though my friends are all great, I wouldn’t marry most of them either. It’s not an insult; it’s a fact of life. My figuring is that if I’d rather stay single than put up with something, I’ll give the guy a “no.” This is a though process designed to reduce the regret CoC claims all older singles experience.

But then again, I also read another article claiming that as women approach 35, the egregiousness of the flaws they’re willing to tolerate in a potential spouse increases almost to infinity. And then the CoC regret will kick in along with the memory of those relatively flawless guys that were “no’d”…

So does that mean our motto should become “Just say ‘Yes!’ to another date,” or should we be confident in our ability to make life-defining decisions?

A girl can go crazy thinking about these things. But what else is there to do during finals?

A Glance at Looks

Surfed over to this blog post one fine day, which got me thinking about appearances in shidduchim. I’ve gone out with guys who ranged from gorgeous to gargoylish with just plain silly in between, but I’m relieved to say that I’ve never rejected a guy based on his looks. I figure a person can get used to anything, and someone has to marry these people, and who am I to complain if my date doesn’t look like a film star with his makeup on? I remember how, at the tender age of 12, I was enraged that Disney didn’t include Quasimodo in the closing nuptials of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I figure I should put my money where my mouth was.

(But then again, who’d want to marry a guy who could pass as a gargoyle?)

There was a commenter recently who also insisted on gorgeous looks, to the general disdain of other readers. I confess, I’m a bit put off by appearances as the first criteria. I once turned down a guy because in his description of what he wanted in a wife, slim and pretty were the first items, and slim was underlined. But hey, it takes all types to make a world, right? Who was it who told me the story about the guy who wanted a trophy wife and the girl who wanted to marry someone rich, and they met, and lived happily ever after?

Anyway, this is a maundering post because when I was thinking about a title, I realized that I’ve done several posts on appearances, so there they are:

Say Shidduch – about the photograph business

Beauty and the Handsome – the benefits of marrying ugly people

Do Glasses Make You Ugly? - a poll

Dating Napoleon - about short men

Fat Potential - The weighty issue of girth

And then there’s Sporadic Intelligence’s response to the post cited above.  (I humbly disagree. Being able to hold your own in an intelligent conversation means a person has a general interest in the world around them, which is a personality trait. Beauty is not, unless it’s carefully applied beauty, which is also a personality thing, but may say less about the person’s overall approach to life.)

Man Needs Wife

“He’s such a good boy,” she offers. “He’s so good-hearted, so good-looking. He’s got a good job.”

Excerpted from this article…

(credit to O.)

Man wants wife? I’d love to see what al-Zaidi’s response to this offer is.

NObody to Set You Up

One Shobbos not too long ago I found myself besieged by MFs in my own living room. There were three of them, to be exact, including one child, and there would have been four except for a misunderstanding (or high heel shoes – I decided not to delve too much).

I guess I can’t complain that my married friends abandon me.

Not that I see them all that often – but then again, who do I see all that often? It’s fair (if a bit sad) to say that for most of the academic year, half my social life exists in my inbox.

But that wasn’t where I was heading. Bas Melech’s post about what’s a girl to do if she can’t get through to any shadchanim and doesn’t have friends and family to set her up reminded me of a subject these friends touched upon during their occupation of my living room.

They all declared that they would not have gotten married through “the traditional shidduch system.”

Now, I’m not entirely sure what that is. Fiddler on the Roof assures me that Tradition! requires a busybody old lady with nothing better to do with her life and no other source of income to throw pants at skirts and bully them into marrying each other.

I guess that’s what these friends meant, because none of them had scored a date through a shadchan. That is a privilege reserved for thin, charming, well-dressed young ladies, I guess, based on the friends who married through professional shadchan-arranged dates. The rest of us must make do with the amateurs.

For me, the amateurs have been aunts, parents’ friends, neighbors, friend’s mother-in-law, and school-friends. For my three MFs, the amateurs were a mother’s friend, a seminary madricha’s sister-in-law (??? I still haven’t gotten this story straight. It’s one of those confusing ones), and the girl and guy themselves (shh…don’t tell). For the MF who didn’t show that Shobbos, it was a family friend from shul who set her up with close to a dozen DoAs (dead on arrival) before sending her BFF.

Now, where do these amateurs find their guys? Well, my aunts get them from my cousins, who are also dating. Or they sift through their sons-in-law’s friends. So do my parents’ friends, I think. An ex-neighbor lives near a yeshiva, and so do the school-friends in question. The madricha-in-law business was a relative of the in-law (I think). And, at the same time, the bochur-across-the-street has been hounding my sister to find out what-I’m-looking-for so he can line up guys bein hazmanim. And, I should note, I have never solicited suggestions, and my parents gave up after an initial frenzy which made us all miserable and turned up nothing.

So, I’m puzzled. Is it possible for someone to not be acquainted with a single person who has any connection to other single people (of the opposite gender)? Do other people have this problem?

Visual Incentive

The post below reminded me of the last time I was asked for a photograph. I don’t really have a picture of me. At least, not an official one. There are pictures of me at my birthday party, or presenting a research poster, wearing a Purim costume, and climbing a tree, but that’s not really the sort of thing I imagine you send along to prospective dates, as illuminating as they might be.

My cousin’s mother-in-law has taken into her head to marry me off. So, having located a single young man who sounded vaguely right, she contacted my mother with the stats and asked for a picture. My mother forwarded me the email (in which the guy sounded just like everyone else) and asked if I could reply with a photo. I sent the profile photo that serves as my avatar on WordPress. I happen to like it. Others give me mixed reviews. My cousin’s MiL was just bemused.

At the next family get-together, her son accosted me and asked about the photograph. “Why didn’t you send a real picture?” he asked.

“I did,” I replied. “It’s very real. It took me a half-hour to take, also. It’s very difficult to get a photo like that.” (Though, granted, it was taken to illustrate an article entitled “Bad Hair Day.”)

“You should send a nice photo, like how you look now,” he said, throwing in a compliment as incentive. “Men need a little visual persuasion, you know.”

“I don’t have a photograph,” I said.

“You should take one,” he pressed.

I said I’d think about it. I guess it was one of his friends. No rush.

When I mentioned this to NEF #11, she told me that when her BFF’s mother asked for a photo, she sent one of her with a snake around her neck. (Am I giving away her ID here? How many people have pictures of themselves with snakes around their necks? Hazard of the friendship, I guess.) They went out, he proposed, she accepted, and I began to wonder if the off-beat photo might not be a bad idea.

Then, one day, as she logged into Facebook with him peering over her shoulder, he exclaimed, “Hey, awesome picture!”

“You’ve seen it already, haven’t you?”

“No, why would I?”

So, young single women, don’t walk off with the lesson that snakes charm men. Chances are the photo won’t get past the shadchan.

Singles Event?

Somehow, I wound up on the Gateways singles list. I was a tad surprised to get a phone call and an invitation to their pre-Chanukah event. I mean, how’d they find out about me? It’s not like they can sniff out singles the way spammers collect email addresses or telemarketers get phone numbers. We’re a market with a very high turnover rate.
Do they maybe employ Gestapo-like tactics, asking neighbors to snitch on neighbors, passing along information about new and aging singles sighted nearby? Or are there secret agents creeping behind the line of cars, flitting from lamppost to lamppost, eying hairlines and looking for wedding bands?
In lieu of a do-not-call list, should we be wearing 25-cent diamond rings to thwart the Women in Black?
Not that I minded the call. I mean, aside from being startled to get a call from someone I don’t know inviting me to a party at someone else I don’t know, and so on. After a moment’s consideration, I realized that I’d never been to a singles event, and a pre-Chanukah party will be fun – especially if I meet people I know there. We’ll eye each other somewhat embarrassedly across the shmorg, like two old friends meeting each other at an AA meeting. And of course, a single these days must always be on the lookout for new, single friends. They go very fast, crisis or not.
Plus there’s the speaker’s topic for the night, “Dating from the Boy’s Perspective” which sounds like a load of laughs.
Sadly, (oh the irony) a friend is getting married that night – well, not sadly, but you know what I mean – and I can’t attend. But if anyone wants to go undercover (and I mean any single women, undercover men strictly prohibited), let me know.

Check It Out…

The latest to ease dating anxiety.

For those who prefer reading left to right – apparently, to ease the discomfort many bochurim feel when they are not only permitted but forced to socialize with a female for the first time, someone has started a course on how to act on a first date.

An ingenious idea, capitalizing on natural nervousness. Yet I wonder if it’s necessary?

Oh, we made plenty of fuss when my yeshiva bochur brother started dating. Suddenly his table manners were under scrutiny, he was repeatedly rebuked for carrying on bais medrash style dinner table debates, and oft heard was the worried “I hope you’re not like this on dates.”

Then again, the oft heard “I hope you’re not like this on dates” was oft proffered by myself, sitting cross-legged on my chair with my elbows on the table, or my sister, who had been actively participating in the bais medrash style dinner debate. Let’s face it – most people know to behave better on dates than in real life.

Now, I haven’t been on too many dates with yeshiva guys, but I didn’t notice that they were any worse at the business than anyone else. Then again, maybe they’d taken a course in dating. Come to think of it, one of them did ask me, somewhat worried, “Should we be talking about this on a first date?” I answered “Why not?” and the result was a bais medrash style debate, so maybe I should be the one taking the course…

But there’s another potential problem with courses on dating. For my first ever date (FED) I was meticulous about conforming to all the “rules” of dating that I’d ever heard of. Now, if I knew there were rules without a course, what happens when someone starts telling people how to behave, and extends the advice beyond “be natural; mind your ps and qs; hopefully those did not contradict each other,”?

Then and Now

It’s entertaining (at least for me) to compare my dating of today* with my dating of yore.

The first ever date (FED) is a high-tension event. But it doesn’t take too long before you become an old pro, and hardly break a sweat at the thought of going out.

For my (FED), I wanted to know all about the guy beforehand. So did my little sister. So we sat around the kitchen table listening to my parents reel off the many details about him that they’d accumulated through assiduous investigation.

The most recent time they suggested a fellow they had to dig me up from among my books.

“He’s a medical student finishing his Ph.D thesis while learning in yeshiva,” my mother enthused. It was the only thing she knew about him, and she had learned it from the shadchan.

“Mm-hm,” I said, paying far more attention to the problem of figuring out how far ahead a mouse would set a clock if it jumped on the end of the minute hand pointing at five past.

“He sounds bright,” my mother offered hopefully.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Um, well, his last name is… I have to go check.”

As for my sister, well, she didn’t ask a single question except “Did you enjoy?” afterward.

For my FED, I was startled to find out how different the real guy was from his paper persona. For my most recent date, I didn’t care, but I found out anyway:

A week after I was informed about my medical suitor, I was told that an official date had been set up. I was also handed an official crib sheet so I would know his name and vital stats.

“It’s a match made in heaven on paper!” my father raved, waving the crib sheet at me.

“I’ve dated a few of those guys already,” I answered, unimpressed, taking the sheet. In his own words, the medical guy wasn’t a doctor finishing a Ph.D – ‘merely’ a master of  science finishing his graduate degree. I don’t know how the shadchan managed to mix it up like that.

For my FED, I pushed the inevitable date off half a week because I needed time to cram the hows and whats. How to dress? How to act? When to come down? What to do? What to speak about?

For my more recent date, I tried pushing it off two weeks claiming midterms. That didn’t fly with my mother. Or my father either.

“You really want to get rid of me, don’t you?” I grumbled.

“Are you kidding?” agreed my father. “I can’t wait for him to take you!”

I glared. He added, “Out.”

For my FED, a week ahead of time we called my aunt, who has five daughters, three of them married, to find out what I should wear. When she suggested a nice sweater, I pointed out that my cousins lived in a different community because I knew I had to wear a suit. My question really was, how black of a suit? How formal/dressy/nice? I made an anxious phone call to my Shidduchville correspondent and then spend an evening trying things on for my mother.

For my medical-cum-scientist date, I wasn’t sure what I was wearing until about an hour and a half before zero hour.

“What are you going to wear?” asked my mother.

“Not sure, maybe a nice sweater.”

My mother got to preview me only a half-hour before the date. “Oh, wow, you look nice,” she admired.

“It does happen occasionally,” I pointed out. She adjusted my sleeves, told me to put on a necklace (I have a memory block on that article of jewelry), and that was that.

For my FED, I waited impatiently for the doorbell to ring. Then I crept downstairs and stood near the top of the landing, waiting with my eyes on my watch. My little sister had already staked the claim with the best view. When precisely 3 minutes and 25 seconds had gone by I couldn’t stand it anymore, and went down, against my sister’s protestations that I ought to wait 4 minutes at least.

For my most recent date, when the doorbell rang I went down to the second floor and was distracted by my sister who was trying to get rid of Vista’s sidebar. “Shouldn’t you be going down?” she asked after I’d been fiddling for a few moments.

“Just a sec,” I clicked and typed and clicked again. “Done. Yes, I’m going.”

On my FED, we ended up in the almost non-existent lobby of a  local hotel. Everyone going in and out gave us a knowing smile. I cringed. More recently, we ended up in another locale frequented by hordes of people, a number of them religious Jews, and I didn’t turn a hair. I was on a date – so what.

But some things just never change.

For my FED, I wondered, “How am I supposed to know if I really want to go out with this guy again?” If he isn’t charming and isn’t repulsive, what do you say? How many dates do you give a guy to fall into one of those categories? When do you get to decide that you’ve been wasting your time… or otherwise? And, oddly enough, the same thoughts occurred on my most recent date.

But then again, some things do change.

After my FED, my parents ambushed me upon my return, and I was pressed to come up with an answer before work hours the next day. This time, nobody accosted me or grilled me upon return, and the next morning my mother told the shadchan that I was probably studying but would come down when I got hungry and she’d ask me then.

And back again, some things don’t change… “So, do you want to go out with him again?” asked my mother both times.

“I suppose so,” I answered, both times. I couldn’t think of any reason why not.

*The use of “today” is figurative, meaning “of the current times.” It should not be understood to mean that I went on a date today, or will go on one today, for all the yentas in the readership.

Look at This…

Shuttle just directed me to some posts on this blog which made me laugh.

Here’s one (comparing Parshas Chayei Sarah to the shidduch parsha) and here’s another (about the difficulty of finding a wife) and here’s a third (mostly about dating out of yeshiva).

And while we’re at it, LWY has been double-dating… tsk.

Michelle has three posts on shidduchim in a row:

This one about racking up shidduch points

This one about keeping track of past dates (I do, ever since I realized I’d lost count of how many people I’d gone out with.)

And this one about proposals

Happy reading.