I so want to be in love

To believe monotheistically in you,

that you are my tender, most tender love

and give to you my sense of wonder --

worlds captured in words

- Abraham Joshua Heschel, "Youngest Desire"

Falling out of love is never easy, especially after a three-year relationship with someone you hoped to marry, raise children with, and be parted from only by death. For me, the last several months have been like a period of grief; some days are fine, some are filled with shadow, and most are a little hollow. But as the winter has given way to spring, and spring begun to hint of summer, the silver linings of the clouds have begun to reflect more light.

In that light I've seen how the way I am in relationship often undermines the best parts of me. Emotionally, I tend to fall in love, as Heschel wrote, monotheistically. I wanted my partner to be my primary source of love, affection, companionship, and support. I wanted to turn to him whenever I needed help, and hold him when he did. Although I maintained many friendships, some of them quite dear, I loved that my partner was my best friend, my secret-keeper, the one who was dear to my heart.

I know I am not alone in regarding my beloved in this way, and I am sure that for many people, it poses no problems at all. But in the months since our separation, it's become clear to me that all this monogamy of affection came at the price of my love for other people. For all my deep friendships and erotic connections, I was cut off. People would come up to me after a workshop or retreat, for example, and tell me how inspired they were, how grateful, how I'd changed their lives. And often, I'd be unable to take it in. I'd try; I'm neither so famous nor so arrogant as to simply shrug it off. But sometimes, the words would almost bounce off of me, like so much small talk.

Or, I'd have lovely gatherings of friends, on special occasions like a birthday or book-launch party, and barely feel the love and affection they were offering me. Again, not always. But often, there would be an invisible disconnect between us. No wonder that, when things were difficult with my partner, I felt so alone. I had multiple offers of support, listening, and aid -- but I felt unable to embrace them. I had been so emotionally monogamous for so long that I'd cut myself off from the love being offered to me by others.

Even more damaging than this alienation from the love of others, though, was my alienation from my own capacity to love. It's been observed before that perhaps the most joyous aspect of loving relationship isn't being loved by someone else -- it's being able to love them. To feel love, not just loved. Love feels delightful; warm, energized, buoyant; all the cliches turn true. And of course, it's possible to feel that love not just for one's partner, but for oneself, and for other people, even for God and trees and breath. Yet I was so monotheistic in my love that two paths were interrupted. First, I focused my love almost entirely in one place; even my love for spirit often felt like a misdirection, let alone that for other people and things. Second, I came to rely so much on the love I received from my partner that I stopped relying on myself to generate it.

This, I suppose, is what dependency (co- or otherwise) is about: relying on someone else to provide something you ought to provide yourself. Even in ordinary circumstances, it can turn into a neediness, a clinginess. At its worst, it can lead to jealousy and rage. In my own case, it was a kind of self-impoverishment. I had seen, in contemplative and shamanic settings, how important it was for me simply to love -- to love myself, others, God, the world. And yet it was almost impossible for me to do that, so accustomed I had become to receiving love from someone else. Indeed, trying felt like yet another betrayal: what if, by generating love for myself, I cut myself off from the love of my sweet partner? What if I had no need for him?

Fate intervened I suppose. Not fate, of course, but the mutual choices of two people no longer fresh in their love, and at least one impelled to take the next steps on his journey alone. Unable to risk the relationship in order to love myself, I was forced back on myself when the relationship ended.

I'm not one to look for the "reason" these sorts of things happen in our lives, or be sure to learn whatever lessons these kinds of circumstances offer. Usually, such talk strikes me as infuriating, insipid, or just plain annoying. But slowly, over the last several months, I have begun to open my heart a bit more to other people, other things, and myself -- and new growth has emerged from the branches. I find my friends all the more beloved. I want to speak to my house, to the woods, and even to God in the sing-song lovetalk once reserved for one person only. And I have learned -- been forced to learn -- some of the capacities of my own heart, to generate love like a furnace.

No doubt much of this seems simplistic, or perhaps banal, New Age, or sentimental. But to me it is, above all, truthful. As the Baal Shem Tov said, and as I've quoted more than once in these pages recently, "there is nothing so whole as a broken heart" -- because in its brokenness is openness, in its fractured state a wholeness which transcends the individual. I have experienced that over these spring months, an awakening from a beautiful dream that was nonetheless a slumber. I am even, at times, grateful.

As the title of this essay suggests, and as my religious mind inevitably would consider, I have noticed a parallel between this process of de-monogamizing my affection and the years-long process of opening in my religious life. For some time now, I have been drifting away from orthodox, then traditional, then mainstream, then exclusive, and then even non-heretical Judaism. I don't fancy myself a heretic, exactly, but I do recognize that some of my beliefs and practices may be considered heretical by others: preparing to spend several months in a Buddhist monastery, participating in 'pagan' rituals like Beltane, having intimate visions of Christ, Ganesh, and the Goddess. For many, I'm sure (and I've been told by plenty of commenters), all this is so far beyond the pale of normative Judaism that for me to hold myself as a Jewish teacher, as I sometimes do, is utterly unacceptable. I understand that, and accept the judgment. But in my experience, none of it has undermined my love of God, and of the Jewish God in particular. Quite the contrary. By gradually opening to these other forms and other manifestations, my capacity to love has increased. And so mysticism -- by which I mean the direct, loving experience of ultimate reality -- has flourished.

The analogy to earthly love is, presumably, obvious. YHVH, we are told in the Torah, is a jealous god. He wants exclusive, monogamous, monotheistic fidelity -- and elsewhere in the Bible, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a harlot, a slut. The traditional Jewish faithful today take this demand quite seriously, and comply with missionary zeal. They reject not just the idols of the nations, but their customs, their languages, their clothes. These latter-day Jewish pietists are, indeed, more faithful to their God than I am, and I know from my own past experience and their present testimonies that they experience love in return.

But that love is a kind of dependency (co- or otherwise). In its exclusivity, it shuts down other openings to sacred eros, and in its dualism, it endangers the capacity to generate love of oneself. I see in my own past Judaism the same pattern as I see in my past relationship. For years, I feared that if I stepped outside the bounds of Jewish exclusivity, the intensity of my commitment to the Jewish God would wane. And I didn't want it to wane; I couldn't articulate it at the time, but it gave me a sense of connection and security and love. It was mother's breast and father's strong arms all wrapped up in one. And so I guarded those boundaries.

Gradually, though, I succumbed to temptation. I danced at Burning Man. I sat (though didn't bow) before a statue of the Buddha. I stopped worrying about whether sacred sexuality was idolatry or not, because I felt the Divine presence within it. Throughout, I "checked in," committed to being faithful to the One I loved -- and throughout, the One was still there. In the depths, I called to God, and God answered me. I raised my eyes to the mountains, and asked where my help would come from -- and my help was there, from God. No longer "God" in any traditional sense, no longer just Yahweh, just male, or just transcendent. Now nondual, now seemingly atheistic, now a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, now feminine, now queer. At times this "God" seemed to melt away entirely, into a mere mindstate, a pattern of the brain. But no matter; the knowing remained; and consciousness itself; and love.

I still maintain many of the old forms of faithfulness. I don't eat forbidden foods, I rest on the seventh day. As I've written about before in this magazine, though, I do so not out of fear of retribution but simply as acts of love. The other day, I sat around waiting for Shabbat to end, wanting to go out, and while I questioned over and over why I was adhering to these Pharisaic restrictions, the answer of love remained. That is why I do it, I admit. I wish others would admit it as well.

So while I am not a polytheist exactly, I do no longer believe that there is but one avenue to the holy -- not even one per person. I follow many paths, and like to see where they lead. I have come to trust in the same salvation being at the multiple ends of the roads, as long as when I get there I can still say hinei, here, and trust and not fear.

And of course, while this essay is about emotional, rather than physical, monogamy, I wonder at the causal nexus between monotheism and monogamy in all its forms. Traditional Judaism, obviously, has demanded physical monogamy for the last thousand years, largely following the lead of Christianity. (Given the powerful homosocial bonds in traditional Jewish community, the question of emotional monogamy is more complex.) And today, our fiercest religious battles are not about ethics and social justice (of paramount importance to the prophets) but sexuality, pleasure, and gender. Today, to question physical and relational monogamy is to question "traditional values," that is, religious values. To delight too much in sensual pleasure is often labeled pagan, polytheistic, or worse. I wonder at the coincidence: are traditionalists worried that if one form of faithfulness is abandoned, others will follow? That if we yield to, rather than repress, our hearts, they will, as our ancestors feared, wander outside the bounds of propriety, safety, and tribe? That as we learn that love is available in many forms and faces, that we might think the same of spirit as well?

None of this is to argue for a particular model of intimacy -- indeed, not even for me personally. Just as I still look wistfully, even enviously, at my friends whose relationships have endured where mine did not, I admit that I sometimes regard the traditionally religious in this way. Their monogamous monotheism has made it, where mine has not -- and I know that in any committed relationship, there have been valleys as well as peaks, doubts as many as reassurances. I don't commend my path to others.

But if there is a salvation to be had, I am grateful that mine has been one of inner knowledge as well as outward generation. That is, in the same way that being forced back into aloneness has enabled me to cultivate the capacity to love, so too finding myself outside the communal and relational bonds of Jewish religious life has caused me to turn inward, to the unitive, the nondual. Perhaps the skeptics are right that when believers say, "I love you, God," they are really saying "I love." In my experience, there is no significant difference.

Life lessons: Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me Not long ago, Ben Karlin quit his job as producer of The Colbert Report to edit a book of confessional essays about breaking up, Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me. Karlin began his career at The Onion and worked at The Daily Show before helping to launch Colbert. He was used to occupying a position behind the scenes, riffing on current events and the world around him. But confessional writing reverses those polarities. Suddenly his job was to direct the jokes inward—to wring comedy out of his own life, and encourage a bunch of other writers to do the same.

Elizabeth Wurtzel knows a thing or two about confessional writing. Her 1995 memoir, Prozac Nation, took an almost masochistically candid look at her experiences with depression. It made her a household name, equally beloved and reviled. She published several more books and then, inspired by the chaos that immediately followed 9/11, applied to law school at Yale, where she’s currently finishing up her thesis.

We thought Wurtzel probably needed a distraction, so we sent her a copy of Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me and set her up in an e-mail conversation with Karlin, who now heads a production company called Superego. To say it got confessional quickly is the understatement of the year. If you’ve ever wondered what Elizabeth Wurtzel’s dog looks like, read on.

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Why superego? Why not id?

From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

Well, the id comes up with the better ideas but is pretty shitty at getting things done.

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Getting things done is so overrated! For every brilliant idea, there are a million shitty executions. Have you been to the movies lately?

Sorry...this is not what we're supposed to be talking about at all! I think we're meant to talk about dating, another nice concept that often fails when acted upon. But I guess that's not news.

How are you? And while I'm asking questions, the author blurb on your book says you live with your family, which would seem to suggest that you have a family to live with. Correct?

We are family: A 1979 Pittsburgh Pirate From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

First of all, has any one pointed out how odd it is to have a physical address as part of your electronic signature? Is that like saying, “In case this whole revolutionary form of communication that is changing the face of humanity as I type this doesn’t work out, drop me a note”?

Anyway, I do, in fact, live with my family, if wife and child constitute family. I guess that does, though I tend to think of family in more pluralistic terms – like multiple children or at the very least the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates.

I am winding down all my book stuff, which has mostly been fun and fine, and am back to working on content to put on the TV.

This is like an internet first date. All awkward stops and starts and I am already convinced it is going terribly. Like me! Why won’t you like me!

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Yes, it is odd to have one's physical address attached to an email. They tell you to do that, though. Don't know why. I guess if you're a girl there's always the secret hope that someone might send flowers or something even better, like diamonds. Or a Birkin bag. Or a really good vacuum cleaner. Or, in my case, I could use a new sofa.

Gossip girl: You never know when a third party might be listening I could go on.

But enough small talk.

Let's start our second date.

And truly, since you are married and I'm not, it's more like an affair. Right?

Do you do that? Have emotional affairs? That seems to be the new thing--to not bother with the whole mess of physical intimacy but just get deeply intellectually or otherwise entangled with a person you're not married to or going out with as a way to relieve the tedium of foreverness. Not that marriage is necessarily tedious. Of course, I'm sure yours isn't...

Forgive me for being so forward. I just don't know anything about the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates. I know a fair amount about the 1986 Mets. And the Red Sox of that same year. Who could forget the Bill Buckner fumble? Probably not Bill Buckner. My guess is that he still occasionally wakes up screaming over that snafu.

Anyway...

As much as you want me to like you, I want you to like me too--after all I'm Jewish, with all that implies. But I must admit, I have a few vicious tendencies. Like it occurred to me that this is the perfect forum for gossip, because we're having a conversation that's sort of being overheard, so I could say something mean about someone who irritates me and pretend to have forgotten that I was speaking to anyone besides you. Which would be a vicious thing to do, but only sort of.

Girls are so tricky...

Next: Married people have three kinds of affairs. One can't be forgiven.

Our own Roi Ben Yehuda has an article in Haaretz about one of the most famous parts of the Haggadah, the section towards the end of the meal where we say:

Pour out Your fury on the nations that do not know you, and upon the kingdoms that do not invoke Your name, for they have devoured Jacob [the Jews] and destroyed his home. Pour out Your wrath on them; may Your blazing anger overtake them. Pursue them in wrath and destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord.

Isn’t this a little too mean-spirited? Do we really need to ask God to severely punish our enemies? Are fury and wrath really called for?

 It’s a funny question to ask, and a very contemporary one. Until fairly recently, I doubt many Jewish communities would think twice about that passage. As Jews have faced persecution and hatred throughout time, it’s easy to imagine that these words were a source of comfort and wisdom to them. The enemies of Israel would be dealt with. Those who tried to devour our people, who destroyed our homes, they had it coming.

This Is Before the Wrath: starts flowing Today’s humanistic ideals try to whitewash our emotions, but as Ben Yehuda points out, wrath and vengeance are, to a certain degree, completely healthy responses to persecution and pain. There may be portions of the Haggadah that bother us, or that seem callous in light of contemporary wisdom, but there’s still value there. At the very least, we can say it’s important to understand how wounded and angry Jews were for so many generations that this became a part of our story. And if you think about the Exodus itself, it’s not hard to imagine Jews leaving Egypt thinking that they’d like the wrath and fury of God to pour down on the Egyptians who had enslaved them.

Ben Yehuda ends his article with a quote from a 16th century Haggadah manuscript from Worms with the following supplement:

Pour out Your love on the nations who have known You, and on the kingdoms who call upon Your name. For they show loving-kindness to the seed of Jacob, and they defend Your people Israel from those who would devour them alive. May they live to see the sukkah of peace spread over Your chosen ones, and to participate in the joy of Your nations.

The manuscript has been lost, and recently some scholars have called its authenticity into question, but the idea of counteracting wrath with love is interesting. The seder is as much about thanksgiving—for freedom, and tradition, and family—as it is about redemption. Jews are not strangers to wrath or to love, and at the seder, it’s nice to recognize both aspects of our history.

Affection or Confection: which would you choose?Can an omnivoracious eater find love with a vegangelical? Such is the question posed by this article in the New York Times, which profiles a handful of "interdietary" couples, including vegetarian Jewcy friend Leah Koenig and her kosher beau. Just in time for Valentine's Day, the article, which is guilty of a few gross generalizations (vegans shiver at the thought of kissing someone who has so much as sipped honey-sweetened tea? Please, spare me), actually does raise an interesting point: Food has a strong subconscious link to love.

Seeing as how preparing, providing, and sharing food is often an act of affection and intimacy, do couples with conflicting diets stand a chance? From those profiled, the answer to that question seems to be a resounding...maybe. Assuming the relationship is built on tolerance and compromise, then sure, you're golden. But if your vegan boyfriend or carnivorous girlfriend disapproves, or worse yet, tries to change you, you're screwed.

The article also looks at other dietary issues. One gluten-free goddess recounted a story of being dumped by a guy who "liked bread too much" to date her. Ouch.

Related: No Death, No Dinner

No time to read The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the Sunday New York Times, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, and New York Magazine during your morning commute? Don’t worry – "How To Sound Smart This Week" will provide the Cliff's Notes.

Pre-bris, he was a baby Schwarzenegger: Everyone's favorite wimpDoes counting superdelegates put you to sleep? This week, the big-idea magazines are all obsessing over the presidential campaign, but it won’t be that hard to change the subject while still sounding respectably erudite. Just bring up one of the following eye-opening essays.

In The New York Times Magazine, Annie Murphy Paul looks at the distinct possibility that fetuses can feel pain. This has major implications for the abortion debate, so you shouldn’t be at a loss for discussion questions, but there’s also a Jewish angle. Scientists think that people who are exposed to pain as babies might grow up to be more pain-sensitive:

Anna Taddio, a pain specialist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, noticed more than a decade ago that the male infants she treated seemed more sensitive to pain than their female counterparts. This discrepancy, she reasoned, could be due to sex hormones, to anatomical differences — or to a painful event experienced by many boys: circumcision. In a study of 87 baby boys, Taddio found that those who had been circumcised soon after birth reacted more strongly and cried for longer than uncircumcised boys when they received a vaccination shot four to six months later.

Is it possible that one of the central tenets of Judaism causes male wimpiness? Does that explain, like, all of American Jewish pop culture? Dazzle your audience with this possibility, and they’ll forget about Obama’s performance in Maine instantly.

Meanwhile, in The Atlantic, Lori Gottleib takes advantage of the Valentine’s Day season to propose a deeply romantic idea: If you’re a woman over the age of 35 and you’re still single, maybe you should lower your standards. “Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics,” Gottleib advises – otherwise, you’ll never be able to organize a stable family life.

Mention this article in the vicinity of anyone male or female, married or single, and you're bound to provoke a strong reaction. It makes everyone involved look terrible: women are either demanding, men either shallow or, if it’s possible that their wives married them out of desperation, pitiable. Also, halitosis is so much worse than bad taste – isn’t it? Actually, that’s another direction you can take the conversation: Would you rather marry someone with perpetual coffee breath, or a collection of Cosby sweaters?

Last week: Super Tuesday

Alex is a 23-year-old videographer living in New York City. He has never been on a Valentine’s Day date despite being totally adorable, so he’s looking for love on YouTube.

Some things about Alex: He likes Point Break, he’s Jewy enough to have made a video counting the MOTs at Heeb’s Hot 100 Party, and if you watch this film demonstrating the unflattering qualities of American Apparel spandex, you can see him in his underwear.

His MySpace page says that he’s looking for “beautiful girls with freckled faces and sugary attitudes that like to make tents in bed with our legs. and when we fall asleep their midsection where my arm rests feels exactly like the pillow i hug at night as i fall asleep,” so if that sounds like you, send him a message. And then tell us how it goes!

My former professor, David Gelernter, has a piece in the Weekly Standard attacking sexual freedom on the grounds that premarital sex destroys a young man or woman's ability to feel romantic love (defined, in Gelernter's inimitably circular way, as excluding any bond between two people who don't wait to have sex). Kevin Drum and Britt Peterson are competing to find the most cringe-inducing riff. They've each found some doozies.

First Britt, noting Gelernter's exception to the no-sex-before-marriage rule exclusive to men: "Experience suggests ... that a few casual, premature sexual encounters at the whorehouse level, with persons you couldn’t possibly love and never count on meeting again, can’t do much damage to your capacity for romantic love." Experience suggests? Whose experience, precisely? Persons you couldn't possibly love? Never mind, let's move on.

Here's Kevin, noting that for all his misguided literary flourishes, Gelernter thinks of love as the output of a computer-scientific operation: "Keeping steady company with a person you adore plus not sleeping with her (or him) yields "being in love," which is a new state of mind that is more than the sum of its parts." You heard right, it's really just that simple.

I think I've found a strophe to top the ones Britt and Kevin cited:

Premarital, premature sex drains the power reserve that would have propelled them into emotional (versus mere physical) adulthood.

I'm certain I've heard that before, but where? Ah, yes:

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen, tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory?
General Jack D. Ripper: Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.
General Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.
General Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No.
General Jack D. Ripper: But I... I do deny them my essence.

Frankly, Sterling Hayden is a lot more convincing than Gelernter.

Just for the sake of practice in conceptual analysis if for no other reason, let's take Gelernter and his formulation seriously for a moment. Recall:

Keeping steady company with a person you adore plus not sleeping with her (or him) yields "being in love," which is a new state of mind that is more than the sum of its parts.

Okay, let's give Gelernter the term "being in love," and the (extraordinarily idiosyncratic) concept to which it refers. I'm going to define a new term, call it being in love' (read "being in love prime"). To be in love' is to be in a state qualitatively identical to being in love, except that abstaining from sex features nowhere in its causal history. So apparently, many of the people I thought are or have been in love never actually were. But they didn't miss out on anything --- they were or are in love'. Which feels exactly the same.

Being in love' is clearly logically and metaphysically possible; there's nothing contradictory about it. It's nomologically possible; no physical law precludes it. Gelernter would deny that it's psychologically possible. The empirical data (which Gelernter never even nods towards) show otherwise. My experience, if not Gelernter's shows otherwise too. Gelernter falls back on The Classics to make his case.* Except that, as Britt Peterson shows, Gelernter doesn't even understand the literature he's citing. So being in love' turns out to be a viable, extant state of being. And (to make a point Gelernter ought to appreciate), from a game-theoretic perspective, it's the rational choice for a young man or woman to make: all the benefits of being in love Gelernter's way, plus a lot more fun getting there.

*Slight aside, has anyone else noticed the tendency of some conservatives to use The Classics as a wedge to be driven between themselves and reality? I recall a debate between Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill on American imperialism, in which Hill argued that we should base our foreign policy on Dante's advice. Really, he did.

UPDATE: Tamar seems to agree with me, although I don't agree with her about halacha being important. 

Last week Francois emailed me about this fascinating article in Haaretz:

Yom Kippur 2007: Jews who hate Reform Jews
By Bradley Burston

The Scene: A spinning class at a smartly appointed gym at a kibbutz in the Judean Hills, a few days before Yom Kippur. The instructor has yet to arrive. "We have a minyan, we can begin anyway," says one member of the class.

"Wait," says another, astride his exercise bike. "Women aren't counted in a minyan."

Debbie Friedman: Does she set your teeth on edge?

"Reform Jews do count women in the minyan," says a woman in the class. The man on the bike is unmoved. "The Reformim aren't Jews," he says.

There are those among us Jewish Israelis, whether we define ourselves as traditionalist or secular-as-Stalin, who cannot abide Reform Judaism and those who choose to practice it.

"I have to admit that the pseudo-spiritualism that the Reform Jewish synagogue manufactures is foreign to me," wrote Gafi Amir in an opinion column in Yedioth Ahronoth this week.

Taking a shot at the "neo-secular, particularly those who congratulate themselves for being enlightened and pluralistic," Amir decided that their level of religious observance will not include the commandments of fasting and searching one's soul.

Full story

Now, moving right past the spinning-class-come-theological-debate, I find this fascinating because I’ve really struggled with my own reactions to Reform Judaism. It weirds me out that it’s a movement that doesn’t even attempt to have standards. I just…don’t get it, I guess.

On the other hand, hate is a pretty strong word. I don’t hate Reform Jews, and I don’t really get people who are way offended by them. By definition they're the least threatening group ever, right? So what’s all the animosity about?

In light of yesterday’s post I’ve been thinking about dating and some particularly Jewish dating problems. (Because it’s not like I ever think about dating without some kind of professional prompt).

Anyway, one of the things that I’ve found to be really important to me when I’m dating someone is intense privacy. I have probably had more than my fair share of secret boyfriends, and though sometimes it was because going public would have upset our families or friends, more often it was simply because we wanted to get to know each other and spend time with each other without the pressure that so often comes with dating, especially in the Jewish community, where a singleton can’t walk three steps without someone asking if they’re seeing anyone, and if they’d maybe like to meet my nephew, he’s a dentist and he went to Princeton…. I don’t know about others, but having my community constantly scrutinizing who I go out with, and how often, is demoralizing and embarrassing, and generally cancels out any romance that might have existed. It’s not that I don’t appreciate that people want to fix me up, because I really am flattered and often interested in meeting the men that are suggested. But if the date is going to have to exist within this critical mass of public scrutiny, I’m not interested.

It’s interesting, because there are places you can go—in Israel especially, though obviously this happens anywhere there’s a big Orthodox community—to watch young frum couples on shidduch dates. These dates are held exclusively in very public venues, like hotel lobbies, under the watchful eyes of other couples, and various community members. The idea is that nothing should become private until a couple is actually married. Until that point, everything should be open for conversation.

While I see how that works in the most observant communities, it’s simply unmanageable for me. I cannot focus enough on someone in a public setting like a lobby, or even a bar, to know if I want to spend more time with them. Privacy has always been such a big part of my life, and so it’s a part of my dating life, too. I have to make a small investment of privacy in someone before I decide if a bigger investment is worth my time.

I recognize that this is completely against the haredi view of dating, and perhaps even to halacha (I don’t know enough about yichud to make this call, but I suspect my preference is not halachic) but it’s the reality of the way I deal with relationships. And I think it mirrors the way I operate with God, too. I often prefer to daven alone simply because I want to have some privacy with God.

This isn’t the case with everyone, but next time you’re talking to a young single friend about how his last date went, think about taking a step back, and allowing him to process things without the community’s input. There’s a lot of time in a good relationship for engagement with community, but I wish we gave young people a little more agency when they’re making choices. It seems, ultimately, like the responsible thing to do.

In keeping with the theme of a lack of privacy inhibiting people from getting to know each other, here’s an awesome short video about lawyers, sex and consent.

The high holidays are a time for new beginnings—a kind of reset button on whatever you’ve gotten wrong in the past year. Services take care of your spiritual crimes, allowing you to wash all the grime off your metaphysical windows and start over fresh. But what about the more literal, practical, day-to-day mistakes you’d like to erase? Kol Nidre can release you from any number of vows, but not the one you made to your credit card company to pay back that $1500.

Hence Jewcy’s guide to starting over. We’ll tell you how to clean up past messes and prep for future successes in six categories:

Sex, love and dating | Health | Friendships | Family | Money | Work

Consulting myriad websites, books, and experts, we've pulled together 26 separate ways to start the year squeaky clean. Click the links above to get to each section, and remember: If Madonna can reinvent herself every few years, so can you.