Seeing that I've been dating someone for a respectable amount of time now, and that things have been going rather well, it was recently decided that I should probably meet the other woman in his life – his mother.  It made sense because a few weeks ago I had convinced him that the 12-hour train ride to meet my Christian family in rural Pennsylvania was going to be fun.  And I even took it to be a good sign that he didn’t break up with me immediately upon returning to Brooklyn.  In fact, shortly thereafter he mentioned that his mother was coming to town and perhaps I should meet her.

I had met previous boyfriend’s parents before, but only once since I had decided to convert to Judaism.  I had been dating a wayward young man who had been raised in a strict Orthodox family.  My Conservative conversion was never going to be good enough for his family – which was clearly articulated to me through him prior to any actual familial introduction.  When I finally met that boyfriend's mother her first question was, “Well, are you going to miss Christmas?”  Yikes!  I will say that for all of the “you must break up with the shiksa” telephone conversations I occasionally overheard him have with his parents, his family was always kind or at least passably indifferent to my face.

Fortunately, in my current relationship, I was not aware of any prejudices against me arising from my Christian upbringing.  My boyfriend did say that his mother asked if our relationship was serious.  To which he responded, “No ma, it’s not serious, we tell jokes all the time.”

All joking aside, I do care about him a great deal, but who knows if years from now I will be looking back reminiscing about this weekend as the time I met my mother-in-law.  Truth be told we’ve only been together since Purim, so there was no sense in getting the cart before the horse.  But I was still nervous anyway about meeting his mother.

One of the ways I alleviate stress is by cooking, but since I’m without easy access to my own kitchen I resorted to my other nervous tic – cleaning.  My boyfriend really hates change and is not the meticulously neat and tidy (or crazy) person I am, so I knew I would have to trick him into my stress-reduction plan to clean his apartment.  When we talking out our weekend plans, I worked in trips to his place to pick up dirty laundry around trips to my place where I have laundry in my building.  I even snuck out early one morning to pick up bagels – and a new shower curtain.

When the appointed day arrived, my boyfriend found me scrubbing the bathroom floor wondering aloud if we should replace the shabby (and ugly) bathroom rugs. “No, my mom bought them for me,” which made me glad I hadn’t already pitched them out.  But we got her call earlier than we expected that she had landed and was on her way to get a cab.  I was still at his place nervously tidying up.  One of the first things she noticed was how clean the place was.  “This is not my son’s apartment,” she said eyeing the small vase of flowers in the bathroom.  I couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing.  

The next night over dinner I again found myself nervous and talking up a storm.  But this was where we got it out in the open – my Christian family and my conversion.  To my relief she appeared rather curious about why anyone would choose to be Jewish, and what exactly was the process I was going through.  “Ah, you probably know more about Judaism than most Jews!” she declared.  Our only potential sticking point was our conflicting views on Israel (I recently took part in the New Israel Fund’s video Love, Hate and the Jewish State expressing opinions I would gather from our conversation she would disagree with) but I wisely kept my mouth shut.

So, as I hope my relationship with my boyfriend continues to grow, so will my relationship with his mother.  I find it such a relief that my family history does not appear at all problematic to her – and, in fact, she seems pleased her son has found a nice Jewish girl.

I met someone special at Purim this past year.  It wasn’t love at first sight, not at all (after all, I was wearing a mask when we met). And it took some persistent and clever wooing on his part, but I am now very smitten.

It’s been a few months now, but my heart still races whenever I see him.  I get this big goofy grin on my face when I am with him.  He makes me want to be a better person.  In the past I’ve described myself as a conscientious omnivore, but he really challenges me (in good ways) to think about my food choices.   Needless to say things were going quite well.   We had gotten to the point in our relationship where he offered me some space in his apartment to keep some of my personal items, like a toothbrush and some clothes, stuff like that.

And that was just around the same time my lease in my apartment was up – so I moved.  Downsized along with the economy.  But what had been an hour-long commute between our separate boroughs, now became a 10-minute walk (shorter by bike).  And in my new place I would have a garden for the first time – all good things that somewhat made up for the fact that the apartment I was moving into was significantly smaller than my last one.  Whereas over the last two years I’ve been able to host 30-person sit-down dinners, Passover seders and other fun foodie events, the new place did not offer such accommodations.

But I didn’t despair since my new roommates appeared accommodating and understanding that I had lots of kitchen stuff and welcomed me to put it to good use in our dollhouse-like space.  That was until my stuff arrived crammed into my tiny U-Haul and seeing box after box fill this tiny new apartment brought dread to the dollhouse residents.

Storage seemed like the only plausible solution, but not having access to my kitchen tools seemed like an unfortunate punishment.  After talking to my boyfriend and his roommates, they offered me space in their comparably palatial kitchen.  I, in turn offered to cook for them to express my gratitude.  I seemed like a good deal, until I began to move myself in.

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Doing a book signing is not at all unlike a date.  It either went wonderful and left you glowing afterwards (and perhaps smiling for a day or two to come) or it skidded and awkwardly jerked along until, at the end, you said to yourself, "Thank God!  It's over!" and then you ruminated for the rest of the evening about all the things that went wrong.

The good news is that, of the half-dozen or so "Supergirls Speak Out" events I've done so far, only one was a borderline-flop.  The other five were great events where lots of people came, I sold lots of books, and it was totally worth the makeup!  But I couldn't get over just how much my poorly-attended event felt like being on a bad date!  After an "intimate" reading at a bookstore, I stopped at a cafe and got some pie, laid in bed, and watched Beerfest in the hopes of salvaging my night.

(Although... bad dates sometimes require three slices of pie to remedy.)

Luckily, it's not just me.  The majority of the first-time authors I know have drawn skimpy crowds to events, and it's something that happens that we all accept.  But the lack of attendance at book readings and signings has me worried about Generation Y, and whether we're less literary of a generation than our predecessors. After all, celebrities draw jostling crowds to Virgin Megastores any day of the week... but I don't think that most Gen Y-ers could point out a bestselling author in a crowd.  Admittedly, I'm talking about two very different kinds of celebrity here, but I'm starting to wonder whether free literary events are uninteresting or irrelevant to the mainstream of Gen Y, and it worries me!

What do you think?

Jason Mesnick, the single father from Seattle, won over female hearts all across America last spring on The Bachelorette when he lost to the surprise pick, snowboarder and walking fashion-faux pas (pink shoelaces, anyone?) Jesse Csincsak. It was clear, to me at least, that Bachelorette DeAnna Pappas was not really looking for a nice guy to settle down with, but rather a fun, adventurous dude. Granted, DeAnna was a Greek Orthodox girl from Georgia, but, in my mind I was wondering how she could pass up the nice Jewish father.

The outpouring of female interest in Jason led to hundreds of women calling into ABC to request that he be made the next Bachelor. And it worked: on January 5^th all of the many adoring and mostly female fans got their wish. Jason started off with 25 beautiful women, many of whom had watched Jason get his heart broken by DeAnna and felt like they knew him already. Take, for example, stalker Shannon who seemed more enthralled by getting to meet a pseudo-celebrity then actually developing a genuine and organic bond with the man himself. She, along with many of the other women, seemed to come on too strong (there was one woman who admitted she'd made an Oprah-inspired "vision board" covered with pictures of Jason so that she could visualize their life together). There was also my initial favorite Jillian, a bubbly brunette from Canada who caught Jason's attention with her theory on how you can tell everything about a man by what condiments he puts on his hot dog.

But, in the end, there were only two women left standing hoping to get that final rose. In one corner stood Molly, an initial front-runner who shared the first overnight date with Jason in a tent early on in the season. It was clear Jason was digging her. She was extremely confident and poised seeming always to be reciting words she had memorized from a "How to Win the Bachelor" handbook, rather than speaking from the heart. In the other corner stood Melissa, a former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader who laid her heart on the line and admitted to always being the "dumpee." Melissa was cute and petite and seemed to be the most genuine and least psychotic of all of the women.  Most viewers seemed to be rooting for Melissa - myself included.

Now what happens next is all a blur. ABC chose to make a few very strategic - and in my opinion, very selfish  and inappropriate - choices all in the name of drumming up viewers.

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To say that my love life has had its ups and downs is probably an understatement.  But with Valentine’s Day right around the corner, it seems like a good enough time to reflect on my romantic situations (kind-of like a Aseret Yemei Teshuvah on my love life) to see what I’ve learned from the people I dated in the past year.

This time last year I was flirting with a handful of guys, but not really dating anyone special.  I had broken up with my boyfriend over New Year’s and by February I had several new suitors.  Each had their positives as well as their negatives, but no one really stood out.  However it was the Episcopalian and the Guy-Who-Taught-Me-The-Word-Nebbish who both demonstrated why I ought to be more cautious with men still pining over their ex-girlfriends.  It was also during this time of causal dating that I got very good at clearly articulating expectations during the non-date date.

Spring rolled around as did a few friends who set me up with their Nice Jewish Boys.  My favorite was Appendicitis Boy who missed our first date on account of having his appendix removed (you only get to use that excuse once).  He was sweet, far more intellectual than he cared to admit, had terribly unhealthy habits (like smoking, drinking too much, and chili dogs) and a caring person if emotionally unavailable.  The only marriage prospects he offered would have been a quickie Las Vegas drive-through wedding with the promise of subsequent annulment.  I'm not a big fan of Vegas.

The summer was hot and sultry and during one steamy rooftop concert, I met a man who would have been perfect – if only he didn’t have a cat.  We went on several dates and everything was going fine until he mentioned the orange fur ball waiting for him at home.  Not only am I not a cat person, but I’m terribly allergic – making Fluffy an instant dealbreaker.  

But then I started looking for a new job and decided to put dating on the back burner for a while.  Interviews and first dates have a lot in common, but I needed to focus my energy on jump-starting my stalled career instead of chasing/being chased by boys.  Which of course meant  I met a guy.  Ari was wonderful even if he and I didn’t share the same tastes in food, and he really broke my heart when he ended things.  So I became even more determined not to date while looking for a job.  Since I was single, I ended up taking very good friend as my date to my sister’s wedding.  It was terrific to have such a great friend fly out to Tucson with me, but even so I was sharply aware that I didn’t have someone special of my own while surrounded by my family.

Winter began and as others began coupling, I continued to dodge the dating bullet and focused on my career prospects.  But my resolve weakened after the tremendous response to a post I had written wrenched me out of my dating hiatus.  New Year’s found me home sick on the couch with a new boyfriend and a No Reservations marathon.  However, Bike Boy and I were clearly not right for each other and by the end of January I was over both the cold and the boy.

So what did I learn?  That I seem to be spending a lot of time with Mr. Wrong and have no real prospect on finding Mr. Right. (but it hasn't been for lack of trying!)  I still haven't yet made my big career move. (not for the lack of trying either!)  But I'm not sure whether or not I should get back in the dating saddle.  I know that I want to be with someone who appreciates good food, has a sense of humor (particularly one compatible with my own) is emotionally available, intellectually curious, who doesn't have any cats and might actually want to get married someday.  This person would also get big bonus points if he were Jewish.

Now, why is that so hard to find?

Let's face it: Valentine's Day-the day which supposedly celebrates romance, and love and cupid's delights--is a scam.

February 14 - an arbitrary date - has morphed from a debatable legend about Saint Valentine's martyrdom into a gluttonous, competitive, commercialized day whose focus has nothing to do with true romance. Rather, V-Day promotes the purchase of an image: of fancy chocolates, overpriced roses, silly teddy bears, mylar balloon, and "special" dinners.

Silly may it be, like everything American and commercial, the "holiday's" (and I use that term lightly) potency is tangible. There's been "backlash" by singles--those who feel empowered by their own singledom, and party promoters looking to capitalize off of other people's manufactured loneliness to throw bashes and bar crawls. And apparently, according to some skilled googling, the day has also become SAD-Singles Awareness Day. As if, as a single person, you weren't aware of this every other day of the year.

Now personally--and I like chocolate, teddy bears and flowers--I've always been confused by the "holiday." On the one hand, while my nieces send me little love notes, and offices have secret valentines, Victoria's Secret also showcases a ridiculous number of red and heart-printed borderline-skanky lingerie for the holiday.

Valentine's Day, to me, just doesn't jive. In fact, it sorta gives me the heebie jeebies.

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• Nihilist Guy, 1997. "I don't really get why you care about this so much."
  
  He was an actor. After we broke up I got the lead role in The Diary of Anne Frank. I was pretty sure it was because I was the only Jewish girl at my high school, or at least the only one in the theater department.
• Unitarian Guy, 2002. "No, don't worry, my parents will love you, you're not really Jewish."
• Reform Guy, 2004. To him, Judaism was neither a cultural identity nor a religion; it was an intellectual tradition. He gave me books: Hannah Arendt, Leon Uris, Gertrude Stein. They all had his notes in the margins, disagreements with the texts. He liked Yiddish because he thought it was full of jokes. We only kissed once. I kept all the books.
• Secular Guy, 2005. He told me he was a Buddhist, despite the fact that he'd never taken any courses in or read any books about the religion. I took him to a meditation class. I signed him up for a Daily Buddhist Quote newsletter. He told me I was too religious for him. He's married now. She's not Jewish. I believe they had a civil ceremony. I have no idea if he still tells people he's a Buddhist.
• Conservadox Guy, 2006. I cannot prove this, of course, but I am pretty sure that he hated Judaism. He wasn't a self-hating Jew, he just didn't really care much for the rituals of religion. Yet he did them anyway, using a block of wood to divide his sink into a fleyshig and milshig side. He used the religion he couldn't stop making fun of to his advantage when he needed to: because he wanted to leave the office early on Friday afternoons, he kept up the ruse of being observant. He kept a kippah in his back pocket and put it on his head just before he walked into the office and took it back off as soon as he left for the day. Sometimes on Friday afternoons we went to MOMA or the park. We never went to shul.
  
  On Saturdays he made me carry his money for him because there wasn't an eruv around his building and he couldn't bear the thought of violating the Sabbath, even though it was 'stupid' and 'a relic.' He was thrilled that I didn't adhere as closely to the rules as he inexplicably did. I realized he was using me as his very own Jewish Shabbos Goy. I should have realized something was wrong when he refused to stop calling me "Lilith," because I wasn't good enough for Hebrew pronunciation of my name.
  
  He's married now. She's Orthodox.

• Culturally Jewish Guy, 2008. "I always wanted to fall in love with an Israeli girl."
  
  I had to break it to him that while my name was Israeli, I wasn't. But he stayed. And so I told him the story of how I got my name (and how my name got me). He stayed longer. And kept staying.

The last time my husband and I had sex after we separated, I wore a Chai pendant necklace and he had on a Saint-somebody necklace.

We were doing it missionary-style and his Saint was dangling next to my Chai. I didn’t want to point out the ridiculousness of our new necklaces, and the fact that we NEVER wore these when we were married. The fact that I am a Jew and he a Christian became painfully obvious.

“We’re both wearing our necklaces,” he said. “Yep," I responded, trying not to think about it. I was trying to just get off and not pay attention to possibly why we didn't work. I didn’t ask him what the Saint stood for. I didn’t want to know. He knew what the Chai was because I talked about it a lot while making my Jewish calendar. But he never talked about Saints. He talked about Christmas but he didn’t believe in God, and yet somehow I drove him to need a Saint? I guess I can’t complain, I also needed something holy after our separation.

One of the last questions our couples therapist asked was, “Did you have a problem with her being Jewish?” To be honest, I don’t think that was our essential problem, but it was a major difference. It wasn’t a God thing. It was a family and cultural thing. When we were happy our religious beliefs were never the issue. We were both reform in our religious ideas and politically very liberal, but when things got bad, I had " the loud Jewish family,” and his family was “white trash.” Yes, not healthy.

If someone pinned me down and forced me to tell them what I thought about his family Christmas, I would blurt out "I fucking hated it!" But I wouldn’t admit that in public. I hated going to West Virginia during Hanukkah and pretending it didn’t matter. I hated buying $500 worth of presents and opening them on Christmas Day. I hated Christmas cookies and Christmas decorations, and I hated being away from my family’s Chinese food and movie night. I wanted to be the Jewish girlfriend and Jewish wife who was “cool” with the holiday that made everyone happy and giving. But I wasn’t, and I couldn’t admit it.

I dreaded that trip to West Virginia. We always got into a big fight before. It wasn’t Christmas per se, as I actually have never dated a Jewish man, but it was his Christmas. It was the fact that I felt excluded from the fun cause I was Jewish.

Do I think it would be easier if I married someone Jewish? Yes, possibly.

Will I? I don’t know. I’m dating both Jews and non-Jews and I like them all. As a Reform Jew, I walk a line in modern society. I am religiously defined, but I also am an assimilated liberal American. I fear losing someone I really love because he’s not Jewish, but when I’m really honest, I can say that I want my children to be Jewish, and that there is a indescribable cultural understanding when I meet a Jewish man.

I’m curious what will happen. I’ll let you know. I have date tomorrow with a Jewish man.

We all know that “in a relationship” status on Facebook doesn’t guarantee a ‘Happily Ever After.’   Just because a Nice Jewish Girl is dating a Nice Jewish Boy doesn’t mean that they are automatically right for each other, as I discovered with Bike Boy.  Although our relationship started sweetly enough, we ended it with a mutual understanding we really were not a good match.

Unfortunately, I haven’t always gone through such amicable splits – like the guy who dumped me a few days after we put a $500 deposit on my credit card for our vacation in Sonoma or the guy who told me after several weeks of, um...intimacy that not only was he not over his ex-girlfriend, but if he was he would rather be dating someone else (how low on this list was I?).  Okay, so I’ve never been dumped by post-it note or text message, but I know that my boys have trolled on-line dating sites before we ended things and have been cheated on more times than I’d care to admit (on the bright side two of my exes eventually married and had children with the women they were cheating on me with).

So what does Judaism say about breakup etiquette?  Isn’t the Ketubah just a pre-nuptial agreement that states that the husband must provide food, clothing and marital relations to his wife, and that he will pay a specified sum of money if he divorces her?  It sounds pretty good until you consider the misogynistic process of a traditional Jewish divorce and how her ex-husband can refuse to grant a Get, thus denying her the ability to remarry.

But what are Nice Jewish Boys and Girls taught about dating?  Since I’m thinking about casting my lot exclusively within the Tribe I’m curious about what I could come to expect among the yids.  Anyone have any breakup tales to share?

You have to give the federation controlled "independent" NY Jewish Week credit. Most Jewish periodicals bitch and whine like Amy Klein about Jewish "stereotypes." But the Jewish Week,  which broadly services the entire NY Jewish community all the way from the Conservadox on the Left to the Left-Wing Modern Orthodox on the Right, is comfortable operating within such...expectations.

Offering advice on how to date cheaply, Alan Zeitlin writes of one poor soul,

On the third date, if he really liked a woman, he used to take her take to dinner and a Broadway show, but now he can only afford dinner.

The hardship of our community has hit a new level of suffering. I had heard rumors of settling for off-Broadway shows on third dates, but the continued economic crisis is much worse than even I realized.

“When the bill comes, you’ve got to have a poker face,” he said. “I’ve seen guys recently who suddenly forget they’re on a date and itemize things on the bill and look disturbed. They look like they’re in physical pain and here they went to all this trouble and they end up not looking very attractive.

Speaking from experience, it may not be the bill. I can tell you that this is most common if you find out at the last minute that your date is a vegetarian, or keeps a modifed kosher existence and only eats "dairy out." Gentlemen, when dating a Jewish Week type of woman, always, always have lactaid pills on hand. It's far more likely you will need that pill than you will a condom. Be realistic.

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"I know this girl, and she'd be perfect for you," I said to a single man-friend, "except, she has a cat." Normally, I'd never include such information, but I've wised up and realize today's man, as eager as he might seem to settle down, is still full of excuses not to.

"What do you mean she'd be perfect for me? If she owns a cat, that's impossible. Even if she were willing to send the cat back where it came from, like Hades, the fact that she took it in to begin with, says enough." That she has a big heart and loves to cuddle? "It says she's not for me, or any other normal guy. A guy who admits to liking cats is just not right in the head."

"Robert De Niro, in that Ben Stiller movie, you know Focker."

"'Meet the Parents,' and let me stop you there. That was a line in a movie. He was paid to say that crap about cats making you work for their affections, that dogs are easy. The truth is, cats are stuck up and have a sense of entitlement, and the people who like them are worse. And I don't believe those people who say they love both. If they have a cat and dog in their house, it's always because the spouse forced them into the cat. It's like those people who like cilantro. It's just one of those things. Either you love it, or you hate it. There's no middle ground."

"Forget it then. I don't know what I was thinking. I bet she takes baths, too." I knew this would really set him off.

"I bet she has incense in her house, and one of those holders for it, like mini skis."

"And she listens to Sade on repeat and puts too many pillows on the bed. And she's into needlepoint. I get it."

"She better have incense. Cat litter and all."

"Seriously, you really don't want to meet her just because she has a cat?!"

"You just don't get it, do you? It's because you're a chick. Women with cats are their own kind of crazy. It's like you half-Jews. Yeah, yeah, I know, you were raised Jewish, can read Hebrew. But you know what? Every single halvesy I know is nuts, but they're all good in bed, so you can put the knife down."

"Oh, are we?"

"It's just my experience, but I always know when a chick's Jewish in bed. She always swallows."

"Come on..."

"It's true. Jewish women hate to clean."

"..."

You're either a bath person or a shower person. That, I get. But always swallow, always spit, I'm not buying it. Besides, I'm technically half-Jewish, which acording to his logic means I don't mind some light housework. The point is, you might do either. I shower out of necessity, even though I might favor a bath. I'm not much of a bath girl, but I love the idea of soaps, of soaking the dead skin off, rolling it from beneath my nails as I scrape it off. Push back cuticles and grate all your calluses off. The big ideas come in the bath.

The night after the conversation with my friend, I took a bath. I didn't light a candle or play music, but liquid soap was invited. I watched the runnels of cloudy water, streams, really. They looked like a village, the kind you see from up above, or in a video game, where you'll soon need to pick your best players and armor to fight a Cyclopes.  Then the water looked like ocean cream, and the peak of my breast poking out was an iceberg, the great mass of me underneath the water, unforeseeable. It's nice to sometimes see yourself that way, as a ringer. When I dried off, I dialed my friend. "I didn't mention that she's quite stacked." I expected that he'd say, "Why didn't you say so in the first place?" Instead he replied, "It's like I told you, it doesn't matter how much she's got going for her. It's too much to handle a woman with two pussies."

Then I took a shower.

Stephanie Klein, author of Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

If you put a bunch of Jews in a room with a bunch of free alcohol, what do you get? Drunk.

Well, that, and some potential new pairings to start the year off right. Considering my second career as a shadchan, I'm happy to report a couple of hookups that resulted from the Very Jewcy Holiday Party, with (some) names changed to protect the guilty. It's in bullet-point format because it helps me indulge my fantasy of being the Jewish Cindy Adams.

• Jewcy blogger Mia Rut, who is doing pretty well in the Jewish dating department despite some initial uncertainties, met her now-boyfriend at our holiday party. He's a Jewcy commenter, but we'll just call him Bike Boy.
• The roommate of a Jewcy staffer made a love connection with a guy who randomly showed up to the Jewcy party without having any idea what it was. He's not Jewish, but we're OK with that. And, more importantly, so is the roommate.
• Another Jewcy blogger, the ubiquitous Max Gross, was offered at least two phone numbers by comely young lasses in attendance.
• My boyfriend's friend "S" and my friend "E" were not looking to meet anyone at the Jewcy party, but three dates and several racy text message conversations later, I think it's safe to call them a couple.
• Jewcy contributor Patrice "The Assimilated Negro" Evans may or may not have been successfully set up with someone I may or may not have forced to come to the party just to meet him.

...and these are only the unions we know about. If you a) met someone at the Jewcy party and want to tell your story, b) have already broken up with the person you met at the Jewcy party and want to make sure the whole internet knows about it, or c) want to come to the next party (which is on January 22nd, for all you kids who were cool enough to make it to the end of this post) and figure you should start laying the groundwork for your potential hookup now, you can post about it in the comments.

Writing for Jewcy has really spiced up my dating life. A few weeks ago some guy asked me out after I contemplated Jewish dating and I blogged the date.  But things never went any further and in fact I met someone new at the Jewcy Holiday Party.

Getting to know this new guy, we’ll call him Bike Boy, only proves what a small small Jewish world we live (and date) in.  During the initial stages of the “getting to know you” dance we both realized we were active in the organization Hazon although he was into the biking and I’m just there for the food.  And we discovered it was possible we could have run into each other before – in fact we realized we were at the same Purim party last year.

Having so much in common as well as a few mutual friends (as we would later discover through Facebook) really made me quickly feel comfortable with Bike Boy.  And as we discovered on our first date, we had a lot to say to one another (which ended around 1:00am when he finally looked at his watch and commented, “you are not going to believe how late it is!”)  A second and third date quickly followed - so lets just say things have been going very well.

However, I couldn’t help notice the other day that his Facebook profile proudly proclaimed that he was – single.  Okay, I realize it has only been a few weeks but we never really discussed what our relationship really was.  We’ve done plenty of things that could be easily identifiable as dates, but I have never really heard him refer to me as his girlfriend even though I’m pretty sure he is not dating anyone else.  We talk endlessly about food and current events and he even spent New Year’s Eve sitting on the sofa with me, a box of tissues, some Theraflu - although I was asleep by 11:00pm.  (It wasn't the most exciting of New Year's Eves, but it was sweet of him to stay with me when I was sick.) 

So how do you begin the are-we-ready-to-move-into-the-“in a relationship” Facebook status conversation?  I’m usually pretty upfront with these things, but he seems to duck the personal “what are we doing” conversations.  And I’m not sure I want to spring my thoughts on our relationship on him through a Facebook relationship update request (although probably blogging about it isn’t too subtle either).

Last week I kvetched whether or not my decision to be Jewish included an exclusivity clause in which required me forthwith to only date Jews. Among the varied comments on the post was one pro-Jew dating response from a nice Jewish boy who bolstered his argument with an invitation for drinks. More than a little curious and after some off-line discussions I agreed to meet him out for drinks, a little take-out and trivia night at a local bar. This was how it went:

7:28 – I’m sitting in a cute neighborhood coffee-shop/bar full of 20-somethings tapping away on their laptops waiting for Hebrewzzi to arrive. The music is good and I’m sipping on a $3 draft beer. Not so bad, the place has a very comfortable feel. The front door is open because it is a freakish rainy 60 degrees in New York City in December. Only two days ago is was bitterly cold with the occasional spastic cough of snow swirling down from the sky. I guess anything is possible.

7:34 – My stomach growls. Lunch was inadequate and too long ago. I hope he gets here soon so we can order food.

7:49 – Hebrewzzi arrives, but doesn't know what I look like. He calls my cell and waits to find the girl at the laptop who picks up her phone. We engage in the usual conversation, inquiring how one’s trip was and if the directions were helpful. I sense a slight bit of unease. Either one of us could be totally weird or crazy or both. After all he doesn't really know anything about me beyond what is on the blogs. This is really the blindest of dates.

7:53 – He’s read me on the Jew and the Carrot so he knows my love of food so in lieu of flowers, he has brought me a loaf of banana pumpkin cranberry chocolate-chip bread he baked himself. The bread is good, moist, a little dense. The flavors are very Fall-like although the enthusiasm of the cranberries overpower the pumpkin flavors. I think it is thoughtful of him and take a few bites to satiate my growling stomach.

8:01 – He grabs the menus from behind the bar so we can peruse our dining options – from the looks of things our best choices appear to be sushi, Thai or burritos.  But he tells me he doesn’t eat seafood or meat or tofu. A knot forms in my stomach as I’m immediately reminded of a guy I recently broke up with that was a dreadfully picky eater.

8:04 – Thankfully without too much fuss we settle on Thai – lots of vegetable options.

8:07 – Trivia night starts. It’s loud. I decide we will play on the same team. I call us Team Jewcy. The bar is pushing Mike’s Hard Lemonades for only a dollar.  He says they would have to pay him to drink those.  Hum.

8:10 – In between the trivia questions he tries to start a conversation. He asks me what I do for a living.  Yawn.

8:17 – The trivia questions start. The moderator comes over our table frequently to look at our sheet and I’m pretty sure to also look down my shirt.

8:23 – Hebrewzzi has an obscene amount of knowledge of pop culture – which is good because I’m completely useless with these types of trivia questions (I also suck at Boggle, Scrabble and Wii tennis). Although, neither of us could name five out of the last six American Idol winners.

8:27 – Our food arrives. The moderator comments to the crowd how trivia night and dinner at the bar makes the perfect first date. He has no idea.

8:38 – I’m on my second beer. I had ordered the Tom Yum Goong, which is great but very spicy. I’m drinking my beer way to fast.

8:55 – End of trivia Round 1. Hebrewzzi doesn’t know the national origin of cars as well as he thought he did (I didn’t have a clue). We are in 3rd place. He’s not terribly competitive, which is nice since neither am I. The food is good, the setting is nice – but its a shame I’m not actually getting to talk to him.

9:28 – Trivia Round 2. Okay, trivia night is officially a bad idea when trying to get to know someone. The moderator has clearly taken a liking to me (or my breasts) and keeps checking our answers, offering clues and obvious hints. Because of the game there really is no real good chance to interact with each other. Neither of us are any good at ‘naming that tune’ and listing a movie is was played in. However, I did know Mark Felt was Deep Throat.

9:51 – We’ve tied for last place. A ‘rock, paper, scissors’ game later with the other last place team and Hebrewzzi gains us the prestige of being the official last place team.  We win a bag of pork rinds (how appropriate!) and two Blow-Pops. We also won an extra“funny answer” prize and the moderator tosses my breasts a package of Hostess cupcakes. We rock. But to be fare we did very well on the actual trivia questions – it was the score skewing questions like “for ten points list 10 American wars in order of most America casualties” that killed us. Really? Who knows this stuff? (apparently the Columbia doctoral students seated next to us)

9:59 – Hebrewzzi is settling our bill. The moderator pulls me aside and says I should come back on more Wednesdays. He asks me to sign up for their email list. I dodge his sign-up list and furtive glances and we make it out the door into the unseasonably warm soggy weather. We are off to find another bar, one that is quiet and where we can actually talk.

10:07 – Another coffee shop/bar but this one only has two couples in it. A young lesbian couple and a woman and man in the midst of a break up. I hear her rip his heart out but then resort to tired clichés – “I want to stay friends” “ I want you to be happy” “I just don’t feel what you said you feel for me” Kinda sucks. I want to move tables, but there isn’t really anywhere else to go. The lesbians leave so it is just us four and the bartender.

10:17 – We tuck into some hot cocoa and conversation. I’m ignoring the fighting couple and the sound of the guy’s heart breaking so near to us.

10:19 – We have an easy back and forth. Hebrewzzi sounds like a nice, decent guy. Appears to be honest, sweet, thoughtful. It’s sometimes hard to tell about these things, but he doesn’t seem the type to pursue you and then not call after you’ve slept together.

10:34 – Hebrewzzi asks the “Why Judaism” question. It is a long answer – in fact I’m writing a book about it. He clearly has strong opinions about his Judaism, about his Jewish identity. But as promised, he isn’t religious and is not comfortable with it. I can understand that. I’m not all that comfortable in church services any more, but I do appear to have more of a regular Jewish practice than he does. And then there is the issue of geography. We are not geographically compatible. I’m a Manhattan girl and he is Queens boy. I realize there are trains that connect the two, but that is something to think about.

11:14 – We close the bar. At some point the defunct couple had left. The bartender cleans up around us seemingly undisturbed by our being there. Around us chairs are placed on top of tables, the floor is swept, and the coffee machine is washed. It is time for us to make our exit.

11:26 – We are standing next to the train stop ready to part ways. I think he is waiting for me to say something like, “so, how about we do this again sometime?” but he’s not saying it either so maybe he is on the fence? I’m not a big fan of rejection so I prattle on with some inane story about something totally irrelevant.

11:34 – Okay, I’m getting tired although he has a much longer trip home than I do. We say good night (again) and I turn away at the moment I think he is timidly leaning in for a kiss? Oh, I hate this awkward first date ritual – the uncertain first kiss game. For me, even the best first dates shouldn’t be obliged to end with a kiss. I tend to feel this action is far too formulaic and artificial at best. And as much fun as this date was with the evening of trivia and all, I didn’t really get much of an opportunity to get to know him. If I’m going to kiss him, I’d like to get to know him better rather than kissing him out of some ritualistic requirement.

I know there is some stupid “wait a couple of days to call” rule to first dates. However, I would have to assume Hebrewzzi is going read this post anyway. So I'll say it, he was a really nice guy. I know, I know that is totally a turn-off for some people, but he really was nice, polite, courteous. He offered to pay for dinner and our $3 beers (although I bought the cocoa) which I appreciated (I'm not old-fashioned - just broke). Sure there were moments of awkwardness one might expect when you've meet that person randomly online but I’d go out with him again - without trivia or computers.

But to be honest, the evening didn't convince me one way or another if I should only date Jews. Sure, it might have offered the suggestion that perhaps someday I should only date that yid. And ready as I am to do my final dunk in the mikvah, I'm not ready to completely swear off the goy.

I have been following with amusement and bemusement the courtship ritual of Hebrewzzi in the comments to Mia Rut’s post To Date a Jew. But not with wistfulness. It's been a quarter century since I had to play the dating game and I thank God for that. I was never good at it (or at any other game) and it was stacked against me.

A couple grafs below in this post I am going to blow Ms. Rut's cover. I know who she really is and what game she's up to. But first let me say a few words about the issue at hand.

Ms. Rut, nearly-converted, wonders whether she should date only Jews. And, new to the Jewish dating scene, she discovers something that Jewish girls have always known: all the Jewish guys out there are "obnoxious or arrogant or creepy and weird or too young or too old or gay or otherwise in some other way wildly incompatible."

Now, this is an incontrovertible fact based on the experiences of many generations of Jewish women (well, a few, the ones postdating the generations in which Jewish women were married off by their parents in their early teens).

A curious fact that Ms. Rut does not mention is that Jewish men have accumulated, over many generations (or at least those since the ones in which their parents married them off in their early teens), a similar data set. Ask the guys. Ask Phillip Roth. They'll tell you that all the Jewish women out there are not only obnoxious, arrogant, creepy, and weird, but also that they have moustaches.

Now we know why the Jews are just a fraction of a percent of the world's population. With such major incompatibility built into our genes, it's a wonder we've survived at all.

And this is the reason why Jewish parents have, through the course of evolution, been programmed to browbeat their progeny to marry other Jews. Obviously, if Jewish men and women were naturally attracted to each other, this would not be necessary. No, the race survives only because of the nagging gene.

But let me get to the point. Back in that nasty, brutish, and not-at-all-short period in which I had to date, I took seriously my responsibility to the tribe. I limited myself to dating Jewish women. This was not difficult in my case; the reaction of the female sex to my phone voice was such that I could easily have limited myself to dating no women at all. Quite naturally, I attributed this to the fact that the women I called saw through me and realized from the minute I said "hello" that I was obnoxious, arrogant, creepy, and weird.

Then came that awful year in which, in the space of just a few months, two women I had gone out with and who seemed to have overlooked my debilities told me that they had been two-timing and that they had decided that the other man was more worth their while. This, as you can imagine, was a horrible, castrating experience.

But, being a scientifically-minded kinda guy, I sat down to analyze the situation. I made note of the fact that both of these rejections had occurred on Tuesday evenings. I plotted out a graph of all the rejections I'd been subject to since high school (and I had quite a good-sized sample). They'd all been on Tuesdays.

Why Tuesday, I wondered? I put together another graph with the days of the week on the horizontal axis and the whereabouts of every Jewish woman I knew on the vertical axis. And I discovered that none of them were ever around on Monday nights. (Of course, there were some outliers, but these were obviously decoys meant to lead me off the track.)

So Hebrewzzi, your blog-based wooing of Ms. Rut is doomed. Here's the cold truth: every Monday night all the Jewish women in the world gather to plot out the humiliations they will inflict on Jewish guys during the week to come. Usually, they are so eager that they can't wait and they carry out their scheme very next night. Mia Rut has recently been inducted into this sisterhood. And you're at the top of her hit list.

Ask the obvious question: given the great Conspiracy of Jewish Women, how did I ever break free? How is it that I have been living happily with a Jewish woman for nearly 24 years?

It wasn't easy, but here’s the secret. I found a Jewish woman who was willing to go out with me. And when she was looking the other way, I married her.

The story has a tragic ending, however. All my sacrifice, my decision to forego all those beautiful shiksas, has been for naught. You see, my wife and I have produced four children. Two strapping guys, Mia. Two vivacious girls, Hebrewzzi. And none of them are obnoxious, arrogant, creepy, or weird. You get what I mean? They're not Jewish.

Read more by Haim at South Jerusalem

A couple of years ago I decided to convert to Judaism. No, I didn’t do it for a nice Jewish boy, I did it for a bunch of other reasons. Let me tell you, it kind of sucks to go through that alone. I had tons of stupid questions and often no one to ask them to. One question that seemed to come up a lot was: should I only date Jews?

To be clear: mostly when I say "date" here, I'm not simply talking about the joys of foreskin (versus none) because a drunken hookup is just a drunken hookup, be it with a goy or a rabbi-in-training. No, I'm talking about trying to find someone who will share endless holidays in faraway hometowns with embarrassing members of our extended families.

Of course my rabbi is unanimously in favor of my meeting a nice Jewish boy, even though he has never introduced me to any. My Christian parents are far more indifferent, although they would just prefer I stop bringing home losers. And I guess if I really stop to think about it I guess I'd like to meet someone who shares in most of my interests. Let's be honest, there are a lot of Jewish holidays when it sucks being alone. I mean, try having a Shabbat chicken dinner by yourself while your passive-aggressive vegetarian roommate sits in the living room having loud phone conversations with her obnoxious friends. Not a lot of fun on so many levels.

I live in New York, so compared to other parts of the country it should be relatively easy to meet that nice Jewish boy, right? I mean, there are lots of kinds of Jews. I guess I would need to find someone of the relatively same practices that I have. So, I've met guys at minyan. But just because they go to shul it doesn't mean they are not obnoxious or arrogant or creepy and weird or too young or too old or gay or otherwise in some other way wildly incompatible.

When I first hit the New York City young 20s/30s (which is code for singles) Jewish scene it was kind of weird how frequently I got asked out. Was it because I was blonde? Or because I didn’t look like their mothers? So I tried JDate, which I'm pretty sure is a requirement for any single girl who is converting. But that was a $39.99 I wish I could get back.

So what's a girl to do? Is it really that important that my partner be Jewish? Shortly after I decided to convert I got involved with a nice Protestant. It wasn't enough that he wasn't Jewish, but he was an actual practicing Christian and he went to church every Sunday. Other than that things were great. He was smart and sexy and funny. Sure, he worked long hours, lived with his parents, and had a terrible allergy to chocolate, but we got along great. He accepted my Jewishness while I tolerated his Protestantism which even led to some great discussion on religion. Things eventually didn't work out, but our breakup wasn't over religion.

I really can't speak for all single women converting to Judaism. I just know that in my heart of hearts I'd just like to meet someone I’m compatible with. And although I waver on the implementation of this, that probably means I want to meet someone who is Jewish (even if it means that does seem to shrink my options quite a bit). True, there are some days I just like to going on dates, regardless of the potential walk-down-the-isle consideration, but someday I'm sure I’ll meet the nebbish boy of my dreams.

This fall, NBC will debut a new reality show, Momma's Boys, which features three sets of mothers and sons. Each mom, who is described by the network as "overprotective," chooses a potential mate for her son from a pool of available women cast by the show. According to the New York Post, Momma's Boys, which will air its premiere episode on December 16, has already been rescheduled twice "with sources speculating that NBC moved it out of its originally scheduled airdate of Oct. 29 because the network didn't want the racially charged show to air so close to the then-upcoming presidential election, in which race was a hot-button issue."

Why might race be an issue in this show? Well, the pilot episode features a mom named Khalood Bojanowski, who describes herself as Iraqi Catholic and is selecting a partner for her 21-year-old son JoJo. Khalood reportedly says during the program:

I cannot have a black one; I can't have an Asian one; I can't have a fat-butt girl. Nooo! No Jewish girl! No way, no way! I cannot stand them! I'm sorry, but I can't handle them. It has to be a white girl.

Oh, great. And now we're back to the "Are Jews white?" argument.

And how, you may ask, did this story leak out before the episode even aired on television? Well, Ms. Bojanowski apparently called the cops in her town of Washington Township, Michigan, informing them she might need police protection. Bojanowski's home was broken into recently, and she claims it was a reprisal for the comments she made on the show--which would be odd, to say the least, considering no one but the cast members and production people have seen it yet.

At the age of twenty-six or so, having noticed that he was obviously not a particle more grown-up or less reckless than he had been at thirteen, he had been greatly relieved to come across a newspaper article by some fashionable psychologist saying that adolescence among human males could be a drawn-out process, lasting in some respects and cases until the age of twenty-five or even thirty. This assurance had given him intermittent hope and comfort of a sort until about ten years later, when it had come back to him in a moment of what had been, even for him, an outstanding act of goatish irresponsibility. Thereafter, he had clung to the consolation that there was nothing he could do about it.

— Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils

Just how popular is Kay Hymowitz’s City Journal essay, “Love in the Time of Darwinism,” which decries the phenomenon of marriage-avoiding man-children? So popular that it was sent to me by no fewer than three different friends today (all males) and it’s been featured on two different traffic engines this week: Arts & Letters Daily and Real Clear Politics.

Her brief is actually a mild apology for a previous essay in which she reprehended the jaded and loveless men of my generation for, as she puts it here, “whiling away their leisure hours with South Park reruns, marathon sessions of World of Warcraft, and Maxim lists of the ten best movie fart scenes” instead of humming Cole Porter tunes and throwing their jackets over puddles in the street for their intendeds. Courtship is dead, and mankind may well be facing extinction given how many men refuse to grow up, get hitched, and start procreating. What happened to Cary Grant? He turned into Seth Rogen.

As far as forays into contemporary masculine psychology go, Hymowitz’s essay wasn’t terribly original. Laura Schlesinger caterwauls about the same subject on her weekly radio program (there’s nothing that a little wifely put-out can’t fix), and Caitlin Flanagan has earned a reputation hovering somewhere between Cassandra and Queen Bee for writing about these domestic complications in much more elegant form in the Atlantic and the New Yorker. But what was original was just how much of a backlash Hymowitz herself incited –all of it from the boys. Her inbox overfloweth with righteous invective styling itself as the “Menaissance,” which sure sounds as ridiculous as “Iron John” did in the ’90s, but recommends an altogether healthier program than banging bongo drums naked in the woods. The Menaissance mantra seems to be, “We’re mad as hell, and we’d rather be masturbating”:

Here’s Jeff from Middleburg, Florida: “I am not going to hitch my wagon to a woman . . . who is more into her abs, thighs, triceps, and plastic surgery. A woman who seems to have forgotten that she did graduate high school and that it’s time to act accordingly.” Jeff, meet another of my respondents, Alex: “Maybe we turn to video games not because we are trying to run away from the responsibilities of a ‘grown-up life’ but because they are a better companion than some disease-ridden bar tramp who is only after money and a free ride.” Care for one more? This is from Dean in California: “Men are finally waking up to the ever-present fact that traditional marriage, or a committed relationship, with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery.” You can find the same themes posted throughout websites like “AmericanWomenSuck,” “NoMarriage,” “MGTOW” (Men Going Their Own Way), and “Eternal Bachelor” (”Give modern women the husband they deserve. None”).

Web bookmarks no doubt to be shortly followed by “BabyComeBack.com,” “BCWH” (Bros Coexisting With Hos), and “Yes, Dear.” Because who do we think we’re fooling, really? Not Kay Hymowitz, who concludes by acknowledging what most “studies” have found: all Angry Young Men eventually quit the struggle and settle for the safe institution of marriage over the fantasy of zero responsibility (even if it is only in baseball). But it’s her anatomy of why we’re so down on girls to begin with that, whether by accident or design, makes her an enabler for our staying down on them. Namely, it’s all the woman’s fault.

“The dating and mating scene is in chaos,” writes Hymowitz. “SYMs [Single young males] of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional.”

She says she wants to be treated as an equal, yet she doesn’t want you to earn less than she does. She adores gallantry and chivalry except when it’s seen as misogynist condescension: dare you hold a door open in the wrong setting, and that’s not all you’ll be left holding. She wants sensitivity and good grooming and garrulousness, but too much of that — and she’ll never come right out and say when it’s too much, you’ll only find out during the breakup — and you risk looking emasculated rather than “metrosexual.” When she’s out on the town, is it a one-night stand she’s after or is she aiming to “close a deal”? You’ll never know because as often as you go to bed with a whore and wake up with a virgin, the plot develops the other way about, too. (Don’t blame Betty Friedan. Even Byron warned against “the amphibious sort of harlot, / Couleur de rose, who’s neither white nor scarlet.”)

All this poorly wired sexual circuitry has prompted a return to Darwinian brute instinct. To succeed with women, the SYM has had to rediscover his inner asshole. It’s a good thing he developed opposable thumbs; he’ll need them for all the finger-guns he’ll be firing.

It’s a fun sociobiological thesis, but by Hymowitz’s own admission, it only accounts for a “significant minority” of men in their twenties, erstwhile celibate losers one day futzing with Playstation, the next consulting Pick-Up manuals and self-brutalization techniques for landing Perfect 10s. Even if they’re successful — and most men are not — sport fucking is still a form of permanent adolescence, and all that those malcontents who emailed Hymowitz are doing is trading one dodge of adulthood for another.

There’s no doubt that fewer SYMs are interested in tying in the knot. In her first “Where Have All the Ward Cleavers Gone?” plaint, Hymowitz provided the declining stats: “[I]n 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively.”

But the real question, in an age that cops to an over 50% divorce rate, isn’t “Why aren’t more men getting married under 30?” It’s Why are any?

Not long ago, I participated in a three-way (calm down) dialogue for Jewcy with a male friend who’d just gotten married and had a child, and a female friend who’d recently been divorced (she’s since gotten remarried, but don’t let that spoil the example). The question before the house was: “Is Marriage the New Dating?” My concern, as expressed in the introductory letter and based wholly on anecdotal evidence, was that my generation had not in fact learned from boomer dysfunction that rushing into long-term commitment too soon was as fated for disappointment as the credulous Maxim subscriber. The woman in the exchange, the witty novelist Elisa Albert, had the best alarmist take on the whole sordid mess, having recently extricated herself from one:

The guy in question (my former “husband,” strangely enough) seemed a great match for me. We had the same books, the same taste in music, the same politics, the same lifestyle. We wanted the same things. “Done!” I thought. “Ha! I’m so not ever gonna have to go on J-Date or pay my own bills or plan my own life by myself! Sweet!”

Our relationship was a disaster. The marriage lasted about eight months, if I’m generous with our timeline. The term starter marriage (married less than five years with no kids, and divorced under 35) became popular in 2002 with sociologist Pamela Paul’s book, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony. (Incidentally, I was perusing the Sunday Times wedding announcements a few months back — yeah, what of it? — and noticed Ms. Paul had gotten married again! Mazel tov! Hope never dies!)

Hymowitz should be careful what she wishes for. At least she should concede that Mr. Darcy, beau ideal of women for centuries who longed for a mythic form of civilized disagreement, was the invention of an author whose view of courtship and matrimony uncovered, in Mr. Auden’s celebrated words, “the economic basis of society.” This is a judgment that has been given a brilliant updating by Laura Kipnis, a third wave feminist whose signals, so to speak, could not be clearer. Here she is in her bestselling polemic Against Love:

When monogamy becomes labor, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shop-floor discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands and domestic partners of the world choke-chained to the status quo machinery — is this really what we mean by a “good relationship”?

I would also add that Hymowitz’s sample pool of arrested development cases is “Darwinian” only in the sense that with a growing population that sees lengthier fertility years, and increased rates of infant survival, more men can afford to go matchless longer and rationalize why they’re doing so. They’re also, whether they confess it or not in their bilious fits of letter-writing, choosier in whom they’d like to partner with, as evidenced by this hilarious fake news segment from The Onion: “Attractive Girls Union Refuses to Enter Into Talks With Mike Greenman.”

As for those Y-chromosomes who would follow the Hymowitz prescription for premature wedlock; to quote an awful film about an imminent global warming apocalypse, save as many as you can.

At the Metro Club in New Orleans, I was dancing with a law school student named Hendrik, who kept palming his way down the backside of my thighs.  Without hesitation, he told me he had been waiting all night to dance with a Jewish girl, especially one as "full-bred" as myself.  Oh God. Was it really that obvious? I wondered, reminding myself that if I would just stand 45 degrees to the left of guys, when speaking to them, that my nose would not seem nearly as obtrusive.  "You know, its so funny," Hendrik said, "My grandfather was a nazi officer but my dad and I, we absolutely love the Jewish people.  Especially the women.  Huge fans."

I Got Blitzed: by a nazi boyIt was weird and not very smart of Hendrik to natter on about his Nazi-infested genes before even scoring my digits.  I liked his honesty though. I also liked how his shoulder muscles packed so nicely into his ski sweater and how his strong, steroidal voice would crunch all the way down to a creak whenever he tried to be romantic.  "Did anyone ever tell you that your hair is the exact same color as your eyes?" Creak.  Creak.  Creak.  He made me want to dig into his esophagus and slowly and tenderly caress his vocal chords.  But I--fortunately--held myself back. 

My first date with Hendrik was a stroll through the New Orleans French Quarter. Hendrik spoke with terrific emotion about ex-lovers, probably to make me jealous, but I didn't really like him enough to mind.  There was Michelle Rosenthal with her nasal South Jersey whine; Mimi Moskowski who sported an unshaven hippie bush which Hendrik found endearing (though he did not find Mimi herself endearing); and Avivah Katz who used to bob her tongue into Hendrik's earlobe in the back row of Temple Emanu El's Friday night services. "It was just her way of saying ‘Shabbat Shalom," Hendrik insisted.  The list continued on with clunky Jewish last name after clunky Jewish last name, lots of bergs and ovitskys, very few vowels.  I could just picture the kid masturbating to a map of Israel every night.

One night, when Hendrik and I were enjoying our privacy outside an empty Café du Monde, Hendrik traced his finger along the curve of my nose as if it were as arousing as a breast.  I wanted to reroute his fingers to someplace-anyplace-sexier.  Look! Down below! There's these fat, flowering 32D melons just above my ribcage, here, have a stroke!  Hendrik couldn't hear my thoughts of course, and began to molest the bridge between my nostrils. I could practically hear him humming, "Ahhhh Juuudaism."

Trying to be heard over street music jazz, Hendrik said to me, "Um Rachel...sweetheart...would you mind singing a little Hebrew prayer for me? Please? Like the ‘Barak ata' one? It gets me off.  I'm being serious." He laughed at this, appreciating his own sexual weirdness.  I sighed and whispered "baruch atah adonei eloheinu meleh ha'olam" into his ear in my slinkiest phone sex operator voice.  He fondled my nose again and I giggled.

I imagined Hendrik dreaming up various Jew-girl-on-Nazi-descendant storylines before he went to bed at night. 

Fantasy #1: The Jew girl, with her inky black eyes and teeth slanted shyly inwards (think Anne Frank) kisses goose-stepping boy atop Noah's ark.  The only two humans left after the flood, the fate of humanity rests upon them to procreate (cue the urgent music).  Their limbs tangle about, arms becoming legs and legs becoming arms, they tangle about some more, the rhythm of the Mediterranean Sea eggs them on and then, suddenly-voila! The bible's first-ever half Christian/half Jewish baby is conceived! 

While my feelings toward Hendrik never did approach love, I, in utter anti-feminist fashion, wanted him to love me.  But I wondered: could a guy nursing a fetish ever truly fall in love with his fetish girl? 

I doubt it. It seemed I could never be the object of Hendrik's cosmic, chemicals gone haywire, rocket-fire love because I was the object of Hendrik's typecasting.  Hendrik was casting for his real-life Noah's Ark Jewess and I was the one who best fit the bill.

Who in Their Right Mind: would turn this down?A few weeks after I began dating Hendrik, I went through a serious Dolly Parton phase, perhaps in rebellion to all the pretentious snot clogging up my college campus. I wrote country songs and performed them before my full-length mirror and my roommate, who promised not to judge.  I wore cowboy boots and peroxided my hair so blonde it washed all the Jewish character out of my face.

I e-mailed Hendrik a digital picture of the new me labeled "Just as Hitler ordered" and I expected at least some kind of half-pleasure to come out from under him; maybe he would call me his "sexy little Barbara Streisand" or he would tell me gently that I looked very hot but that he wanted his Jew back. I just assumed that all guys, even the most Jew-chasing among them, were turned on by blonde.  I thought it an evolutionary thing.

For a good few hours, I stared, autistic-like, at my computer until an instant message from bodyofgod937 popped up on the screen: "Call me when you have better judgement" is all it said.  My better judgement told me that I should take Hendrik's number out of my cell phone and that I should have listened to my mother in the first place and only date nice Jewish boys.  Jewish boys, after all, would never pass up on a good shiksa.

Jewcy LA stepped out at the JConnect Tu b'Av event last night, and this picture pretty much sums up the evening.

 

This morning, a Jewcy friend e-mailed: "Dude, I felt like a piece of meat at this event! Never seen so many JAPs with a look of 'Desperately seeking husband ASAP' in their eyes!"

He's 6'4", well-built, well-groomed, and Jewish. In other words, he got laid last night!

Luke Ford, the world's most infamous porn-documentarian-turned-Orthodox-Jew, was also at the Lovefest, and causing trouble as usual. Luke has excellent taste and fine judgment, so he spent much of the night hanging with us at the Jewcy booth. You might think that Luke was kicking it with us because he was so enamored of Joey's ability to speak volubly and interminably on just about any topic, but it turns out he's just hot for Jewcy ladies.

[Luke, call me! I still have more to say about Shlomo Carlebach!--Joey]

You know, there's nothing wrong with young Jews trying to hook up with other young Jews. Sure, the Jewish Federation supports it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad for you.

Perhaps young Jews could even get Jewish orgs to directly "sponsor" our dates. Perhaps pay for an occasional motel room. Now THAT'S a way for Organized Jewry to make itself useful.

Help Dad: get laidI like to whine about the trials and tribulations of the dating scene for young observant Jews. Besides the innumerable suggestions (read: pressure) to join JDate, there’s the never-ending parental push towards marriage and the intolerable Jewish singles events. But my annoying dates with guys named Reuven and Judah don’t come close to New York Times columnist Bob Morris’s experiences trying to find a match for his widower, octogenarian dad.

In his new book Assisted Loving Morris recounts his experiences guiding his dad through the murky waters of dating, all while looking for his own beshert.

Check out the hilarious Assisted Loving website (make sure your volume is up), listen to a great Fresh Air interview with Morris, and watch the preview below. Then, go out and buy yourself a copy.

 

Muslim women: in search of believersNothing highlights the difference between the Muslim and Jewish attitudes about marriage better than this article in the Washington Post. There are some new resources in the Muslim community devoted to helping new couples get to know each other before and after they’ve married, and the expected matchmaking services. That stuff is nothing new to Jews. But I was fascinated to hear that Muslims share the problem of way more single women than men in their community, and the reason is that Muslims are allowed to intermarry as long as the spouse is “a believer.”

Interfaith marriage is a huge topic with wide cultural ramifications. Because Islamic tradition, not law, holds that a Muslim man can intermarry but not a woman, a substantial gender gap in the dating pool has opened as children and grandchildren of immigrants have grown up.

The Koran says for Muslims to marry "believers," the meaning of which has long been the source of great debate but has been widely interpreted to include Christians and Jews. Although the Koran does not address the gender issue directly, tradition has held that women are more easily subjugated, and therefore a Muslim woman in an interfaith marriage could be forced by a Christian or Jew to live and raise her children outside of Islam, while a Muslim man in an interfaith relationship would be able to control the household's faith.

 

Of course, intermarriage in Islam doesn’t have the pall of death that it has been given in Judaism because there are a billion Muslims in the world, and no one’s worried that they’re dying out. Still, it’s fascinating that in both communities it’s the men that are marrying out, and the women who are mostly staying in. 

Clearly both the Muslim and Jewish communities are waking up to the realities of dating challenges, but I wonder if it’s too little too late. What’s going to happen to the hordes of single women left at the end of the dating game? Something tells me they won’t be running to the synagogue or mosque for comfort.

Two old friends from Hebrew School: OK, I don't know that for a fact, but they COULD beStuffWhitePeopleLike.com gets the Nerve treatment:

I drink too much bottled water (#76). I wear overpriced vintage t-shirts (#84), loved studying abroad (#72) and stand completely still at concerts (#67). I'm a fan of Michel Gondry (#68), Apple products (#40) and Stephen Colbert (#35). I've threatened to move to Canada on more than one occasion (#75). And I don't mind that StuffWhitePeopleLike.com — a blog that lampoons the over-educated yuppies and hipsters who populate the nation's trendy urban centers and mixed-use development zones — pinpoints me with such eerie accuracy, assessing my predilections like a gifted psychic reader. The site is a fairly amusing send-up of the slightly embarrassing, clearly predictable culture I'm a part of.

But the fact that it also describes virtually my entire dating history — that really unnerves me. When I moved to New York, I imagined my dating repertoire would reflect the diversity of a Barack Obama rally (#8). But this doesn't happen, or at least, it didn't for me. I ended up dating exactly the people StuffWhitePeopleLike.com depicts: other white people who'd come to New York lusting after authenticity, ponying up their ample disposable income to purchase something that feels like "the real thing." People like me who moved here to drink from some mystical font of urban cultural capital, then just kept on dating within the tight-jean pool.

This strikes me as incredibly central to all the hand-wringing about intermarriage. Because while the Jewish community at large is busy panicking about young Jews marrying out, the truth is that “out” is a lot more complicated than anyone is willing to admit, at least if you’re not going by strict Halachic law.

The most modern argument against intermarriage goes like this: “But honey, you’ll just be so much happier with someone who shares your culture.” Certainly this is a lot easier to digest than “But honey, God doesn’t like his people as much as He likes our people.” And in a less secular country, maybe it would make sense.

The truth is, though, that unless you’re fairly observant, “your culture” probably doesn’t have that much to do with your Judaism. In fact, for many Jews, “your culture” is just the culture of all privileged, college-educated creative types—the white people of StuffWhitePeopleLike. And if what you want is someone who shares your love of sushi, indie rock, and Michel Gondry, there’s no reason to hang out at Jewish singles events. All you really need to do is go stand in front of Whole Foods.

Kids, stay back: MazoPhil Mazo’s upcoming comedy-album debut, Pervert, drops April 1. Listen as Mazo, a vaguely creepy comic from Jersey, riffs on the "I'm less Jewy than you are" J-Date courtship ritual.

 

 

J-Love conquers all: A JDate billboard looms over Boston I am a New York City–dwelling, L Word–watching, liberal-minded hipsterish hetero. A girl who has always thought it would be kinda sorta maybe cool to make out with another girl but never has. That kind. And yet....

As my 30th birthday approached, I found myself single — and celibate — for a longer stretch than I've ever wanted to be. As more and more friends settled into the adult worlds of marriage and parenthood, I started lamenting my missed opportunities, as if 30 marked some sort of slow decline toward death.

I was embroiled in a tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship — with JDate. What had once been exciting — a sea of eligible Jewish men for the taking! — had become a virtual waiting room of guys who liked to work hard and play hard and enjoyed staying in as much as they liked going out.

It was a particularly heinous-feeling I'm-never-going-to-have-sex-again kind of night when I received a Flirt from ArtsyGrrl18*, a curvaceous and pretty woman seeking a woman. Her message was nothing more than a cheesy canned pick-up line chosen from a drop-down menu: "You're burning up my monitor — are you always this hot?" But I felt a flutter in my stomach. And while, yeah, OK, I'm straight, I didn't really care. I was smitten. Sort of.

I was sick of men. Sick of corresponding with guys only to meet them in person and find out we have zero chemistry, to repeatedly come to the soul-crushing realization that the dream lover I'd imagined doesn't exist anywhere in this universe. Sick of pretending to be indifferent just so I won't scare them away. I'm not indifferent. Why should I be? Men could keep their issues and their fear of commitment. They could have their erectile dysfunction and their emotional unavailability. I was moving on to bigger, better (softer, nicer-smelling) things.

I immediately drafted a response. "I'm burning up your monitor?" I asked incredulously. "Come on, that's almost as bad as some of the guys on here." My reply accomplished a few things. It flirted back, it put her in her place and, perhaps most important, it reminded her that I was used to being courted by men. I hit send without stopping to wonder what I was doing.

A few days passed with no reply, and I began to worry. Had it been wrong to mention men? It was no secret that I'm straight. What was the sense of playing down that fact when it was, in fact, a fact? Maybe that was even part of what drew her to me — I was, in theory, off-limits. Every day I skimmed through message upon message from a nondescript crop of men, obsessively refreshing my in-box, automatically declining IM requests from the likes of Mensch4U and JewtasticNYC, hoping that each new page would bring a sign of ArtsyGrrl18.

And then, on the fifth day, there was light, in the form of a blinking-envelope new-message icon. "LOL, Carla," she'd written back. "You rock so hard." How adorable, I thought. What a gem! It's true, a similar response from a man probably would have found its way into my Trash bin. But I was hooked. There was no doubt about it: ArtsyGrrl18 would signify my first trip into Girltown.

"I think I'm going to go out with a girl!" I told friends. They all looked at me strangely, as if I'd told them I was thinking of piercing my nipples or moving to India, that I was going to do something that sounded adventurous and edifying but in reality was probably foolish and regrettable. And they all asked the same thing: "Do you really want to date a woman?"

Straight-girl lesbian-dating: Don't knock it till you've tried it A good question. Did I want to date a woman? Well let's see. I love women. Most of my closest friends are women. But no, all right, that's not what they meant. So did I want to kiss a woman? Well, sure! Maybe. Life's too short not to try it, right? And kissing's always nice. OK, forget kissing. Did I want to get naked and sweaty and dirty with a woman? Oh boy, now it was getting tricky. Maybe if Susan looked like Diane Lane. (She did not.) And maybe if the prospect of a man were anywhere on the horizon. (Mensch4U's ability to feel as comfortable in a T-shirt as in a tux and JewtasticNYC's exciting life as an actuary weren't exactly getting my blood going.) Maybe if I could keep my eyes closed and spend more time receiving than giving. Whatever, I thought. I'd figure out the particulars later. I was going to do this, damn it, so I decided to address my reservations the best way I knew how: by ignoring them.

Susan and I e-mailed for about a week, and then she decided we should talk on the phone.

When she called, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I jumped, even though I knew it was her before picking up. She'd scheduled the time for our phone date (who schedules a phone date?), but even if she hadn't, there was an urgency in the ring that told me it was her. Or maybe it just seemed that way.

But the conversation was easy. There were no awkward silences. Aside from the weird feeling in my stomach, talking to Susan was just like talking to a girlfriend. You know, a girl friend. When she let slip, "You're cute," or worse, tried to talk about "us," I shifted the topic to more platonic things.

At one point, I managed to get out, "I don't know how much of a tease I'm being." It was the only thing I'd rehearsed, the one thing I'd known I would have to say, even before the phone rang.

I was still speaking when she said, "That's OK." I could feel the period of my sentence hanging somewhere in the middle of hers. She wasn't listening to me. "Do you like more masculine or feminine women?" she asked.

Oh, Jesus. "I'm not sure what kind of women I like because I've never liked a woman before."

I had thrown in the "before" to be kind, even though I knew lying now might result in an even bigger cruelty later. What was true was that I was curious, I was intrigued, I was flattered, I was bored. But I did not know if I was interested. And wasn't that what she was really asking?

When she pressed it further, I tried to think of celebrities I found hot. Jennifer Lopez, sure. Rosie O'Donnell, not so much. Scarlett Johansson? Yes, please. Lea Delaria? Hell to the no. "Feminine, I guess."

Which led to a discussion of the photographs she had posted with her profile. "The one of you in the red top is nice," I said. I regretted it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. The red top was pretty low-cut. I could hear her smiling.

"You like the boobies, then."

Like a boy, but nicer-smelling: As a straight girl, would you switch teams for J-Lo? "You just look happy in that picture. And red's a really good color on you. " There was no fucking way I was talking about boobies.

We chatted a bit longer and hung up with a time and a place to meet. Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. "It's me," she said. Her sense of familiarity annoyed me, and the second call caught me more off-guard. Men did not hang up the phone and call back 20 minutes later. At least not men I've ever known. I suddenly understood that old joke: What do lesbians bring on a first date? A U-Haul.

"You make a person want to cancel her appointments and just keep talking to you," she said. I wouldn't have believed it if I'd read it in a book. I'd have chalked it up to melodrama if it were a line in some asinine romantic comedy.

"Oh," was all I could muster.

"Can you talk a bit more?" I was already planning on telling her not really, but then she added, "Just for like 20 minutes." It was so exact, so needy, so faux casual that I couldn't even consider saying yes.

"Look," I said, "I've really got to go. We're going to see each other in a few days." I could sense disappointment on her end, but what could I do? This woman seemed crazy! We'd never even met! Didn't she know you can't just act on every impulse you have? That you need to play the game? I shuddered. What the hell was going on here?

Susan's disappointment didn't last long because that night, around midnight, my phone rang again and we had our third conversation of the day. On the first day we'd ever talked at all. I had gotten my wish: an attentive mate who said what she meant and meant what she said. And I couldn't have been more freaked out about it.

But the truth is I enjoyed talking to her. In fact, I opened up to Susan in that third conversation more than I have with some men I've dated for months. But Susan was sensitive. She didn't spook at the first mention of imperfection, of baggage. She was, after all, a girl.

The week after our first day of phone calls passed with alarming speed. I grew increasingly panicked as our date neared. "Blow it off," one friend advised. "You're not a lesbian!" A good point. And yet, didn't I owe it to myself to see how this thing played out? I'd already come so far! Wasn't it time to live a little dangerously in homage to all the friends who were now shopping for Bugaboos and obsessing over seating arrangements? Going out with Susan wasn't something I necessarily wanted to do, but something I felt I should, to build character. I mean, going weak in the knees for someone or wanting to tear his clothes off the second you see him is nice, I guess, but it doesn't hold a candle to character, right? Right?!

Sunday arrived, and I woke up groggy. My sleep had been fitful and uneasy. I was supposed to get in touch with Susan to confirm the details of our date. I didn't. Later that day I received an e-mail from her: "Am I right in assuming you've lost interest in meeting me?"

Hot straight girl-on-girl action: Sca-Jo and N-Po (Even worse, she had accidentally sent a slightly altered draft of the message, too. I was mortified for her. I was mortified for me—how many times had I agonized over every syllable in a one-line missive to a man who probably skimmed it anyway, too distracted by ball-scratching or mirror-gazing to care?)

My response to Susan's e-mail surprised even me: "What makes you think I've lost interest?" Holy shit, I thought. I am a guy. I am a motherfucking guy. I was full-on playing with her head, and it terrified me how naturally it came, how easily and effortlessly the transition had occurred. Didn't I complain that men can never just make a plan and stick with it? That they're purposefully evasive? That they toy with our emotions for sport? What could I have been thinking?

Not much, I guess, because I strung Susan along for a week or two. I answered her phone messages with e-mails. I canceled plans at the last minute once because I got stuck at work and another time because a friend sprang last-minute birthday plans on me (a last-minute birthday?). Finally I decided to do something no man has ever done with me: I decided to come clean.

"Look," I wrote, "I'm really sorry. I never meant for this to happen or for things to get this far only to have me chicken out. I just don't think my heart is really in it. And I sort of wish it were. I'm truly sorry if I've hurt you."

And she, also being female, responded in a similarly refreshing way: with honesty, compassion and understanding: "I'm a little bummed because I thought we were connecting, but no worries, OK? Please. Call me if you ever change your mind. Goodbye, beautiful."

Her e-mailed crushed me. It made me want to write back and tell her I was wrong, that we should meet, but I didn't. The kindness was what I was attracted to. It always had been. I just couldn't get down with the boobies.

In the end, Girltown turned out to be less like an exciting vacation spot and more like a restaurant I wanted to gawk at through the windows but never actually eat in. Today when friends and I are contemplating how to proceed with men we're dating, what the best course of action is, we invoke the question WWSD — What Would Susan Do? We figure out the answer, then do the opposite. And I hate that we have to. But I guess that's the price you pay for being a straight girl.

*Names and Jdate handles have been changed.

God, this column torments me! On the one hand, I’m currently listening to podcasts of the world’s best break-up songs on Minnesota Public Radio, which is making my heart feel all melty towards those in the love-finding trenches. On the other hand, there is a guy on JDate who goes by the handle SuckItUp33, which is so gross and hostile that I can’t NOT make fun of him.

On the other other hand, SuckItUp sounds exactly like the kind of guy I would have made out with back when I was a pretentious 23-year-old with a limited alcohol tolerance:

I'm sarcastic, I can be obnoxious, and the word arrogant has been thrown around before also...but I am also loyal, intelligent, classy, motivated, dedicated, educated, even-keeled, well-written...and dashingly handsome… I think its hot when girls get drunk and stick their tongues out and I really like girls who use words like "capricious", "salacious", and "pedantic".

Listen, I don’t mean to be pedantic, but that tongue thing is unfortunately salacious, and even if you sign up for JDate as a total caprice, the least you can do is proofread your profile (that “its” takes an apostrophe – it’s a contraction, not a possessive.)

SuckItUp definitely comes in second, but before I reveal my absolutely favorite JDater girl so far, a pair of third-placers:

• Loveme823, poor thing. I hope she thought long and hard about that name. If it’s “Love, Me” as in “Dear Boyfriend, had to run but have a great day, Love, Me” written on a post-it on the pillow, then it’s cute. As a naked plea for affection, though: Oy.
• Ffffffflorida, whose profile reads like his mom literally forced him to sign up. He says he “would love to meet a jewish girl.. and have little jew bagel babies,” his perfect first date involves “complete aquardness and very uncomfortable,” and he’s looking for “a jewish princess, so my rents tell me...”

Nobody, though, is as awesomely honest as ChalahBack. She enjoys the Scottsdale nightlife, she considers bad sex a dealbreaker, and she’s looking for someone who “butters my Muffin upon request.” ChalahBack, we at Jewcy all wish you a future full of happy muffin-buttering.

Alex is a 23-year-old videographer living in New York City. He has never been on a Valentine’s Day date despite being totally adorable, so he’s looking for love on YouTube.

Some things about Alex: He likes Point Break, he’s Jewy enough to have made a video counting the MOTs at Heeb’s Hot 100 Party, and if you watch this film demonstrating the unflattering qualities of American Apparel spandex, you can see him in his underwear.

His MySpace page says that he’s looking for “beautiful girls with freckled faces and sugary attitudes that like to make tents in bed with our legs. and when we fall asleep their midsection where my arm rests feels exactly like the pillow i hug at night as i fall asleep,” so if that sounds like you, send him a message. And then tell us how it goes!

It’s always easier to argue that we should limit someone’s choices than to argue that we should let someone decide for themself, simply because we all know tons of people making incredibly bad choices every day. The rise of leggings alone could stand as an example of why people should not be allowed to do so much as dress themselves without consulting a panel of experts. But making decisions is a part of being an adult, and the more we blanket our lives with across-the-board restrictions the less responsible we become.
Shomer Negiah Panties: the last reserve
As a result of it being easier to tell people not to do something than to tell them to do it carefully, it’s really hard to talk about not being shomer negiah without sounding like you’re just trying to come up with an excuse to have sex. I know because I’ve had this conversation about five hundred times in the last five years, and though I’m confident that being shomer negiah would not be the right decision for me, my reasons don’t sounds as sexy as the shomer negiah advocates’. But I’m okay with that, because my reasons, though perhaps lacking in sex appeal, are legit. Allow me to explain...

The first reason to question the whole shomer negiah movement is the lack of halacha backing it up. 'Shomer negiah' (a term that occurs nowhere in rabbinic literature) is a technical prohibition against lustful touch (Rambam & Shach on Shulchan Aruch) between a guy and a girl who is considered ritually impure as a result of menstruation, or with a guy and any other forbidden relation. That’s it. Contemporary teachers and overreachers have been teaching that shomer negiah is actually a prohibition against touching someone of the opposite sex at all, but as far as I know, there’s absolutely no halachic basis for that. Presumably, if I got myself to a mikvah, there would be no halachic problem with me kissing my date.

Now, that’s good enough of a reason for me, but not for almost anyone who has read The Magic Touch or I Kissed Dating Goodbye, so let’s look at some more ideological concerns.
Hammer Says: Can't touch this!
One of the things that appalls me about a lot of the shomer negiah rhetoric is that it belittles how important the physical aspect of a marriage can be. Example: I recently went on a couple of dates with a really great guy. He was nice, cute, smart, funny and generally excellent marriage material. But there were no sparks. And neither of us wanted to be in a relationship that was purely cerebral. I want my husband to be nice, cute, smart, funny, and also incredibly sexy. He has to have some quality that makes me anxious to spend every night in his bed for the rest of my life. That’s not a minor thing, and though I might have an okay sense of whether a guy has that without running my fingers through his hair at some point, I’d really rather check before I sign up forever and ever amen.

Sometimes what I hear from people pushing shomer negiah sounds like a fancy way of advocating delayed gratification. Essentially, if you wait until you get married then it will be so so amazing when you finally do get to touch/sleep with that person. But the obvious problem with that is that it might not be that great. I mean, the holding hands part might be awesome, but as soon as you have a slimy tongue in your mouth for the first time and you don’t know what to do with it, I imagine the charm is somewhat less potent. And yes, of course you’ll learn and adjust to what you and your partner want, but the beginning is unlikely to be all violins swelling in the background and fireworks sparkling over the bed. So the delayed gratification argument is, as far as I can tell, ridiculous.

But the real reason I touch the men I date is because I’m an adult, and I deserve to have a physical relationship with whoever it is I’m in a relationship with. I really don’t believe that kissing someone has a detrimental effect on that relationship if we’re not married, nor do I think that having kissed someone else will mean that whatever relationship I have with my future husband is somehow less special.

Sex is a different issue. Being shomer negiah today doesn’t mean being a virgin, it means not touching anyone of the opposite sex, which is a much bigger thing than just waiting to get laid until you get married.

I have a lot of respect for people who decide to wait for sex until marriage, but at the end of the day I’m a lot more concerned that my husband and I share views on how to raise the kids, or how we’re going to observe Shabbat than that we’re both virgins on our wedding night.

Sex is a serious thing, and anyone who tells you otherwise is kidding himself (or herself). But it’s not the only serious thing, and I worry about the amount of emphasis that being shomer negiah puts on sexuality. I’m all for encouraging people to be really careful about the decisions they make in relationships, but being a virgin when you get married doesn’t trump everything else. If you marry the wrong person, it’s still the wrong person no matter how little experience you have in the sack.
Here I Am: not being shomer negiah. Scandal!

Which brings me back to my original point. Being shomer negiah treats the symptoms, not the problem. Preaching a hands off/all-virginity-all-the-time policy isn’t the way to make sure that people think before they jump into bed with someone. And it doesn’t teach anyone to be particularly good at recognizing good and bad relationships when they see them.

 

It’s important to guard your touch, and the touch of those in your life. But that’s not the only thing that goes into a successful relationship, and claiming anything to the contrary is dishonest.

On Monday I wrote about how single people are sick of being told to shack up, and tarfon responded:

Yes to everything you say, except the last point. Asking whether X is dating anyone is not at all the same as asking how much sex X is having. It's OK to ask X whether he/she's dating someone, but it's not OK to ask what they do after the dates.

So!: Are you seeing anyone?

But you're absolutely right that married folks need to invite singles over (and to accept return invitations) more than they do. Single folks are part of the community and should be treated as such.

Specifically, tarfon is referring to the final paragraph of my post:

So today’s practical spiritual advice is to first invite the singles that you know over more, and second to stop bugging them about their love life. Do they ask about how much sex you’re having with your partner? If not, then you don’t get to ask if they’re dating someone, and if not, why not.

Initially I tried to clarify my point with tarfon, and considered that I hadn’t thought out my position particularly carefully, but the more thought I gave it the more I agreed with myself.

Relationship information is just not something that can or should be asked about in a public setting. Whether or not I’m dating someone is just none of the business of anyone at shul. I can ask about someone’s wife because it’s public knowledge that he’s married, but I wouldn’t dream of asking anyone but the closest friend about how the relationship is going in any specific way, and that’s because putting someone on the spot can be humiliating or just plain unpleasant. For everything that Jewish law says about modesty there is a pretty shocking lack of privacy for most people who are dating or thinking about dating, and I find that really offensive and sad.

The issue is mostly the people who want to know if you’re dating because they have an opinion on the matter—your hair is the problem, this is the wrong city for single Jewish girls, you’re not mature enough, have you met my nephew Max?—but the people who think that it’s just pleasant conversation over kichel at Kiddush are equally frustrating. Does a person who’s single want to have to reiterate their status ten times every Shabbat? Probably not. And even if he has started dating someone, is it something he necessarily wants to chat about with the gabbai? Unlikely.

Please people, watch what you say to us single people. At the very least you should expect that we’re writing about you on our blogs, criticizing your nosy ways and your bad manners.