Want a Date?

There’s a new guy in the league. Girls, swamp him.

It’s Raining, It’s Pouring

Quick: what does Bad4’s dating life and an equatorial climate have in common?
They both have rainy and dry seasons.
Seriously: when it rains, it pours. I can go a good three months without ever seeing a bachelor sail out of the sky and land head-first in my front lawn, and then suddenly there’s a storm of them and the grass needs patching and the neighbors are calling the cops.
It’s a predictable pattern. There are times when I have nothing much to do except date and get married. Like this summer. With a steady 9-4 and no homework, what’s a girl to do with her evenings, if not meet young men and discuss deep topics with them over expensive sodas in local lobbies? At least, that’s what I thought. Apparently, the gentlemen thought differently, because not a single one sought my company. Even my friends and family couldn’t come up with a single suspect to liven the dog days.
Now, come some time like midterms or finals, when I rise at 6:15 to begin filling my mind with the accumulated wisdom of our modern age, and bed after 11 to allow my brain to store the data during essential REM sessions, and also occasionally eat, drink, shower, and take care of the necessities of life when I remember them… It’s during such a time that I’ll get a plethora of calls, “Bad4! He said it’s ok with him.”
Or emails, “The guy I said I would ask about for you is free now…”
Or IMs: “r u avlbl?”
And in addition to all these young gentlemen who are dying to take me out A-sap (so they can move down their list, doubtless), there are the sudden “hey I’ve been thinking of you” suggestions too. The “can you send me your latest profile because I know someone who…” or “would you be interested in a guy who…” or “What do you think of going out with…” Swamping my inbox, ringing my telephone, and accosting me in the street.
It’s at times like these that I grab my head and squeeze gently to relieve the pressure.
Not that I don’t appreciate it, and all that. But can’t there be some sort of modulation thingy happening so I don’t get them all in a rush?
I don’t know how guys handle lists. I just want to crawl under my bed and wait for them all to finish their cokes and wander off with a shrug. I don’t know why – is it keeping their stats straight that worries me? Remembering who suggested who? Having to date back-to-back if the first one doesn’t work out? All I know is that I just don’t like it.
Down with the rainy season. Up with year-round precipitation.

Predictable Intermission

I generally try to avoid topics that lower the tone, but this one has kept me guessing for a long time. Why is it, that on every date, the guy picks up halfway through and excuses himself for a trip to the men’s room? It doesn’t seem to matter whether the date is a good date or a bad date—they just  go. (Indeed, the only guy who sat through the entire date without a break was among my worst dates ever, and I would have welcomed the intermission.)

A friend told me that guys have smaller bladders—at least until a baby sits on a woman’s and squashes it flat. But a good 45 minutes of googling this most fascinating topic (not recommended…  did you know there’s a field called urodynamics? Did you know that Iberians used urine as mouthwash, way back when? Do I now have a greater understanding of why information at your fingertips is not always a blessing?) turned up the data that men and women are pretty similarly built in this area.

I developed an inkling of an idea when people started sending me dating jokes. Invariably, the bathroom is the safe haven—the place you escape to when it becomes unbearable any more. Like the one about the guy who goes to the bathroom to ask his friend to call and say that his grandmother is in the ICU. The friend complies, and the guy apologizes, saying he has to end the date because his grandmother has taken critically ill. “Phew,” the girl says with relief. “Another 10 minutes and my uncle was going to die.”

However, none of my dates have ever taken any calls on our dates. Though, I guess, it is possible that they’re running off to check who’s been vibrating their phones. But otherwise, if they’re ducking away for less mundane reasons than they claim, it’s purely for relief from my company. How flattering.

Then someone pointed out that guys and girls don’t head out on a date on equal footing in that way. Girls pop out of the powder room and step into the car. Whereas, the guy has already been in the car for up to an hour or two. This is a particular problem for my dates, since I don’t think I’ve ever gone out with anyone from Brooklyn. Considerate parents-of-the-girl will point him down the hall, but the guy doesn’t always feel comfortable with that option.

Which leaves the date itself. More comfortable for the guy, perhaps, but not all that fun for the girl—at least, not a girl without a cell phone to text on. If you’re in a lounge, there’s a limit to the number of paintings you can look at before you start encroaching on the next dating couple’s territory. (Though eavesdropping is oh-so-tempting!) If you’re in a restaurant, you have to twiddle your fork and try to avoid the sympathetic glances coming from all around. And if you’re almost anywhere else, you kind of hang out in the hall and try not to be in the way.

Of course, a resourceful girl is hardly ever at loose ends, so guy also takes a risk, abandoning his date like that. On my first ever date, when the guy left me for the bathroom, an Israeli gentleman struck up an animated conversation with me. When my date returned, the Israeli was kind enough to include him in the conversation. He was not, however, willing to let us get on with our tete a tete. So the rest of the date went pretty much three-way.

Thank Goodness. The Israeli was far more interesting. Too bad he was already taken.

I Just Want To…

So Boro Park has its kashrus scare. In typical “let’s observe some mitzvos at the expense of others” it becomes a whole brouhaha – at least according to Hamodia, which was the first I heard about it. Anyway, naturally the store owner is a drop upset. For his reputation? His livelihood? Nah… that’s piddling stuff.

“I just want to make good shidduchim for my children,” he says sadly.

Doing It for the Grade

Sometimes I think I spent too many formative years in school. If nobody’s going to grade me, and there’s no deadline, why do it? Let’s face it: there’s no motivation like a letter grade to make a person put in some extra effort. Society has noticed this in general, and there are now letter grade systems for public schools, airports, and even the MTA. Imagine how much more we’d try if we knew we were being graded on our dates.
This girl realized that if she wanted to get herself married, she was going to need some serious motivation. So she took it on as part of her senior project. She gave herself 3 months. Wow. I hope she doesn’t get an F.

The Long and the Short of It

I recently sifted through a game I brought home from a high school shabbaton. In the game you are dealt a hand of positive aspects of life, and you have to choose to discard a card—providing explanation—every round. The cards ranged from “bitachon” to “wealth,” but the one that caught my eye was the one that read “A feeling of belonging.”

There have been many times in my life when I felt like I didn’t belong. They ranged from 1-hour Shobbos-meal ordeals to over a month long. They all stem from one essential difficulty: that of cherishing values and goals very different from those of the people around you. This prevents you from forming a rapport with them, building relationships, and developing that comfortable confidence of belonging.
The discomfort of not belonging can be so acute that many people will adjust their value systems to match those around them. We commonly call this “being brainwashed,” which is a bit unfair, seeing as our dreams are an amalgam of goals condoned by our family, community, and society. We’re all brainwashed, just some more obviously than others.
For one who holds on to beliefs anomalous to the happy, well-adjusted people all around them, there develops, in addition to loneliness, a gnawing doubt. Why is one so… weird?
Of course, that all sounds very melodramatic. Reality is often more subtle. For example:
When in Touro, I often precipitated eye-rolling by wondering things like “How do the two elevators coordinate which picks up which calls?”
“Only you would think about something weird like that,” snorted a friend.

So when I graduated and moved on to a college with an even more complicated elevator system, I did not voice my observation that the express elevators would make local pickup stops on their way down, nor my curiosity about the complexity of the programming behind this. But when I overheard a few really normal, well-adjusted students discussing exactly that one fine afternoon, it was like an extra birthday. They probably found my sudden friendliness and enthusiasm a bit odd, but in fact they’d confirmed something I’d been suspecting for quite a while now: I am normal.
No really, don’t laugh. I know it’s not just me. A friend and fellow graduate of the same alma mater mentioned how shocked she was by how much she was enjoying graduate school. “I know why,” I informed her clairvoyantly. “It’s because for the first time you’re surrounded by people who are just as curious, sedulous, and enthusiastic about what they’re doing as you are.”
Startled, she asked, “How’d you know?”
It’s pretty crazy to be crazy for having joi de vivre, but that’s exactly what she’d been pre-graduation. It is possible to be thoroughly sane and yet completely incongruous. And that was, ‘til recently, the most troubling part of my dating experience. Why should a mostly sane and well-adjusted young lady have such trouble getting beyond two dates with any given guy? Is that normal? Or is it just me? That prompted a post (which I can’t relocate), wondering if it is common to date with such brevity, and if that is a preferably practice to prolonged dating streaks.
In a way, it’s good, I guess. If you date so many people who are so wrong, you can’t help recognizing the right chap when he rings your doorbell. But there’s something to be said for knowing that the right chap has a chance of existing. The longer you date instant duds, the more dubious that chap’s existence seems. And if there is no man with whom you share enough values to develop a rapport, doesn’t that make you a bit of a freak?
Of course it would take more than being doomed to eternal spinsterhood to convince me to give up my otherwise effective freakishness. But that is a rather depressing prognosis for life. Which is why I have finally answered the question I posed in the above-mentioned post. Short dating streaks are easier, but if you’re going to be dating for years on end without success, throwing in a long-dating streak every now and then is good for the sanity.
It’s like Tarzan meeting fellow humans for the first time and discovering that he’s not a pathetic ape, he’s actually a normal specimen of another species. This discovery is so relieving that it’s really no surprise that Tarzan married the first human he met. For the rest of us, it provides a renewed belief that they do indeed produce the right brand, and all that remains is to find the right edition.

Round Two

There are milestones in singlehood. The first is when all your friends are getting married. Then you’re sort of left behind in the rush—except that you’re rushing more than anyone else. You have to get from vort to vort, shower to shower, wedding to wedding, and by the end of it all you’re as broke and exhausted as they are, but still single.

The next round I am in right now. That is the First Baby Round. Within the past two months I have congratulated no less than six friends on the birth of their eldest. And there are still a few more on their way. In this round, the single rushes from the balloon-and-teddy-bear store to the Kiddush to the bris to Children’s Place and then back to deliver the gift. At the end of this round you’re pretty tired and out of pocket, but at least you haven’t changed any diapers.

So what’s round three? Is it the upsherin rush? Or do you wait for bar mitzvahs?

“I Knew Right Away…”

Have you ever met someone with whom being just seemed natural?

That’s not a very pretty sentence, but the alternative isn’t great either: Have you ever met someone and you just knew immediately that you’d make great friends? Not a friendship based on anything like working in the same office, or a shared interest in Alfred Lord Tennyson, but just an instinctive, intuitive feeling that you’d get along, always, even with years and miles between you – you’d just be able to pick up again with the same warmth as before when back together?

I was thinking of this because of NMF#11. Whenever people ask how we’re friends, we just answer “It’s complicated.” There’s no particularly good reason for us to be friends. We first met during an intramural machanayim game in high school. I fed her cake and she showed me the janitor’s chickens. We hung out for about 2 hours and then didn’t see each other for 3 or so years, when she popped in to spend an hour on my bed in seminary, telling people their personalities based on the shape of their noses. And that was it until she showed up for my open-invitation 21st birthday party instead of flying to Scandinavia that night.

After that we decided to keep it up because it seemed a waste not to.
She’s not the only one. There was a girl in the parallel elementary school class who I knew would make a great friend even though I hardly saw her or had anything to do with her. But there was a taboo on cross-class socializing, so it took until summer camp after 8th grade before we got together. Stargazing and swatting mosquitoes on the baseball field with her one night, I confessed, “I’ve wanted to be your friend for the longest time.” She tickled my ear with a blade of grass to make me think something was crawling up it and answered, “Really? So have I. Be your friend, I mean.” We’ve been at it ever since.

Often people say “I knew from the first date” that they were going to marry their spouse. I wonder if that’s what it’s like. You know, you just see your “bashert” and you know that you will always get along because you just will, and that differences of opinion and styles of living won’t matter because you’ll always just like each other no matter what, and you’ll have that to fall back on. Or when people say that are they referring to some stronger feeling? That giddy rush of love at first sight we all hear about and sometimes witness? Some people have commented to that tune on  the Not for Singles post. Would you care to elucidate on what you mean when you say you “knew” right away?

Segulos Revisited

Milestone in Bad4’s life: for the first time I’ve been offered a piece of shattered porcelain to assist me in finding my pair.

It was at NMF#11’s wedding. I was sitting there, sipping my soup, and minding my own single business when another single girl came by holding something heavy in a cloth napkin in one hand and a stack of paper towels in another.

“Segula glass!” she called, like a pushcart salesman hawking his wares.

“Wha-at?” asked my friend next to me. I looked up curiously. The girl – woman, I mean – put down the napkin and spread it open. Inside was a shattered plate.

“It’s what the mothers break,” she explained. “You take a piece and it’s a segula for getting married.”

My friend reached hesitantly toward the shards. “Don’t touch!” yelped the woman. “It’s sharp. Use a paper towel.” My friend gently stirred the pieces with paper-towel protection. “I’ve never heard of this one before,” she said doubtfully. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

I shrug. “I don’t believe in it,” I say. “It’s just people who think that anything remotely related to marriage will somehow, by association, like a magic amulet, rub off on them.”

My friend folded a paper towel around a piece and tucked it into her clutch. “I’m going to throw this out one day, but…” she shrugged. No reason not to give it a shot. Couldn’t hurt, right?

“You throw it out when you’re married,” I agreed. “Or even engaged. Then it’s ok, I think.”

This calls for a revisiting: The segula posts

Segulos 1

Segulos 2

Segulos 3