Archive for the ‘Relationships’ Category

Something tragic happens to you and the entire Jewish community knows about it, so how do you date after personal disaster? Tom Selleck’s character on “Friends” perfected the sympathetic head tilt “how are you?” when he was poking fun at how people were handling him with kid gloves following his divorce. The gossip mill is busy, and you’re the topic: divorce, death, illness, rejection, whatever. But you’re still single and you still want to meet your Beshert, so how do you rise above it?

You don’t owe anyone details, but don’t shy away from the fact of the matter either. Be prepared to address it and do so calmly, gently, and succinctly. If you don’t want to be a victim, then don’t feed into it. Let your dates know that there’s so much more to you than whatever the tragedy was you experienced.  The Jewish community is great about coming together and supporting their befallen – and you should allow them to help you until you heal – but when you’re ready to move on, let people know. Don’t make people feel uncomfortable for showing concern, accept it and change the subject.

Drama does not define you. But make sure you are truly healed from whatever it is before even attempt to date seriously.

You meet a guy, fall in love with him, break-up and then agree to become “special friends” hoping that he recognize the error of his ways and fall back in love with you and ask you to be his girlfriend again. Listen, they can make movie after movie about special friends falling in love, but that usually doesn’t happen. You can save yourself the heartache — and the self-respect — by realizing that nothing good can come of it. If you are really, truly over him and don’t want to be alone, then, well, even still proceed with caution because you may not realize the emotions that you still have for that person. In addition, the time you spend with your special friend may be keeping you from opportunities to meet your Beshert. It’s hard to see the predicament from the outside, but try to understand the position you’re putting yourself in and see how it probably won’t turn out for the best.

How much is too much time on the phone before that first hookup? How little is too little?

Too much can run the risk of forming a connection that will inevitably compete with the connection or lack thereof once you lay eyes on each other. A line I once wrote for George in a Seinfeld first draft: “Blind guys have it made. They don’t need looks! All they need is a cute voice. There are tons of women with cute voices!” Love may be blind, but on the road leading there, men and women are both visual creatures.

Being very auditory, I’m drawn to a certain type of voice. The wrong one is a deal breaker right away. The right one, I start filling in the other pieces to the puzzle, probably based on subconscious combos of other interesting women I’ve met across the years with similar voices. A recipe for ultimate disappointment if there ever was one! Before you get to filling in those other pieces… hang up the phone and meet them.

On the flip side, a woman recently avoided giving me her phone number beforehand. The voice inside me said, “This isn’t right.” I wound up basing our “chemistry” on our emails and her eternally smiling picture. How can real life measure up to that? It can’t. Lesson: Listen to the voice inside you. And before meeting her… hers.

Hi Tamar,

How can there not be somebody else out there exactly like you, who thinks the way you do, who also happens to float your boat, who wouldn’t mind your floating their boat? Permission to board, sir! (That was the lady talking, not me.)

We’re not that unique in other aspects of life, are we? How can we be the only ones who totally get us and find ourselves absolutely irresistible? I only ask that rhetorically. If I truly found myself irresistible, I wouldn’t have resisted admitting that I was irresistible.

These are the questions many of us raise following yet another in a series of hookups that didn’t wind up hooking us. But if you did find somebody exactly like you, would familiarity breed contempt? “That face you make when you think you’re being cute. I hate when I do that. Could you not do that?”

In the end, we’re not looking for clones. We’re looking for complements… then compliments. Remember “You complete me” in Jerry Maguire? Yeah, sappy all right. Hey, it’ll be Valentine’s Day soon. What better time to drain a little sap? More on that “holiday” in an upcoming post.

A few weeks ago, I wrote this article about making love happen now, or whenever you want it to happen. The context of the article was in trying something different when you realize that your tried and true methods aren’t working. Aligned with that belief is the idea that you both internally and externally need to be ready for love in your life. Taking a line from Field of Dreams — “if you build it, they will come” — is your physical and emotional space ready to be shared with someone? My physical space is not. Not at all. My dear dear assistant cringes, I’m sure, when I ask her to come over and work from my home because my place is such a mess. There are stacks of books, papers, and clothes everywhere. There was a point when I didn’t care about bringing someone I was dating over but then I realized its less the message of “she’s messy” that’s being given off, more the fact that its hardly possible to picture how he (a guy) could fit into my life right now. And, when you think about it, “picturing yourself together” is a huge component of progressing a relationship forward so its important to allow that to foster.

On a similar note, a client of mine told me that one of the reasons she felt uncomfortable dating a man she was seeing is because, upon seeing his apartment for the first time, she asked if he’d just moved in recently. When he said no, she was astonished at the lack of warmth and that “lived-in feeling” that the apartment had. This isn’t to say that you should turn your apartment into the after picture of the Pottery Barn catalog, but just to keep in mind what kind of vibe your place sends off.

To take this concept to the emotional level – if your emotional space is occupied by something else, be it an ex, stress, family issues, anything that is going to be translated subconsciously into distance or disinterest, work on creating some vacant emotional real estate for a very special person you could meet.

-Mel

You’ve seen the perfect match on JDate. Talk about it all you want. You’ve started talking to that match. Slowly stop talking about it to your friends. You went on one awesome date with a new prospect. Talk about it a little. You started a new relationship. Don’t talk about it. You’re officially in a new relationship. Start talking all you want. You are single again and looking. Talk about it, go it out of your system and then get back on the market. Don’t dwell on your singleness or why you’re single and don’t start talking about a relationship before it happens. It’s hard to not want to brag about a new prospect but sometimes it’s better to keep it to yourself until there’s actually something to report (or find one good friend to confide in). Enjoy that feeling of being at the beginning of something new and revel in it. And if it doesn’t work out, you’ll have less people to have to recount the break-up to.

This Week’s Top Three Tweet-Worthy Events From Jews Who Make News

1.  Gabby Giffords Resigns, Promises To Return

Representative Gabrielle Giffords handed in her resignation last Wednesday.  Giffords, Arizona’s first Jewish congresswoman, says she needs more time to heal from the gunshot wound she suffered last year at the hands of a would-be assassin.

Giffords team Tweeted on Wednesday, “Today Rep. Giffords will step down from Congress. Watch her official resignation now on @cspan #Inspiration.”

Giffords does plan to make a comeback in politics though. In a public resignation letter, the congresswoman says, “I will recover and will return.”

2.  Ferris Bueller Returns For The Super Bowl

Matthew Broderick will be resurrecting one of his most memorable characters next weekend for a Super Bowl ad. The actor, whose mother was Jewish, will bring Ferris Bueller back for a mystery commercial that will air during the big game.

A short teaser was posted to YouTube, reenacting the first scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Media outlets around the country are all excitedly reporting the news. TV Guide Tweeted, “Bueller… bueller… BUELLER! Matthew Broderick to reprise iconic ’80s role for mysterious Super Bowl ad. Watch the video!”

3.  Hoffman Makes His TV Debut

Dustin Hoffman is trying his luck at TV with the new HBO series, Luck. The Jewish actor has starred in dozens of movies, but will be making his debut on television with this new series.

Luck is centered around characters who are tied to the same horse-racing track. HBO is working to promote the series by giving viewers a shot at winning $50,000! The cable network Tweeted on Thursday, “On Saturday at 4pm ET, cheer your horses on as they race to earn you $50,000. Feeling #LUCK-y?”

We just may try our luck!

My friend Ari is dating a girl who isn’t Jewish and they’ve started getting serious. He is adamant that he only wants to marry a Jewish girl.  So is it fair to Christina to keep dating her? She hasn’t done anything wrong, she’s awesome and they have fun, but he knows there’s something missing. He told her how he felt when they first met, but I think she’s hoping to change his mind. The longer they date, the harder it will be to break it off and the more it will hurt. He says they’re having fun, but she seems to really be into him.

I think it’s selfish of Ari to let it get any deeper when he knows it will never amount to anything. Sure, some couples end up falling in love, even when they told themselves they would never date a non-Jew/a lawyer/a smoker/etc, but if Judaism is one of your top priorities (and I, of course, hope it is), then letting a casual date turn into a relationship isn’t a smart idea. Shiksas have feelings too.

I’ve been fairly lucky in love in that even in my relatively short time dating, I have experienced some great love. The love of cheesy movies and letters passed down to grandchildren (literally, my college ex wrote me letters from overseas every day for four months). I remember how we met: on a cruise ship somewhere between Italy and Spain. I remember how our courtship started: he wrote me an email and called me the Jewel of the sea (our cruise ship’s namesake as well) and so began nearly 4 years of one of the most beautiful, passionate romances I have ever been witness to, never mind experienced. I remember our breakup too: a tearful embrace in the foyer of my apartment building, an uncertainty of when we’d see each other again (It’ll be two years this March).

In a perfect world, this great story would have led to our great love and our great love to a great relationship and subsequent marriage. But we weren’t right for each other and we knew it probably from very early on in the relationship. So what made us stick it out, aside from our young-twenties inexperience? What makes so many people try to fix something broken? The beauty of the story.

We loved telling our story. We loved when people told us how brave we were to try and work things out with an ocean between us. Every trip to see each other was the next hit of a powerful drug, reaffirmed by the praise and admiration we received from friends, acquaintances, and family. But behind closed doors, when no one was telling us how cute we looked together, we knew it wasn’t working.

You know what makes for a better story than how you met? How you stayed together. How you stayed happy together. My admiration is not for those who are lucky enough to meet in a wonderfully poetic way, my admiration is for those who met in a completely ordinary fashion and worked together to turn their relationship into something extraordinary.

Happy dating!

-Mel