If the CIA did background checks…

Thank you Ezzie for sending me this reality check on yesterday’s link. Emasculated, video-game-playing men who do housework and termagant crones with cats and PhDs, do not celebrate yet. It seems yesterday’s writer may have manipulated some data.

HT to MF#7 (& Ezzie) who sent me this article reassuring educated women that they still have a shot at getting married, as long as they don’t insist on a guy more educated than themselves.  According to this chart, men want love, education, and good looks more than ever before. The article emphasizes the education part, of course.

“When I saw the coffin I was like, ‘Really? They fit him into that? They didn’t even need to widen it around the middle?’ I mean, this is a guy who never went anywhere without his iPod, iPad, cell phone, pager, Hatzolah walkie-talkie, and Chaverim toolkit, just in case he needs to break into a car in a hurry. He jangled so much when he walked, you thought a robot was coming down the block. His belt added about a foot to his waistline. He never went anywhere without all that stuff, there’s no way he’s going to heaven without them either.â€

Pause

“Or wherever he’s going.â€

Pause

“I mean, you never know. God’s car might break down, and we know there aren’t too many mechanics in heaven.â€

Pause

“So, here we are folks, mourning the passing of our esteemed friend, relative, and colleague, Yosef Schwartz. I’d like to invite his rabbi and mentor to give the next eulogy. Rabbi Cohen was in charge of Yossi’s spirituality. The guy who was supposed to make sure our friend here went to the good place. I don’t see any smoke coming from the coffin yet, so that’s a good sign. Ladies and gentlemen: Rabbi Dovid Cohen.â€

“Thank you, thank you. You know, I really don’t think we have to worry about Yossi. I knew he was a good boy from the very start. We first met about a year after he joined our yeshiva. He had taken a hot slice of pizza—with the cheese just browning and bubbling—out of the toaster, and dropped it, right on the floor in front of the stove. Cheese side down, of course. Yossi was always meticulous about following rules, and Murphy’s law was no exception.

“Anyway, Yossi knew that many bits and scraps of food—both milchigs and fleishigs—had fallen in front of the stove over time, and in fact, most of them were still there. He really wanted to brush off and eat his perfectly baked pizza, but wasn’t sure if it was kosher.

“R’ Katz, who he usually went to for sheilos, was in LA at the time and Shabbos hadn’t ended yet. In desperation he called me. I immediately took a liking to the sincere, sweet boy, and we’ve been in touch ever since. He never hesitated to ask me even his most sensitive questions. I’ll miss him, but I know he’s happier now. He has access to much greater rabbanim than me now, and for his really tough questions, he can even go to the Ultimate Rebbe himself. In fact, right now the Ultimate Rebbe is probably pinning a medal on him for throwing out that pizza, and having blueberry pie for melaveh malka instead.â€

“Thank you R’ Cohen for your kind words. You know, I bet they’re making up for that pizza right now with an entire pie that tastes… just… heavenly. Although I think they have to order in, since I hear most of the ovens are kept elsewhere.

“Our next speaker is someone who may have a different perspective on where Yosef wound up. We’re talking about someone who still remembers the time he colored on the walls and wouldn’t let him forget why they had to paint the living room mauve. She used to be upset because he didn’t call often enough. Well, he definitely won’t be calling now, Mrs. Schwartz. But you can send him a message anyway, while his neshama is still lingering. Everyone: Yossi’s mother, Mrs. Eve Schwartz.â€

*     *     *

Okay. Now imagine the subject of these speeches is still alive and sitting there, listening.

Now swap out the jokes about God, heaven, and hell for jokes about mother-in-laws, wives, and jewelry shopping.

What do we have? Yep: sheva brochos.

Way back in my heyday I wrote a series on the halachos of yeshivish dating. I’ve long since abandoned most of them. The first one is about kavanah in dating. Or, actually, who knows about what when.

Rereading it, my favorite line is the following:

I mean, seriously. I was 21. Four years later, I begin to wish I’d skipped even my annual birthday.

The second post was about hachanah, or preparing for a date. Boy did this one drive me up the wall the first few times. There are two types of people in society: the type who make the rules about what is normal. They never think or worry about it – they just do, and this creates standards. Then there are the types who accept the standards created by the first type, and anxiously strive to fit them. I’m in the second type for sure. So not having a handbook on what to wear for a first date left me wringing my hands.

The secretiveness surrounding dating was the subject of two posts: Shtikah 1 and Shtikah 2.

The first is about keeping things from the neighbors – those pesky people with binoculars who sigh and reach for their Tehillims whenever you walk past with a bare head. The second is about not being seen on a date.

That was the most exposed I got on a date (including eating in the same restaurant as my boss once) until that ice cream date mentioned in the Extreme Dating post.

HT  Dude in the Black Hat

Let’s face it: most dates are boring artificial stretches of time in which you attempt to extract information from your partner mostly because there’s nothing better to do while sipping coffee in a crowded shop to avoid the slush in the gutters outside.

I know I’ve suggested the Tomchei Shabbos date before, but here’s a girl who had a similar idea and ran with it.  I don’t really know how you manage a grocery-shopping date (Who pays? What do you do with it after? Find a kitchen and make yourself a meal?), but the idea is intriguing.

Ladies: how would you feel if a guy took you out to a grocery store?

Here is where I reveal myself to be a narrow-minded misnaged. I expose myself because I have a feeling that there are many more like me out there, and I’m trying to help the naive newcomers who don’t seem to have a feel for the topography.

To: All BTs who want to date smart and interesting centrist Orthodox women but who include a photo of themselves wearing a bekesher with their profile

Subject: How you are narrowing your dating pool

Look, I get it. You became frum in college through the campus Chabad, and you have a soft spot for the sect. (We all do.  They’re the indispensable if adorably odd sibling.) But do you sit on your hat before you wear it? Do you grow a bushy beard? Do you walk around with your shirt untucked? No. So why the 16^th-century Polish costume?

A bekesher doesn’t just represent chassidus, an ultra-orthodox sect. It represents the irrational part of chassidus—the part where they can’t tell the difference between an anachronism and a custom. Or, it sometimes seems, between an anachronism and a Torah commandment.

It makes the average over-educated woman uneasy. She begins to wonder about your BT motivations. She wonders at your opaque rational processes. She wonders if you’ve finished your BTing, or if you’re still travelling across sects, and might wake up in Satmer one day. Or maybe Bat Ayin. Or someplace else she’d rather (in her admittedly narrow-minded way) not be.

So, if you’re trying to weed us out, you’re doing a great job. Just keep posting those bekesher pics.

But if you want to broaden your dating circles, and you can’t figure out why otherwise intelligent and charming women are making the unintelligent choice of not dating you, take this suggestion: shock her with the bekesher on your Shabbos sheva brachos.

Hat tip to O for a laugh that needed muffling during work hours.

Right through this way, ladies and gents.

From: Bad4

To: ColdFeet

Subject: Rated to -40

Message: You should have bought these boots:  http://www.zappos.com/sorel-snowlion-white

——

From: ColdFeet

To: Bad4

Subject: Re: Rated to -40

Have you tried Saw You at Sinai?

Some people took issue with my Da’as Torah post, because it seemed to suggest that men are prone to handing their minds over to their rabbeim for safekeeping. This is hardly my position on the matter. As a woman, I tend to hear bad-date stories from women, hence most of my posts are from the female perspective “OMG can you believe this guy?” However, having attended a bais yaakov, I know perfectly well how far off the deep end women can dive.

One gentleman learned this himself on a date with a nice aidel girl. Conversation flowed until they had a hashkafic disagreement on a matter of ba’al tashchis. Suddenly, she withdrew and wouldn’t answer him with more than a grunt. After some monologuing at her, he gave up and dropped her off at home. He wasn’t sure what went wrong, but he had a feeling that she hadn’t been rendered speechless by awe and admiration.

“I think it’s a no,” he told the shadchan. “She went mute at 7:49pm.”

The shadchan did the post-mortem and came back with the results:

“While she was dating you,  and there was a potential for marriage, there was toeles to your conversation. But once she decided that she didn’t want to marry you, she had no heter  to speak to men, so she stopped.”

I have to say, I’m impressed by the strength of conviction  of this young lady, and I just hope she doesn’t work in social services or any sector where pleasant but unnecessary conversation is part of the job. Either way, she’s now happily married to a man she can talk to as much as she pleases.

Just another day in Touro College. Oh, those were the days…

When I was in college, I would inevitably received a rash of redts during the most inconvenient times of the year: midterms and finals. When I graduated I worried that I would no longer receive any matches.

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

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

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

This is even worse than finals.

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

And I’m not.

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

Beats me.

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

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

Probably dateless.

C’est la vie.

Shimmy is a divorced ba’al teshuva with obviously nerdy tendencies. His five-page introspective dossier describes everything remotely important about him and his dream future spouse, qualified anything about him that might seem unbecoming, and apologized gently for his shortcomings. “Because of this, I have been advised to only look for a girl from a whole family. I think I would like her to be from a very special family.” Further along, he explained that he’s been advised not to date ba’alei Teshuva or divorced women or women from broken homes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The title doesn’t mean what you think it means. Go read the post about not begging… because of shidduchim.

Longest date I’ve been on – Also the hottest date. It was the summer. I wore a white trenchcoat over my clothes because I don’t like walking out all dressed up without a jacket. It was also on the assumption that we would get into a car and go someplace where we would sit in an air-conditioned atmosphere while sipping  iced drinks in perspiring glasses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone recently informed me that my blog doesn’t qualify as a tech blog. Just to dispel the notions that my blog is inadequate in any way, I sat down to write a VBA program that would simulate dating in a safe, Microsoft environment.

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

Kudos to MCP for his Ten Commandments of dating. Check them out at the Peanut Gallery request last week. He threw an entire tub of butter at it.

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

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

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

I’m always bemused when people try to redt shidduchim for people they don’t know on the basis of knowing their family. Then again, maybe this is tied to the often astonished statement people make to me: “Everyone in your family is so different!” Well yes.  And trust me on this: the world doesn’t need multiples of any of us. One unique version is more than enough.

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

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

A while back someone challenged me to write the Ten Commandments of Dating. I came up with four. After a couple of months of staring at them, I’m giving up and opening this one to you folks. What are the Ten Commandments of Dating? I’ll post my four next week so as not to unduly influence any of you.

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

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

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

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

Or, well, for a few weeks at least.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, I wish I could bring myself to be as obnoxious as I recommend that other people be. (A prize if you can rewrite that sentence without the dangling preposition.)

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

Diagnostic Criteria for 299.803 Social Asperger’s Disorder
[The following is from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM IV]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or – oh. I see.

OT, PT, SP, and SE.

Ooh. I get it. Now I get it.

Man, I am slow.

It’s been a while since I wrote a 5-paragraph essay, so excuse me if it comes out klunky. But my response to Thinking Jewish Girl’s post sounded so much like a response to an SAT essay prompt that it seemed the natural form for this post to take. Since fat paragraphs weary the online reader, I have taken the liberty of breaking up my 5 paragraphs into smaller, bite-sized chunks. But the droning style remains. 

 

Orthodox Jewish singles generally do not ask each other out on dates directly. Instead, they communicate through a shadchan—a matchmaker—whose involvement ranges from introducing the couple to setting up the time and location for their dates and communicating any concerns or reservations after the date.

Thinking Jewish Girl states that the shadchan is an important assistant in expediting a couple’s engagement and marriage because if the couple had to speak about their reservations directly with each other they would have disagreements and break up over minor differences. I disagree. I think the shadchan actually increases the likelihood of a couple breaking up over minor differences by preventing both parties from having to discuss their reservations with each other.

….

Thinking Jewish Girl is right that a very involved shadchan can smooth over many differences. If a girl is distressed because her beau didn’t wear a tie, for example, or tip the waiter generously, the shadchan can relay to the boy that these things are important to her. This works for larger differences as well. If the boy is worried that the girl is too career oriented to spend time at home with her children, but doesn’t feel comfortable challenging the girl about it, the shadchan can tip off the girl, who can then make a point of expounding upon her maternal persuasions on the next date. Thus, it is true that a shadchan can help two young and shy people smooth over many differences.

….

However, a shadchan does not always have a clear picture of what occurs on the date, and one of the daters can easily leave out important information or simply refuse to pass it along. A young man may not feel comfortable telling an older woman that he found his date’s eating habits unattractive, or a young woman may not want to say that the guy gave her a creepy vibe or scrapes and stacks. In many cases, all the shadchan hears is a brief summary and a “yes, I’d like to go out again†or the reverse, “no, I don’t think she’s for me.â€

And there are many reasons why a shadchan may be unable or unwilling to press for details. As a result of this dynamic, it is easy for one of the daters to turn down another date without providing sufficient reason to the shadchan. This essentially stonewalls the shadchan, preventing him/her from filling that essential role TJG assumes in her statement.

….

If daters could not break up through a shadchan, they would have to break up in person, meaning by communicating directly with their partner. In many cases, a simple “not for me†would not be sufficient. Some sort of reasoning would be required. Faced with wide eyes and silence, most people will strive to fill the silence, often with excuses or explanations. This would force a dialogue between the couple, wherein they examine their differences and decide, together, if it is worth breaking up over. Breaking up is simply much more difficult. Couples who have to break up in person using ‘State of the Union’ conversations are more likely to date for longer before breaking up than couples able to break up through a shadchan.

….

Therefore, I believe, that while shadchanim perform an important service in connecting young people who might otherwise be too shy to ask each other out directly, they also do some harm, by permitting those people to be just as shy about breaking up, and do it more easily, sooner, and with less provocation by doing it indirectly.