Some commenters at the shidduch Haiku post did the math and calculated that I’ve gone on at least 16 dates a day if you just count the Starbucks dates. Since I’ve also gone to lounges, museums, parks, and amusement venues, you can imagine how busy I must be.
Truth is, I find it hard to keep track of all those guys. Sometimes it’s as many as six a day. I confess I’ve taken to keeping a little log in my phone where I record the fellow’s name, the date we went out, where we went, and the highlights of the date. At the end of each day I review the log and cross off all those who fall below the median.
Dating like this is quite a chore and is impinging on my personal time. Honestly, I don’t seem to do anything all day except brush my teeth, do my hair, and sit myself down in the passenger seat. I can’t remember the last time I just relaxed against a haystack chewing a stalk of grass. Sometimes I really wish I was married.
Apparently, the commenters don’t go out nearly so often. I don’t know why they’re so upset, to be honest. It must be nice when dates are these rare and exciting things. Which makes me wonder, how often do normal people go out?
Okay, seriously. Is there a normal dating pattern? Because mine (which does not include 16 dates a day) has these long periods of as much as 3-5 months when nobody on the planet wants to go out with me at all. Then suddenly everyone seems to want to, very briefly, in about 2-3 months. Notably, the stagnant periods always coincide with vacations while the busy periods tend to match up perfectly with midterms and finals.
Someone once told me she went out with a new guy every week. That’s pretty steady – and pretty frequent, by my estimation. But what do I know? She was a perfectly ordinary Flatbush maidel and I’m the strange girl in the ponytail and sneakers.
Do some people date steady? A new guy every night? A new girl every week? One a month? Every two months? How does it work? What’s your dating pattern?
Below is a plot detailing male interest in Bad4 as a function of the academic semester. A distinct pattern can be noted in the correspondence between the peaks and peak stress periods in academic life. Causes of this correlation are still being investigated.
Bad for Shidduchim 
Perhaps you should be looking for potential beaux whose timetables are similar to yours, not those where bein hazmanim is their only downtime in the year?
Keep your spirits up – the best is yet to come!
i use spss to keep track of my dates. this way i could run correlation analysis right away 😉
an idea would be to go out with guys who have similar semester scheduling with their bain hazmanim not coinciding with your finals
Does every guy have to have a “bein hazmanim?” Are there no eligible guys who are also attending a college, rather than learning in Yeshivah? Or is “learns all the time night and day”* a prerequisite for a good shidduch?
(*Random digression: Assume you accelerated your average studious bochur to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. If he was learning the whole time, then he would technically be learning straight, non-stop for days, weeks, years even (according to Earth’s reference frame.) He’d have to slow down before Shabbat, though, unless he wanted an epic Three Year Sabbath.)
Harryer –
I doubt the boys she’s dating would know what “SPSS” and “correlation analyses” are.
Never knew that Bein Hazmanim is between November and January…some strange calender you got there, guys.
Adam, you sound like Bad4’s type. Excuse me, I made a mistake. What you wrote has me wondering if Bad4 posted under someone else’s name. ….why not date her? (Not around midterms or finals, that is.)
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I will explain the patterns starting from Aug to Jan… End of august to mid september is often right before the beginning of elul zman.. It has a feeling of newness and an appreciation for life [because we are about to start a new mesechta or a new yeshiva etc](plus a bit of trepidation for the days to come)… At the point we start thinking about the things that are missing in life (ie – someone to share a life with besides our other cholent-eaters and a family) so that is around when there is the first urgency to go out again after a nice long summer b’hz… Then around the middle of elul is just spent getting ready for the yomim noraim…. So dating is out till succos because we rationalize that there is no time. Then around succos you see your second spike… The final spike in that part of the year comes from the guys that decided to really put in a good zman but are getting antsy to “get a move on in life”… Not quite sure why it happens then but guys generally date around those times (if they aren’t the consistently dating type).
It looks like the Nov to Jan is really a reflection of the secular calendar- ie, break for Thanksgiving, break for Christmas, and the March to May is the break for Easter…so it makes a lot of sense to date then. It happens to be midterms and finals, but still…
I go out like once or twice a year, though I just had three dates in a month, but that’s quite rare. Still I certainly don’t admire propensity of dating…
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