Boyfriend Chronicle #2

I moved to New York on a whim after getting severely dumped by my very first boyfriend my last year of college. An acquaintance was subletting his apartment in the East Village for the low, low price of $975. It was a shoebox. Instead of a bed, there was a thin, futon-like mat that slid under the couch during the day. I had no job, not very many friends, and no money of my own. Luckily, the Bank of Dad was my generous financial backer for the summer. Yes, I was that girl. The girl whose parents pay for her to live in Manhattan and realize her dreams. I made no excuses, and I realized that most of the world would have hated me if they had known my situation. But I didn’t tell anyone. I also did not realize my dreams. Unless my dreams were to work at a snooty juice bar for minimum wage while I looked for “real jobs” and ate lots of takeout food.

The guy who got me the job at the juice bar was a friend of mine from college. His name was James and he was a strange bird. The kind of guy who listens to avant garde “noise” music and tries to emulate it, and thinks that anyone who doesn’t find this kind of music extremely interesting “just doesn’t get it.” James dressed in garishly clashing, sometimes ill-fitting, vintage clothes, and often smelled a little funny. He was prone to manic outbursts and had zero customer service skills, which are kind of important when working in the service industry, especially in the West Village, where people treat their dogs like children and often subscribe to the latest liquid diet trend. So I should have been a bit leery of any man James might introduce me to, or any man that I might meet in James’ presence.

I was not leery enough. Will was sitting at the bar in a restaurant underneath the Marcy St. subway in Williamsburg where James’ klezmer band played every Tuesday. He was wearing a navy blue suit with a red bowtie. He had frizzy blond hair and a cherubic pink face with bright blue eyes. Will was a crime reporter for the New York Sun, which seemed very impressive to me at the time. He also was a Yale graduate, a concert pianist, and spoke Russian. A note to the young ladies out there: any time you find out impressive information about a man within the first ten minutes of meeting him, he’s talking too much and trying too hard. But, he gallantly pretended to be my date when a peculiar man continued to hit on me, so I gave him my phone number.

Our first date was the fourth of July. We were supposed to go to the Yale Club in Manhattan to watch the fireworks, which intrigued me, but then he took me to the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge instead, which was slightly less intriguing. After the fireworks, he plied me with alcohol, and somehow got me to agree to come back to his dingy little apartment—“just for five minutes.” I have often asked myself why I believe lies like that when coming from someone who obviously wants me to stay for more than five minutes. Why don’t I just admit that this guy is clearly trying to get me into his bed, so I’m going to make a decision to either go with him, or go home, but there is no way that I will be staying anywhere for “five minutes”? When we got up to his place, which was completely un-air-conditioned on a 90-degree night, there were strategically placed vases of fresh cut orchids, and a bottle of red wine on the wooden box-cum-coffee table. Will had really been banking on my coming home with him. Were I sober, I would have been more repulsed by this kind of behavior, but as it was I could barely protest his advances without his suction-cup lips silencing me.

I felt dirty the next morning when I woke up in the infernal Brooklyn heat next to this sweat-soaked chubby man on a sweat-soaked futon. At seven o’clock in the morning, it was already at least 90 degrees Fahrenheit. I couldn’t remember why I had found this man attractive. Without the bowtie, he was just an average-looking Mississippi boy in a dingy New York apartment. And he didn’t have any cream for the coffee he made me as I jetted out the door as fast as I possibly could.

Yet, we continued dating. I know, it was questionable by the way I was describing my utter ambivalence to him whether I would let him become a part of my life, but somehow it just happened. Please don’t judge me, dear reader. I have no idea why we continued dating. In retrospect, I felt nothing but mild revulsion toward him after he boozed me up and lured me back to his apartment on the first date. Perhaps it was the fact that I was lonely and bored and slowly learning that I could not count on my few friends in New York to have time for me. Or maybe it was the Southern gentleman thing—I didn’t mention that part. Will definitely knew how to open doors for the ladies. But a relationship cannot survive on good manners alone. After a couple of weeks, it became clear that his fervor could not overcompensate for my complete lack of attraction to him. In fact, I think it was his over-interest in me that made me want to run for the hills.

Why is romantic chemistry such a delicate game? In the beginning of a relationship, if a man declares too much interest, I lose interest. If he is slightly aloof and mysterious, that’s so much more intriguing. Unless he’s too aloof, of course—that’s a turnoff as well. We all claim that we don’t like to play games in relationships, yet I think games are the fundamental “mating dance” of dating. It’s like Carmen says:

L'amour est enfant de boheme
Il n'a jamais jamais connu de lois
Si tu ne m'aimes pas je t'aime
Si je t'aime prend garde a toi
Si tu ne m'aimes pas
Si tu ne m'aimes pas je t'aime
Mais si je t'aime, si je t'aime
Prends garde a toi!*

My loose, modern interpretation:

Love is a wild ghetto outlaw child.
If you not into me, I’m into you.
If you are into me, you’d better watch yourself, boy!

*From George Bizet's Carmen

To all the boys I've loved before...

Here’s a chronicle of my past lovers. It's a work in progress, with other stories to follow. We start with the proverbial “first time.”

The first time I fell in love, I was twenty-one—a month shy of twenty-two. I was still a virgin. Don’t think I didn’t have a complex or two about getting to my senior year in college without having been deflowered. It’s not that I’m hideous-looking, or socially inept, or even wont of gentlemen callers. But at the time, I just hadn’t met the right guy. Enter Alex. He was a lanky, drum-playing, yoga-practicing, artsy vegetarian with a killer smile and a certain unabashed naïveté about him that was both endearing and refreshing. The first night we got together was after a drunken night at a party, when he asked me if I wanted to come home with him to “listen to some music.” Insert “records” for “music” and it could have been a scene from any bad college movie from the 1970’s, but I played along and went back to his “pad.” I knew it was fate when I found out that he, too, was a virgin, and was saving sex for the right girl.

We waited for three whole months to “consummate” our love. In retrospect, I really don’t understand how we managed to hold out for that long. Today I would not be so patient. But I also think it was great to have had that experience of waiting for the right time. It placed a lot of meaning and importance on physical love. That same kind of importance hasn’t been present in any of the relationships I’ve had since. He was, and still largely remains in my mind, the perfect guy. He would leave little love notes on my pillow, and sent me beautiful letters when I went away to a writing program for six weeks. We cooked and gardened together. After the initial couple weeks of testing the waters, I wanted to spend every waking (and sleeping) moment with him. I did. The relationship got very intense very fast. We were joined at the hip. I completely believed he was my one true love and that we would be together forever. I couldn’t imagine anything that would tear us apart.

Then came the end of summer. Alex went to study overseas, and I had to start student teaching for my education program. It was the most miserable time of my life. We decided to have a long distance relationship and make it work. The trouble was, for the previous nine months, my entire life was centered around Him. With him in another country, I had to focus on my own life, which was not nearly as fun. I was lost. We wrote back and forth, called each other whenever we could, but I was definitely the one putting more effort into communicating, because he was the only thing I thought could make me happy. When I went to visit him over spring break, he waited until the last night I was there, and then he broke my heart. Completely crushed it. Without any warning, he let me know that he needed his independence, and thought he could “enjoy his time there” better if we were not trying to make our relationship work. I knew it that was a euphemism for “I want to get it on with many, many girls, and I don’t want to feel guilty about doing it.”

It felt the floor had crumbled underneath me. God knows why, but I had not even considered this possibility. This relationship had taught me to completely worship another person, and to completely forget about my own self worth. The idea that we might not make it as a couple seemed ridiculous to me. I mean, we had said “I love you” and everything. We had fantasized about our future children. I was furious to think that those words could be rendered empty and meaningless in a matter of seconds. Looking back, I was obviously naïve and delusional. This guy was wonderful (still is), but not worth my obsessing and being paralyzed when he said goodbye.

Jdate: Confidential

Currently, my biggest fear is that someone will see me on the street and recognize me from an Internet dating site. My picture and “profile” are available for anyone to peruse at will on not just one, but two separate sites. I clearly feel comfortable exposing a decent chunk of information about myself to complete strangers—I even attempt to do this with a modicum of wit. And by all means, I want people—male people, particularly—to respond. But bridging the gap between my cyber-identity and my, well, real self, proves to be awkward, even embarrassing. Why is it so easy to be creative and interesting behind the cyber curtain? Is this e-me the real Me, or just the Me that I’d like to be?

Let’s backtrack a moment. I began my foray into e-dating a little over a year ago, when I had just moved to New York City. I had a few close college friends nearby, but was completely under whelmed by the dating scene. For those not “in the know,” Internet dating typically works like this: you fill out a series of questionnaires (the aforementioned “profile”); after a couple pages of multiple-choice questions which demand the kind of details that my parents probably still don’t know about each other after 32 years of marriage, you are expected to “say a few words,” which usually ends up sounding more like a business cover letter than a self-introduction; depending on the site, you could be asked to describe “your ideal date,” or “your ideal relationship;” then, you upload a photo, or five (some people go for thoroughness). Once all that info is set, you are free to peruse the cyber meat market. You can search for men seeking women, women seeking women, men seeking Chihuahuas, and many other combinations (I typically like to weed out the short, over-35, dog haters). Then you can email people through the site, or wait for someone to get in touch with you.

Having been advised by more than a few Jewish mothers (who are, as we all know, the authorities on modern dating practices) I signed up for Jdate.com, a service for Jewish singles. Most dating sites advertise “free” memberships, but it is impossible to actually communicate with any of the members unless you pay, and it’s not cheap—typically around $30 for a one-month membership. I tried to avoid paying by putting my email address in my profile, but the site administrators continually bleeped out my personal information, even when I thought I was being super-creative (e.g., “You can contact me electronically at my name plus something that sounds like ‘frugal’ dot com”), but they didn’t let me get away with it. So I gave in, and signed up for a month.

And so began my dating adventures in New York. I have to admit, it was kind of exciting. At one point, I had four dates in one weekend. Yeah, I was popular among the cyber-love set. For the most part, these guys were financially successful (they were either in the business or other high-powered fields), ex-frat-boys, not-bad looking, and only slightly socially awkward. In short, they looked good on paper, but didn’t quite cut it in three dimensions.
One such specimen was a poster-child for Adult ADD: he wouldn’t stop jumping around and kept interrupting our conversations with wild outbursts of completely random subject matters. But he bought me dinner. And he was very tall. And he had a dog. I guess everything’s a trade-off.

Another was a lawyer, who I like to call Mr. Lack of Personality. The one thing Mr. L.O.P. had going for him was a very large apartment in Gramercy Park. But, and there’s always a “but” in these stories, his place was garishly decorated: the quintessential Bachelor Pad. I had to bite my tongue when I first saw the matching black leather couches paired with a large, red, fake Oriental rug and an enormous flat screen TV. To top it all off, he actually had a football telephone—a phone made out of a Giants helmet—that was proudly on display next to his collection of the Most Generic Music in America. I don’t know how or why we managed to see each other for six whole weeks. Perhaps I thought I could make him interesting. Or perhaps I just really wanted to believe that good relationships can start on the Internet. Eventually, I decided that I wasn’t desperate enough to sustain a relationship whose only saving grace was that we both were Jewish. I also moved to another country, but I like to believe that I would have ended it anyway.

These men were exactly who I expected to be candidates for cyber-dating: those who, for one reason or another, couldn’t get a date in the real world. Or even if they could get a date, the real dating world somehow wasn’t giving them what they wanted, so they turned to the Internet. I couldn’t look down upon them, because I had put myself in exactly the same position. But I was having trouble accepting the Internet as a viable means for meeting men. Even though it seems that more and more people are stepping onto the dating dot-com train, it remains my dirty little secret (or at least it will, until this gets published).

I have yet to meet someone who makes me want to come out of the cyber dater closet. It’s always the same story—somebody writes me who appears attractive, interesting, and we have witty IM (instant messenger) conversations. But then the time comes to actually meet this person or talk to them on the phone, and I know it’s over. There’s just no way someone can be more clever in person than they are via electronic communication, myself included. That’s the Catch 22 of Internet dating: you can “meet” people fairly easily, but when you are face-to-face, they tend to be very different than their online personas would suggest. What you are “attracted to” online may not even exist in real life.
So why, finding myself alone in a big city once again, have I turned to the big bad worlds of both Jdate and match.com? Does hope really spring eternal, or am I just too shy to meet boys in real life? I really want this to work. I want to believe that if I, an interesting, attractive, funny girl (a “catch,” if you will) subscribe to these sites, than there’s got to be some other not-too-freaky, slightly well-adjusted, and even interesting people who are looking for real love in the virtual realm as well. And if that’s the case, then let’s not keep this a secret any longer. Let’s not feel bad or weird or unworthy. Let’s wear our dating site of choice on our sleeves.

But if you see me on the street, and you recognize me from Cyberland, please: do not acknowledge this fact. Just keep walking, and send me an email when you get home.