A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (6 page)

We decided to stroll and find a place to order a drink and warm up. Our search was not random; she made a beeline north to the St. Regis Hotel.

We settled into a booth and I noticed a young Orthodox couple nearby, perhaps in their modest courting mode. They knew how to get to the point of dating.

The waiter brought the drink menu and we ordered glasses of wine. As a total wine neophyte, I seconded her order. The place was relatively quiet, but I strained to understand Nadezhda’s Russian accent. We talked about our kids, our work, Russia, the U.S. Every word, every gesture of this first encounter was new to me. After about forty-five minutes Nadezhda excused herself to get the bus back to Brooklyn, and I had to skitter to Grand Central Terminal for the train to Connecticut. Our first date had reached its conclusion.

I said I would call, and I did. Nadezhda ushered in my new life and I liked her exotic Björk-like appearance and the notion of a social life. I called, I emailed, and I never heard anything back from her.

I never responded to a print-media personal ad again. The first date of my new single life marked the last date generated by my old approach. Within a month, I joined an online dating site. My social life was going digital. The opportunities for searching, finding, chatting and even connecting, I soon learned, were about to increase dramatically.

I knew about JDate, but I couldn’t get myself to join it. I was not yet divorced, and the idea of seriously looking for a new woman felt strange. However, I wanted to do something with my sudden solitude, given my new status as a refugee from a big house to a one-bedroom apartment.

I’ve always had an affection for off-brand consumer selection. In banking, why would I select Citibank or Manny Hanny when I could go with more daring, maverick options like Amalgamated or European American Bank? My zeal to support the struggling contender extended to dating. At the suggestion of people in MSN’s anti-JDate discussion group (yes, it did exist), I signed up with the small but scrappy rival, Jcupid, in February 2003.

On a good night, one hundred women were online at Jcupid. The selection got old fast. Yet what it lacked in quantity it made up for in quality. I met several women there who became, if not lovers, then staunch friends. Plus, the site had technical features that I have yet to see on other dating sites. I especially liked the way it kept track of all emails back and forth with a single woman on the woman’s profile page. This feature enabled me to watch the relationship unfurl, like a flower blossoming, as emails zapped back and forth. Other sites simply clump all emails together in sent and received files, so tracking the back and forth with one contact becomes much more difficult. Facebook just adapted this approach to messages, so Jcupid was way ahead of its time (JDate eventually absorbed it).

I can remember the first two women I had contact with quite clearly. I got an email from a French woman in New York, perhaps intrigued by the note on my profile that I was born in France (albeit on the U.S. Air Force base, and we moved back to the U.S. before I was three, so I spoke no French). She sent me a short note, I wrote back, I got her name, checked her out and found she had knocked three years off her age. For the first but no means the last time, I found myself thinking, “She lied to me.” Her European style attracted me, but I never could get a date with her.

The second date from Jcupid started at my initiative. I saw a woman who looked like a Jewish Hobbit, even shorter than me, cute enough. I wrote, she wrote, and when she gave me her name, something clicked in my brain. Mora ... short ... had a job in publishing ... then it hit me. I had worked with this Mora at a publishing company in the 1980s. I was an editor at a monthly magazine covering the frozen food industry (I went to Princeton for this? Well, as an editor once told me, “A gig is a gig.”); Mora was a secretary and also was my secret office crush (until her boss casually told me he knew all about my mooning over her).

I said nothing to Mora on the phone. I wanted to see her in person to confirm she was the Mora of twenty years earlier. With my impeccable sense of inappropriate planning, I convinced her to meet me at the clock in Grand Central Terminal. It was March, 2003, the day of the massive anti-war rally in New York, protesting the invasion of Iraq. I figured we could watch the excitement, see the freakiness, have some fun.

We planned to meet on a street corner in the East Fifties, but the huge turnout and stifling crowd control by the NYPD made movement impossible. The sardine-like crowd density made me feel panicked and claustrophobic. I tried calling Mora with my cell phone but I just got her voice mail. She must have been on the subway.

Swaying with the crowd like seaweed at Bikini Bottom, I watched the rally as I fought to reverse directions and reach Grand Central. I saw several people wearing buttons for a politician I had never heard of—someone named “Howard Dean.”

Finally I reached Grand Central and found Mora. I was bursting to reveal the big secret. She had not associated my unusual name with her lovestruck coworker of the early Reagan years. Once I saw her, I said, “Mora, it’s me, Van. Don’t you recognize me? We used to work together. Your boss was Moe, right?”

Gradually, recognition spread over her face. My first great dating coincidence.

We talked about the demonstration, her work after publishing, my life since we last saw each other and all the typical first date/old friends topics. Time had taken its toll on both of us. She wasn’t the Yiddish sylph I remembered from twenty years earlier and I didn’t see a second meeting in the cards. Or so I thought.

A few months later I attended a Jcupid social event at the bar. I was interested in another woman then, Marsha, a lawyer I had gotten together with twice. I walked upstairs where only a few people had gathered and, to my surprise, saw Marsha and Mora together, chatting away. I smoothed over how I knew the two of them, and maybe told Marsha a few more details. I snapped a picture of them together and for years Marsha used an edited version of that photo on her dating profiles.

So, I chalked that one up to experience. I had many others. I always felt a jolt when I met a new woman and we connected. I would think, “Finally! Normal life, again.” Consider what I wrote in my journal late in 2003 about Dulce, a career-changing corporate executive. We both felt a spark and I wrote,

We enjoyed cuddle sessions in my creaky 1986 Saab at frigid Connecticut beaches and fervent hand-holding at movies. I printed out her long and affectionate emails, written in bold purple type. “When is your birthday?” she coyly asked one January night, a question that suggests a long time horizon and exotic plans.

She wrote to me:

Very patient and optimistic, I assured her. We got along great and she was an assertive PDA/hand-holder at movies and events—I liked that. Then, very quickly, Dulce talked about getting my child together with her nephews, and us coming to her family’s Passover seder. I told her I needed to think about that. Result: total silence. She never responded to me again, despite my efforts to restart contact. Her patience must have been limited, I suppose:

Five years later, on a date, I saw her in an Indian restaurant. I recognized her instantly and she must have recognized me—I’m the same bald Jewish guy with glasses I was then. But given the circumstances, I decided to keep quiet. I simply noted that Dulce was dining with a man and woman—just the three of them on a Saturday evening.

Too bad about Dulce, but I kept moving. Over five years of on-and-off Internet dating, my batting average hovered around .250, meaning that from about a hundred contacts, twenty to thirty have led to something other than my being ignored, getting a polite thanks-but-no-thanks (or sending the same type of response myself). The others led to an exchange of emails through the dating site or an instant message chat, with a progressively smaller number moving to swaps of personal email addresses, phone calls, and even real meetings—the point, of course, where the contact soars or crashes. It took about ninety seconds to tell whether any chemistry existed; the process was probably the same on the distaff side. After two minutes we were either starry-eyed or checking our watches. To be honest, we could both tell; only in a few cases did one of us wildly misjudge the situation.

I figure I sent about 3,000 emails on JDate and got 2,000 back. Of course, a smaller group of women generated all that traffic—one woman might generate dozens of emails back and forth over years. Match and Jcupid account for another 1,000. That’s a lot of trying, blind alleys, long distance faux-romances, digital heartbreak, self-delusion and self-acceptance. And some of them actually led to something.

I felt plenty of exasperation and frustration. At one low point, I wrote,

The nectar could be emotionally addictive. I over-scrutinized profiles for revisions that then rubbed my self-doubts and insecurities raw. I mused:

But hope was always springing eternal on JDate and Match. The opportunities endlessly beckoned, floating in the digital ether then usually drifting away. So:

Online dating from this point on became a numbers game, a slow, halting, confusing process. I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t limit myself to searching just in my area. I hesitated at first, but got into the swing of contacting women and, in some cases, getting contacted. I couldn’t believe a woman would ignore me when we seemed to be such a good initial match, but I learned that’s the way the world works, that I should not even expect an acknowledgment. I described online dating as a social version of the Rubik’s Cube. All the parts are turning, and at any one time you can see only a few of them. While I was dispatching my heartfelt notes, others did the same, and I could only try and hope. Most were ignored; of course, I also sent plenty of thanks-but-no-thanks notes to women—but I always responded. I gave them credit for reaching out, and these women merited at least an acknowledgment. Some were gracious: