A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (12 page)

The Shabbat Seductress and I became warm friends and shared holiday adventures in deepest Brooklyn, and have even collaborated on some editorial projects.

Fedelma and I exchanged fun banter about our backgrounds. I pointed her to some online reading and she referred to the “Hebrew-Hibernian article—a sweet little tribute to
two tribes
with a theatrical bent.” Our emails indeed had a literary bent. So we finally got together for a first date at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. After the stroll down the spiral display area of the museum, we went to a French restaurant for dinner on the Upper East Side. Now French food is a type I almost never eat, preferring Indian, Chinese, Cuban, Mexican, Thai and BBQ. I can’t remember what I ordered, but I do remember the meal came with a choice of hot cider or wine to drink. Fedelma chose the wine, I chose the cider, not having any genetic predisposition to alcohol (if I could have ordered a sweet, sticky alcoholic drink with an umbrella in it, that would have been a different story).

A day or two later we had a post-date conversation and Fedelma voiced deep concern. I thought the first contact went well enough. Fedelma couldn’t understand why I wanted the cider rather than the wine. Who eats French food without fine wine? I could tell we were running on tracks that would never intersect, all because I had such a Baptist preference for nonalcoholic drinks. We never met again.

I met Motek early on and we connected in a strong way. She called me special and said my ability to “read” her was scary. I hinted how she could “read” me with motivations like letting me feel wanted and accepted. But I dithered and dawdled on meeting her because of my creaky 1986 Saab, which kept me locked up hundreds of miles from her. Of course, the onrushing rapids of romance soon carried her far away:

The Lark and I always had a great friendship. As soon as we met we began swapping chatty notes, often on our romantic frustrations with others. I advised her on the mating habits of Southern men, while she provided empathetic play-by-play analysis of my thwarted pursuits. She lived in Boston and worked as a health-care professional, but we never could navigate the New England space between us.

Finally, however, the stars aligned. We arranged to meet in Boston, where I would be on a business trip for several days. I took Amtrak up the day before to settle into my hotel and then stroll around the Harvard campus. I sat on the steps of a building, looking at the students and parents, and thought life was pretty good. An interested project beckoned; the Lark and I would finally meet, and the mid-summer weather made me think of Robert Frost poetry.

The next day I bopped to my company’s Boston office and waited for other team members to arrive from New York for a big marketing project. I noted an email about a conference call at 11:30, something about changes in the marketing function. I knew executives had been examining the department, and I figured there would be people coming and going, shifting boxes on the org chart, nothing dramatic.

My colleagues from New York breezed in at 11:25, with just enough time to grab a cup of coffee and settle in for the call, which, oddly enough, was listen-only. Nobody could talk, only listen.

We dialed in and the speaker got right to the point. Our marketing function hadn’t been working the way the leaders wanted and the company was going in a new direction for the work we did. Our services were no longer needed. We would be hearing from HR.

End of call.

We sat there, stupefied. All of us had been laid off. Almost our entire department, nationwide, was wiped out in a listen-only conference call that lasted only four minutes.

As you can imagine, chaos ensued. We had to tell the client-facing team in the Boston office we had just been laid off and couldn’t work on the project. Our cellphones hummed as we frantically called family members and rearranged our travel plans. I called the Lark and told her that our plans were star-crossed and that dinner would have to wait. She was as disappointed as I was, but understood completely. I called other obscure objects of thwarted affection and left voice mails about the Beantown slaughter so they would feel sorry for me and want to talk to me (and they did, as I turned lemons into lemonade).

I returned to New York and found myself in demand for job interviews, given my skill set. I had a first call from one firm on September 11, of all days, and began working there in October on my birthday, of all days. The spell of unemployment passed quickly. Another year would pass before the Lark and I would finally meet in Mystic, Connecticut, but we connected and have met several times since then. We are both good listeners.

Meanwhile, the Listen-Only Massacre became a dark legend in New York professional-services circles. Marketers and headhunters talk about it with horrified fascination to this day.

Miz Rutherford and I connected in that regional U.S. way, given her gracious Southern upbringing in the land of moss-drenched oaks, mint juleps, firefly-watching from the front porch, black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day (Jan. 1, not Rosh Hashanah), expressions of “Land sakes alive, honey chil’!” and Lynyrd Skynyrd albums.

Both of us fell off the turnip truck and landed in Gotham City decades ago. Miz Rutherford (AKA The Divine Miz R) has lived in the Northeast as long as I have and fits right in to Yankeeland. But once we met, the Southernisms became a running joke throughout our friendship.

My first date with Miz Rutherford proved memorable. We got together on a Friday after work for a light dinner at an outdoor café, nothing unusual about that, but she had also asked me if I wanted to go to “something else.” She was a little cagey about what exactly “something else” was. Something thought provoking, perhaps emotionally challenging. As a veteran of a long-running men’s group and even some twelve-step meetings, I was open to the idea. I agreed to go and didn’t ask too many questions. In fact, I didn’t want Miz Rutherford to tell me much at all. I had plenty of time for a Friday event, and I didn’t mind a mysterious, madcap Manhattan adventure. My main thought: would we be taking our clothes off? Would the event involve drippings of hot wax or vampire worship?

Miz Rutherford and I wandered to an Upper East Side apartment already crowded with people who looked, well, like people anywhere in New York. Some old, some young, couples, singles. I paid a door fee and Miz Rutherford and I squeezed into some open space.

I’ll end the mystery: Miz Rutherford and I attended an “encounter group” called the Mark Group. Started in California in the 1960s, the movement brings people together for guided discussions of issues and exercises that encourage self-revelation. The others talked about lifestyle choices that are way down the road from my boring suburban patterns (on the continuum of sensual lifestyles, I’m the poster boy for the conventional concept of “vanilla”; they’re more “Dark Odyssey”). I’ll respect the rules of confidentiality and not reveal specifics, but I did indeed find the evening emotionally challenging, as to what to reveal and what to hide, and whether to deceive. Miz Rutherford told a little fib about how we knew each other, but that was acceptable under the ground rules.

Everybody kept their clothes on, nobody dripped wax on me. I never attended another Mark Group meeting, but I still think back on the surprising adventure that definitely pushed me outside my comfort zone of typical first dates. I give The Divine Miz R a lot of credit for instinctively knowing I would be okay with a Mark Group meeting. It must be a Southern thang..

E
pluribus unum
—out of many, one. That motto found on U.S. currency also applies to online dating. Out of many opportunities, find the one.

The connection to currency is deliberate and relates to a side of dating I tracked in my obsessive-compulsive way: the investment. What did I spend in my search for love and its more earthy equivalents? What did I get in return, and how did I calculate my ROEI—Return on Emotional Investment? The basic answers are easy to determine; during the entire time I’ve been single I’ve used one bank account and one credit card. Usually when I incurred a dating expense, I noted the event and the woman involved in my Quicken software program. Put the event (usually dinner) and a name together and I can get a sharp mental image of an encounter.

Bangkok Imperial in New Haven, K, $41.90. We hit it off. She had studied Russian and had red hair. But she was looking for a man without young children, so that never happened.

Oest Restaurant in New York, L, $68.70. My first date with a fellow Princetonian. Nice Sunday brunch. We had one more date volunteering at a Jewish event, then nothing.

Free Times Café in Toronto, klezmer brunch, $33.36. My jaunt north of the border. Nice but no magic.

Akdeniz Restaurant in New York, Turkish food for lunch with F from Latin America. She was a corporate executive who kept checking her BlackBerry. We were doomed.

Roger Smith Hotel, wine with E, first and only meeting with a mental-health professional from Mexico visiting New York. I got photos of us together—and a good thing I did because our contacts completely fizzled after that.

Cabana Midtown, Cuban food with S from Italy. She was an exotic type involved in fashion. She started crying and said I looked like her late father.

Hummus Place, somewhere on the Upper West Side. My notation says “J Dogs?” because she liked to talk about her dogs. $28.36.

The names and dates roll on and on: Dvora at Wave Hill, Joan at Tintol, Galadriel at Stone Cold Creamery in Stamford. A date, a name, a place—each one combines to evoke a snippet of theater, a memory of friendship made and roads looked down but not taken.

Then there were the dating sites. I started with Jcupid, paying $99.95 on February 27, 2003. I was on and off JDate for nineteen months between 2003 and 2008, long enough to see the monthly charge rise from $28.50 to $39.99. Total expenditure: $640. Total number of emails sent: around 3,000; received: 2,000.

I also used Match, which had a thriftier cost structure and a fair amount of overlap with JDate’s membership. The per-month cost was lower, and the site allowed for longer essays and a lot more photos, both of which appealed to my strong points of writing and hey-look-at-me photography. Whatever I am, I was never shy about self-revelation online, and Match let me play that up. Total investment: $440. Emails sent: can’t tell (Match emails are erased after a certain amount of time); emails received: around 600.