For a while it looked that way. Although I was driving in to New York City every 5 weeks, I inevitably spent those long weekends with friends and family, not with dates.

Then, with a long stretch of no major Jewish or secular holidays, I decided to just hang out in OOT for a few months, sans pilgrimage to the Big Apple. I booked a plane ticket for Pesach and planned to let my car grow fat on so little exercise as a daily commute.

Naturally, my phone started ringing off the hook. As did my Facebook account and SYAS profile. Three separate women who I’ve never even heard of called me up to say they had a guy for me. An old classmate sent me a FB message with the same content. And a rash of pre-accepted matches landed in my SYAS inbox. Naturally (and uncreatively), every one of these guys is located in New York. (Except for the Baltimorian being redt to me to for the third time.)

This is even worse than finals.

When you get set up during finals, you can play a scheduling game, where you space your dates conveniently between your finals. But when you’re planning to be OOT for four months, there’s really no two ways about it. Nobody can sustain a 4-month telephone relationship, so either you’re dating or you’re not.

And I’m not.

So what do you tell a shadchan when you’re in this position? Where were you two months ago? Come back in two more? Is he willing to travel?

Beats me.

And, it just occurred to me, it gets worse.

Because come Pesach time, all the eligible bachelors born and bred in this area of the USA are going to be heading home for the holiday. All the  shadchanim within 2.5 hours of my new town will be ringing my cellphone to set me up with them… and I’ll be in New York.

Probably dateless.

C’est la vie.

“Basically, he’s being a bit of a snob, and he’s justifying it by saying his rabbi told him so?” I asked. I wasn’t very impressed by that. Granted, I wouldn’t have been impressed either if he’d just been a snob without justification. But you get a smidgen more respect if you stand up for your snobbishness, instead of hiding behind someone with a wide beard.

“That’s nothing,” DIT said. She’d once gone out with a guy who had liked her so much he’d asked her out for a second date at the end of the first. Later on in the week he called, ostensibly to plan the when and where, but… “My rebbe tells me I shouldn’t continue to date you, so I don’t want to go out again after all.”

My response: “You should have said, ‘But my rabbi said to marry you! Maybe we should call a bais din so they can decide what to do.’”

The cyborg yeshiva guy is not as unusual as you’d hope. Somehow too many step beyond the “having someone to ask” position to the “keeping a manager on speed dial” state. When a guy talks about his rebbe’s vision for his life in his shidduch profile, you can just shake your head and move on. But sometimes the influence is a little more subtle. Like the woman who found herself on a date with a Chofetz Chaim boy… and his entire hanhala.

“We believe that there’s nothing more important than strengthening the community,” he said. We also had beliefs on internet, child-rearing, and current events. If every Chofetz Chaim boy is like this then dating them is especially easy. You merely verify that your hashkafos match up with the yeshiva line, and then speed date your way through the student body until you find a personality that you like. It’s actually not a bad thing.

But there does come a point when you want to tap a guy’s head to check if there’s anything inside, and demand to know, “Yes, but what do you think?”

Instead, as we hit the sidewalk, he said, “So, where do we go?”

I offered him a few options: some local restaurants, a coffee shop, or a walk around the park. He said, “Sounds good. Which do you want to do?” Unwilling to stick my hands in his pockets when I’d only known him for 247 seconds, I suggested the walk. Of course, first we had to walk to the park, then around the lake, and then back, at which point I was hot, tired, irritated, and no longer reluctant to lighten his wallet. I marched us to the restaurant. We proceeded to converse about programming for another two hours.

When the shadchan called, she first apologized in advance and then asked me if I wanted to go out again. I always wonder when shadchanim do that. Does that mean they knew they set you up with a dud? Whose side are they on anyway?

Shortest date I’ve been on – It was probably a bad sign. He drove up to my door, checked the clock, and said, apologetically, “It was only an hour and 20 minutes, is that okay?” The best answer was probably not the one I gave: “Only an hour and 20 minutes? I didn’t notice.”

Most horrifying date I’ve been on – Watching my date beat a horse. Okay, it was a digital horse. We were at an arcade and there was a horse-racing game, and he projected that if using the crop a little bit improved the horse’s time a little bit, then using it a lot would improve the horse’s speed a lot… I watched in horror and squealing protest as he beat the living daylights out of our horse. He will forever remain in my mind as the animal abuser. Near miss, there.

Most boring date I’ve been on – a mini-golf center that thinks mini-golf means using a putter to gently tap a ball across a small green. No windmills, no bridges, no loop-de-loops, no fun. Conversation with the guy wasn’t scintillating either. We swapped dating stories the entire time. If you need to discuss other people’s bad dates to liven up your own, what does that say about things?

Funniest date I’ve been on -  I like to let the guy lead on dates. So when he suggested ice cream in Borough Park, I didn’t murmur a word of protest. The affable (and loud) guy behind the counter of Sprinkles wished us a hearty mazal tov upon our recent engagement, and when we explained that there hadn’t been one, he wished us an equally hearty mazal tov upon our impending engagement. We both waited to laugh until we were out the door, ice cream in hand. We spent the rest of the date running around the playground across the street. When I got home my sister said that she heard I’d had a good time – from her pack of friends hanging out at the ice cream store.

Well, talk about too much success. My simulation was so accurate that it got caught in an infinite loop. It’s still dating in the background as I type. I think I’ll leave it there  just in case, in a few days or so, it finally calls the Wedding() subroutine.

When I posed the question, I was actually serious in a sardonic way. That is, the first three commandments I envisioned were:

Thou shalt not be a doctor-in-training

Thou shalt live in the greater New York City metropolitan area

Thou shalt know the exact standards of treatment your date expects and alter your behavior accordingly.

And then, somewhere around commandment ten I was going to tuck in: “I am thy God who split the Red Sea to take thee out of Egypt, and I can make a shidduch too.”

None of the suggestions quite fit the style I was going for, but maybe that’s why I had trouble in the first place – it’s too narrow. But it was fun anyway. So thanks everyone!

But maybe some families are like that. A bunch of very similar bunnies all popped out of the same chocolate mold. Or maybe there’s some generalization you can make about the family that also applies to every member of it. Like “they’re all so different! I’m sure you’ll love the daughter that I never met.”

Anyway, this one is a fun post about family. Enjoy.

Dear Bad4,

Last week’s post about communicating through the shadchan reminded me of weird feedback I get after some of my dates. Things like “she needed to go to bathroom after drinking all that diet coke” or “you took her to a shopping mall where she’s bound to meet friends” or basically, “you should have read her mind.” Why don’t girls tell you these things on dates? How else am I supposed to know?

Sincerely,

A Long-Time Dater

If you’ve been reading marriage books and shalom bayis books, set them aside. The married woman (defined as wedded for more than one year) “owns” you, and therefore treats you as a possession. But if she doesn’t own you yet, then you’re dealing with quite a different animal.  And there is one thing you should know about most women: they don’t want to inconvenience you.

Trust me on this one. Someone lifted my phone and sold it to a ghetto-dweller last week. When I finally made contact with the guy, it took him about 5 minutes to make me feel guilty for wanting my phone back. I mean, he paid for it, right? I couldn’t demand it back without compensating him his loss. And since he didn’t have a car and it was cold and snowy, and he was doing me a favor by returning it, I couldn’t really demand that he pay to take a bus to my neighborhood to do me the favor of returning his purchase, right? I should go pick it up from his.

Then I felt guilty about inconveniencing the cops over what was really just petty theft. And depriving my male accompaniment of the timely comfort of his supper. And even after I got my phone back smelling like marijuana, containing Pepper50 in my contacts list, and sporting a photo of its temporary owner as the background, I still felt sorry for the guy in the backseat of the police car.

I mean, I could have replaced the phone for a hundred bucks and I would only have had to enter  145 contacts by hand and it wouldn’t be such a big deal to fly cross-country for vacation the next day without a phone… really I didn’t need to put all those people through all that trouble, did I? The guilt will haunt me for all eternity.

Or, well, for a few weeks at least.

If you read articles about why women don’t succeed in the workplace (I do), they tend to list the same set of crimes: not demanding higher salaries, not negotiating, not interrupting men when they speak at meetings. Sometimes not speaking at meetings at all unless asked directly. Not arguing, disagreeing, or grabbing the best projects ahead of everyone else.

Why? Well, they don’t want to embarrass anyone. Or put down anyone. They don’t want to seem aggressive or greedy or difficult to please. They don’t want to be difficult, disagreeable, or inconvenient. And they’re not even on dates with strangers when they exhibit these behaviors!

So, no. She will not interrupt the flow of your conversation to ask if you can move someplace warmer. She will not disturb your walk along the beach for the small matter of a bathroom break. She will not tell you that she’s fleishigs when you take her Starbucks; she’ll manage with tea.

After all, the conversation or the walk is going so well, and you might feel bad about Starbucks and what if you don’t have a backup location to go to? It would put you on the spot and you might feel bad or even resentful or think that she’s pushy and it’s not important, really…

…Not important until the shadchan asks how the date was and she can’t remember how it went because all she can remember is needing the bathroom.

Like it? Hate it? Oh I hope not. If there’s anything I can do to help ease that feeling, let me know. I’d hate to think you were upset or discomfited by anything we did.

Am I simply too well bred? Too cowardly? Or simply lacking the strength of emotion required to propel such behavior? Who knows. But it’s still fun behavior to contemplate.

(I) Qualitative impairment in social normalization, as manifested by at least two of the following:

(A) marked impairments in the use and comprehension of social conventions
(B) failure to develop career aspirations and dress preferences in lockstep with peers
(C) a lack of spontaneous seeking to share and duplicate the life experience of the peer group

(II) Restricted repetitive & stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities, as manifested by at least one of the following:

(A) encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal for the demographic
(B) apparently inflexible adherence to specific, functional routines or rituals in opposition to non-functional social conventions
(C) persistent preoccupation with purpose, point, or utility of behaviors
(III) The disturbance causes clinically significant impairments in social, occupational, or other important areas of interaction with the given peer group.

(IV) There is no clinically significant general delay in language (E.G. single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years)

(V) There is no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or in the development of age-appropriate self help skills, adaptive behavior (other than in social interaction) and curiosity about the environment in childhood.

(VI) Criteria are not met for another specific Pervasively Weird Disorder or Antisocial Mania.”

Do you ever get the feeling that everyone else in society was issued a manual at birth, or maybe upon graduation, but somehow you were left out of the distribution list? I imagine this is how an Aspie feels when everyone is laughing at a well-turned bit of sarcasm. Which is why I decide to call it Social Asperger’s.

Every now and then the fog of incomprehension that often hovers between me and today’s yeshivish/ultra-orthodox Jewish norms lifts, and I see the light, and a big “Eureka!” pops out of my mouth. I bask in smugness at unraveling the mystery, when suddenly I realize: everyone else knew this all along.

I had one of these “aha” moments while rereading this post last week. In the post, I complain that I’m branded as “immature” and “unready for marriage” because I don’t have plans for a career yet. This struck me as unfair because my flexibility was what left room for a spouse in my life.

I laughed when I reread it because now I have the opposite problem. Having chosen a field, I’m considered too nerdy or smart to date anyone in any other field. Having launched a career, I’m now considered too career-oriented and geographically bound to date pretty much anyone.

Catch-22, right? You just can’t win. I mean, what kind of career would have satisfied these Women? Only one that’s more obviously transplant-able and non-ambitious. Like masseuse maybe?

Or – oh. I see.

OT, PT, SP, and SE.

Ooh. I get it. Now I get it.

Man, I am slow.