A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl by van Wallach Read Free Book Online Page A

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,
     
    I believe I’m making an emotional breakthrough today. I scurried to Barnes & Noble to flip through self-help books as essay research and I quickly found Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s Ten Stupid Things Men Do . The first stupid thing—“Stupid Chivalry.” That hit me like a lightning bolt. That’s me, accepting all kinds of nonsense from [name redacted], excusing her, hoping she’ll change, taking enormous emotional damage in my longing for her, although plenty of circumstances warn me that it would never work.
    So, as my mind churned through these matters today, I realized in the words of the Alfie theme song, “What’s it all about?” Really—I’ve been pursuing online romance for four years, since Jcupid in February 2003. What do I have to show for it? How close am I—have I ever come close—to my ultimate goal? Am I serious about finding romance, warmth, somebody to share some aspects of my life? Am I spending too much time in a fruitless wheel-spinning quest, a scavenger hunt for inappropriate women? Isn’t it time I stopped jacking around, being the nectar-sipping hummingbird, and really found a flower?”
     
    The nectar could be emotionally addictive. I over-scrutinized profiles for revisions that then rubbed my self-doubts and insecurities raw. I mused:
     
    I noted she updated her profile yesterday with a new screen name; perhaps the old one was too obscure. I noted also she’s seeking somebody with a doctorate, nothing less. Her profile also referred to time in bed, which made my chest lurch. Obviously that’s on her mind.
     
    But hope was always springing eternal on JDate and Match. The opportunities endlessly beckoned, floating in the digital ether then usually drifting away. So:
     
    A bunch of promising JDate contacts came up like snake eyes. One is in Merrick, NY, so that’s not good geography. Another wrote to me, a NYC executive, 5’ 8”, the last in the world I expected to like my profile enough to write. I wrote, she read, nothing, I wrote again yesterday, “Come on, my Sweet, don’t stop now.” Her screen name is Sweet, or some form of it. Then I chatted with a woman who looked at me. She launched a barrage of questions that I answered, bemoaned the “nightmare” of JDate and the boorish behavior of men. Twice she said she didn’t think we were a match, and she wrote she didn’t think I was attracted to strong women. All this happened while I was watching 24 , too—Jack Bauer tangles with his father and brother. She came across as cold and suspicious; dare I say unfeminine? For a woman who’s had awful experiences, she did her best to alienate me. Yet she didn’t seem to want to end the chat. She sounded like a horror. Abrupt, lacking any of the coquette. Never married—I can see why.
     
    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