We were married, but we weren’t married, trapped in a nameless liminal space where our identity as a family was murky at best. If divorce felt like Dante’s 9th circle of Hell, the months-long separation period while cohabiting under the same roof recalled a Viking funeral. Our marriage lay in a boat, set aflame as it drifted off to sea, awaiting its arrival at Valhalla. 

Ten months after my soon-to-be-ex-husband took up residence in an apartment building 1.2 miles down the street, the world erupted into a fiery petri dish bubbling with viral plague. We were not yet divorced—Covid-related closure of the courts had stalled our paperwork—but the margins of married life were receding as if water ebbing to and from shore. Sometimes, it continued to lap at our feet. Eventually, our separation found its own rocky groove, a mathematical percentile of messy division. We spent 87% of the time fighting over custodial arrangements, the other 13% was dedicated to passing our kids’ Ritalin and forgotten gymnastics leotards back and forth. 

We were not yet not a family. But we were not the one we had been. 

Summer came, camps were cancelled, and our children, quarantined for four-and-a-half months at that point, had watched a collective total of 10,000 YouTube and TikTok videos. They were cranky and inconsolable, ricocheting off one another like moths in a beaker lit aflame. Tzvia, our mercurial tweenage daughter, had morphed into a raging hellion. And Sam, our autistic thirteen year-old son, was unravelling under the pressure and stress of a loudly imploding world; his anxiety and depression had spiked to a boiling point. Early on in the pandemic, I walked outside into our tiny fenced-in backyard to find Sam lighting a wooden table on fire. Weeks later, he stuck a fork inside an electrical socket and ignited a bright, ashy spark that burnt my computer charging cord to a crisp. Minutes later, a trio of firefighters arrived at our doorstep. 

Desperate for a change of scenery, my ex and I agreed that we had to do something. Mid-July, we took advantage of our temporary work-from-home set-ups, arranged precautionary COVID-19 tests in Los Angeles, and hightailed it back east where the coronavirus numbers were starting to flatten. I flew with the kids to Boston; My ex left a week later for Burlington,Vermont. 

In Boston, the kids and I spent two weeks with my parents, mostly zipping through the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru for strawberry Coolattas and swimming during our reserved two-hour block at the local JCC where the local yentas in skirted bathing suits barraged me with endless questions about my impending divorce. Then the kids and I road-tripped to Vermont, blasting Borns’ “Electric Love” as we pulled into Shelburne. There, my soon-to-be-ex-husband, our kids, their cousins, and my soon-to-be ex-in-laws (we need another word: been laws?) would be staying for a week at their family home, perched high atop a leafy hill overlooking fertile cow fields exploding with grass and the golden shimmer of Lake Champlain. 

I booked a room at a nearby hotel where I would stay for two nights, getting my fill of maple creemees and roosters clucking at dawn. A week later, my ex would return the kids to Boston. 

But once in Vermont, the impracticalities of this pandemic-era plan soon became clear. My ex’s sister was quarantined with her husband, daughter and my 80 year-old, immunocompromised soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law in the property’s main house; My ex was staying in the one-bedroom “tiny house” on the front lawn, several yards away. Until their tests came back negative, our kids weren’t permitted inside the main house, and vice versa. Both kids were screaming to go in different directions. Our son needed a parent around; our daughter needed a parent around. And while the hotel where I’d booked a reservation was implementing coronavirus safety protocols, no place was completely failsafe. 

Finally, my soon-to-be ex-husband relented: “You can stay two nights in the tiny home.” 

Then he pointed me down the hall toward his mother’s empty bedroom, a tidy square space painted eggshell white with seascape-themed watercolor paintings and sheer fabric curtains like something out of a Virginia Woolf novel. 

My ex was not thrilled with this arrangement—that, he made clear. He needed me to stay and help with the kids, but he didn’t want to need me to stay: “Two nights only,” he repeated. As I passed my soon-to-be ex-husband in the kitchen, he sucked in his stomach in an exaggerated curve, his body forming a hard ‘C’ so as not to make contact. Later, walking along Shelburne Beach as I followed behind with towels, he flicked his wrist to shoo me away. In the check-out line at Trader Joe’s, he picked a fight over money. As we were pulling out of the supermarket parking lot, our daughter threw a bottle of water at her father, triggered and traumatized by the last decade-plus of dysfunction.  

Did I mention he had a new girlfriend back home in California? 

Over the next two days, my soon-to-be ex-husband did his best to ignore me and I followed him around the tiny house, desperate for attention, willing him to act like my husband and not like somebody about to divorce me after 14 years of a loud, messy, combustible marriage. It was our first time sleeping under the same roof in about 15 months—us, the kids—and, to me at least, it didn’t feel uncomfortable. It felt familiar, in the way being a family does, even when being a family is difficult, even when it feels like a nightmare. But it did remind me of why we made the choice to actually break up, after years of merely threatening to do so in the presence of myriad couples counselors—one of whom became so frustrated with us, he fired us on the spot and kicked us out of his office. 

In the tiny living room, I scrolled through instant messages on my ex’s iPhone, spying on texts with his girlfriend: “Miss you sweetie.” He’d never called me sweetie—ever. I told him his financial problems were all his fault; he accused me of being “impossible.” We were swimming in the lake when he asked if the guy with whom I’d been corresponding on JSwipe knew that I was “large?” It was his go-to jab, always followed by an “I’m kidding,” and one that had never been funny, not since I gained 70 pounds during the pregnancy of our daughter and went from being skinny to zaftig, which is really just a Yiddish euphemism for fat. 

Despite all this, I was planted in denial. I didn’t want to be alone in life, and I was terrible at saying goodbye, no matter how bad things got. The worse they got, in fact, the harder I fought to make things better. In our 15 years together, my ex and I had weathered drug addiction, rehabs, death, unemployment, raising a special needs child. I had no interest in adding divorce to this depressing repertoire. Standing in the kitchenette rinsing a pint of fresh-picked strawberries in the sink, I again asked my soon-to-be ex-husband if he wanted to stay married. No, he answered. 

Two days passed. Kids and I were coronavirus-free, and I was due to drive back to Boston. And I should have wanted to go. But I did not want to go. Because even if my relationship with my soon-to-be ex-husband was on par with icebergs jostling for space in the Arctic, I liked my been laws, I liked their friends; I’d been coming here for 14 summers. I’d known my nephew since he was five, my niece since she was born. There was nothing ex about them. There was a global pandemic, we had a monster for president. The earth was in a fragile, perilous state. Who knew when we might be able to spend time together again? Why should our divorce be the reason I can’t take photographs of my kids and their cousins toasting s’mores in the backyard of their grandmother’s house, licking melted marshmallows off their fingers? 

In the end, it was my soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law who insisted that I stay. 

Over the next five days, My ex took Sam golfing while Tzvia did her cousin’s make-up and biked circles around the neighborhood. My ex took Tzvia to the Shelburne Country Store where she filled up a brown paper bag with Nerds and rock candy and I drove Sam down to the LaPlatte River Nature Park where we hiked across mossy trails and trekked through swampy puddles and my nephew taught Sam how to fish. Sam’s soft, small hands gripped the bottom end of the pole and he pulled, pulled, pulled as a copper-colored bass wiggled and writhed, flapping its fins, water spritzing everywhere. My nephew slid a silver hook from the fish’s gaping mouth, and we watched as it thrashed its way through the pea-green river, swimming toward freedom. Later that week, my ex and I and our kids and their cousins and Fozzy, the family’s Muppet-like Moyen with wild russet curls, scampered through the woods and swam in a cool, freshwater gorge. As we scaled the mulch-blanketed mountain path back toward the car, my soon-to-be ex-husband held my hand to steady my balance and make sure I didn’t fall. 

Sometimes, he said mean things. Sometimes, so did I. And when I couldn’t take it anymore, I retreated to his mother’s room, wrapping myself in a white cloud-like blanket. Eventually, we’d regroup, and things would shift and we’d head to the backyard and lather pads of butter on ears of corn and watch the sun sink to a flash of red.  

On our last day together, we visited the grave of my ex’s brother, who died in 2013 in a cliff jumping accident in Lake Champlain. We had problems, but really our marriage ended after my brother-in-law died. That was the last time my then-husband ever said, “I love you.” Seven years later, Sam and Tzvia placed smooth black stones atop their uncle’s grave, per Jewish custom. I cried for a moment and my soon-to-be ex-husband, also for a moment, placed his hand on my shoulder. Quickly, he pulled it away. We seemed to have completed a cycle. Our children had just spent seven days with both parents living under the same roof for the first time in well over a year. Maybe we would—and could—do it again. 

We never would have planned this. We were terrible at planning things. And even if we had tried to plan this, it never would have worked out. But here we were, standing in a cemetery—together. Weeping over what we had lost; grateful about what we still had. Things felt over—really, really over. I would not be asking to stay married.   

For us, it was the end. For our family, perhaps it signaled the start of a new type of beginning.

Peak Jewish Divorcee is a bi-weekly column charting the (mis)adventures of a Jewish, newly single working mom in Los Angeles. 

The post In-Betweeners appeared first on Jewcy.

That late October night, I was seated across from Shai, an Israeli immigrant in the construction business and formerly of the diamond business with whom I’d matched on JSwipe (as one does under collective Jewish-community coercion). Eleven months had gone by since my husband and I decided to divorce, seven since he had moved out of our home, and I hadn’t been with anyone. Like most people who read hardcover books and were ruined forever by 1970s French cinema, I thought dating apps were the least romantic approach to meeting one’s potential soulmate, an online catalogue of flat, two-dimensional profiles that rarely made the leap into real life. Still, it had been eleven months. 

A magazine editor, I penned a tight four-line paragraph under a photo of me with ample bosom and my dog, noting I’d penned a term paper at Cornell on the symbolism of hair in Hemingway novels. Surely, this would attract charismatic neurosurgeons from Cedars-Sinai and award-winning authors adapting their books for Hollywood. Within seconds of posting said profile—Just Jewish, Kosher, Liberal—Shai appeared, Facetiming me from the parking lot of Lowe’s, where he’d gone to buy drywall and caulk for a client’s garage in Reseda. He was eager to discuss Hemingway, though admitted he’d never read A Farewell to Arms—or The Sun Also Rises or For Whom The Bell Tolls or any of the short stories—but he had read The Old Man in the Sea in seventh grade, in Hebrew. “I learned it for school,” Shai said. “I think we have a lot in common. We are both Ashkenzim. You will not find anyone else. When do you not have your kids?” 

He mostly spoke in Hebrew and I mostly answered in English, because I lived in Israel for a time but my accent makes me sound like a dumb American tourist. “That sushi was overpriced,” he said when the check came. “Next time I’ll make pita and labne.” 

But Shai had eyes the color of my favorite beach in Caesarea. He reminded me of a taller, fatter Lior Raz in Fauda, even if Shai’s ranking in the Israeli army involved performing clerical duties in a dusty office because he was diagnosed with asthma. We went home that night and fell into bed and I sobbed afterwards because that was the first time I’d been with anyone else save my soon-to-be ex-husband in over 14 years. But Shai was sweet about it and told me I would get the hang of post-divorce sex and we met two days later at his beige Calabasas home, sparsely furnished and scrubbed cleaner than a picnic cooler with a transplant organ. He showed me his yard, his lemon tree and the cotton sheets he’d ordered from China in bulk. He pointed to photos of his three “perfect” boys, gushed about them endlessly and offered to help me sell my engagement ring to a guy he knew downtown. “If you use a dish, load it into the dishwasher,” he instructed. 

For the first several months, our date nights consisted of him mopping my kitchen floor, folding my laundry and watching Israeli sitcoms on the cable channel he didn’t pay for but was able to pick up by way of a neighbor’s Internet signal. He’d pack me Tupperware containers of homemade schnitzel and arrive at my house with various household appliances from Big Lots: cell phone chargers, laundry baskets, a battery-operated kettle. He installed outdoor lights in my small, fenced-in yard and appeared one evening with an olive oil dispenser “for smaller portions to avoid becoming fat.” He advised me to cut my kosher chicken breasts in half and freeze the unused portions. Shai was stocking up on masks long before the coronavirus pandemic virus reared its ugly head. 

Shai’s pragmatism knew no bounds. He was practical in a way that left me awestruck in its radical acceptance of what we could control in the world—and that basically included dish soap and bathroom tile. If there was a chair pulled out from the table, Shai’s entire world would implode. He would spend hours sweeping the living room floor. 

On Shai’s JSwipe profile, he had written that he was “romantic,” but one night, while vacuuming a single crumb off his bedroom floor, he informed me that he did not have feelings.  “I am dafuq,” he said, the Hebrew word for “screwed up in the head.” He would never move in with anyone again, would never marry again, never merge financial assets. He assured me that I would not either, that any potential of that happening was delusion. Not just for him and me, but for every divorced person with children. “That’s for people in their 20’s,” he would say. The things divorced people needed, he said: “Sex.” 

For Shai, women provided a service, that of fulfilling his unflagging carnal needs. He was selfish in bed, demanding multiple showers—before, after and during. While not terrifically well-endowed, Shai was obsessed with his phallic member—and phalluses in general. Convinced I was obsessed with them too, he texted gifs ranging from pornstar orgies to an animated caveman with a swinging giant penis. 

By that point in time, I’d come to terms with the fact that dating in the age of divorce is like a white elephant table of toxic exes: I’ll trade you my emotionally-abusive recovering alcoholic for one emotionally stunted contractor with a paralytic case of OCD and the emotional maturity of a 12 year-old boy. Bidding starts at $5. 

On the other hand, Shai was wickedly funny and keenly observant. He was right about the things he said about me 72% of the time. My dog fell madly in love with him. “Kalba!” he would call. And my dog would come running. 

Shai was also an attentive and doting father, loving his children the way he could not anybody else. He commanded their attention, and they filed into line. But there was joy in their doing—they gardened, made their beds, cooked their own breakfast. They were the most well-mannered children that I have ever encountered. “I raised them like they are in the army,” Shai said proudly. On alternate weekends, when my kids were with their father, I was with Shai’s. Occasionally, we’d all hang out together, the contrast between his three young boys and my teenage son and tween-age daughter like the Exxon Valdez oil spill darkening the Prince William Sound. 

One particular Sunday, my 14 year-old cracked open Shai’s freezer and helped himself to a popsicle. He had not asked, and Shai had not seen. But when Shai discovered a trail of cherry-red popsicle juice stretching from the kitchen to his bedroom and erupted into a fiery panic, I knew we were nearing the end.  

We kept things going for several more weeks, until one fateful day roughly eight months after we’d met. Shai had gone to work, and I had spent the day in his living room, where he had invited me to work on my then in-progress novel. I’d managed to write a few decent pages, had taken great pains to rinse out the glasses I’d used for iced tea, and locked the back gate as instructed. But when Shai returned home, he noticed the one thing he had asked me to do that I had forgotten: run the dishwasher. 

Shai sighed as if someone had died. “We are not a match,” he said. “We will not be together. But we can still have sex. If you want. Just no feelings.”  

I did not want. Shai was back on JSwipe that same afternoon. 

We kept in touch, which is easier to do when you were never right for one another in the first place. We called one another on Jewish holidays, he gave me a referral for a cleaning lady, sent me videos of his boys telling jokes. One day, when I was bored and alone and on the sofa watching CNN, I texted Shai and asked him, “Did you ever really read The Old Man in the Sea?” 

“Yes,” Shai answered, in bed with his latest girlfriend. “He struggles with the fish.”

Peak Jewish Divorcee is a bi-weekly column charting the (mis)adventures of a Jewish, newly single working mom in Los Angeles. 

The post My Big Fat Israeli appeared first on Jewcy.

I have reached a point where I call myself a proud loxist. “Loxism” was coined by antisemites in 2005, but was recently re-popularized on 4chan or 8chan, or whatever ‘chan’ they use to blame Jews for not getting laid. Its originally intended meaning is the belief that Jews think of themselves as superior to others and hate non-Jewish people, specifically white people. So, according to conspiracy theories Jews thus bring upon the decline of the white race through things like ‘low birth rates for white couples’, ‘porn’, and my personal favorite ‘the church of satan’. 

Anyway, some Jews have begun reclaiming the term to mean dating fellow Jews. Now it’s how I describe my my quest to find a Jewish partner. To clarify, I do not believe we’re superior to anyone, and the idea of a church of satan is a bit concerning because first of all church, and second of all satan? That would definitely be avoda zarah.

So, with more than a hundred dates below my belt and even more therapy sessions, I am here to pour my heart out with past, present, and hopefully future dating stories to all the others who are also asking themselves where all the Nice Jewish Boys have gone.

I was born and raised in a Jewish community in Europe and before moving to New York, I lived in Tel Aviv for a bit, where my sister has been living for the better part of the last decade. I moved to the city four years ago and almost immediately started dating. A lot of those initial dates were, admittedly, ego-boosters and external validation. However, throughout the years and the good, bad, and antizionist dates, I got to know the Jewish dating scene (disclaimer: not the Hasidic one) too well for my liking. 

A city with over a million Jews? Finding a boyfriend should be a piece of cake. Turns out it is more challenging than finding desserts without kitniyot during Pesach in Israel. While some of those failed dates and relationships were undoubtedly my fault, a thorough retrospection and analysis of all the Jakes and Joshs and Davids, showed that something was up with dating Jewishly in NYC. The nice ones were too boring for me, the mean ones too condescending, and then you had the occasional jew with so much internalized antisemitism it made my IBS act up, and my ancestors turn over in their graves.

These dates, which were mostly just not a good match for me and at times just bad matches for anyone, taught me many things and made me face the challenges of dating in the 21st century in the age of the apps and (((the apps))).

At the same time, some of the challenges of dating Jewishly remain the same: Will my friends like them? My mom? Is he the right level of religious? We know everything more observant than us is a meshuggene and anything less is a goy. But there has definitely been some change over the past decade, and maybe even more specifically since we started treating every date as a potential near-death experience and not just because of our crippling anxiety.

Yes, most of those things are uncomfortable to discuss. I had to explain ‘ghosting’ to my therapist, and my mom has no advice on dealing with guys ‘breadcrumbing’ me on social media but the awkwardness and newness don’t make these things any less challenging or relevant. 

Dating has changed, for better or worse, and similarly, the advice we give and take has to adjust accordingly. Getting set up by a lovely lady from shul doesn’t work anymore because her grandson will tell her he wants to have a serious relationship and then ask you for a threesome on the first date.

I do not have the answers to all dating problems; if I did, I would probably not be writing this or looking up the definitions of my dating phenomena on Urban Dictionary. I do have some of the answers and a solid drive for research, and a passion for collecting dating and relationship books to find the rest.

Hopefully, we’ll get to the bottom of how to date Jewishly (successfully) in the city.

Lots of Lox,

D.

‘Lox and the City’ is a bi-weekly column detailing the trials and tribulations of dating Jewishly as 20-something-year-old woman in New York.

The post From the Shtetl to the City appeared first on Jewcy.

Here’s something to lift the Monday morning blues, maybe even get you a little high: The New Yorker has just published a new short story by Israeli writer Etgar Keret. (And it’s translated by Nathan Englander, no less—a literary twofer!)

In ‘One Gram Short,’ a nameless, neurotic, curiously passive Keretian protagonist goes on a quest for some weed to impress Shikma, the waitress at his local cafe who is a “fan of recreational drugs.” (Because asking her to a movie would be “too in-your-face,” ‘course.) This quest leads him to the apartment of a lawyer with cancer, a dramatic court appearance, a violent confrontation, and an… interesting ending. Look, no more vague spoilers. You can read the story—and listen to Keret’s lovely lispy reading—right here.

(Image: Martina Kenji)

The post Read ‘One Gram Short,’ a New Story by Etgar Keret appeared first on Jewcy.

My first real grown-up date, when I was 20, was an absolute calamity. Before agreeing to go, I had what felt like a 40-minute panic attack. “How do you expect to ever find a husband if you’re scared of a coffee date?” asked my Mom. She was right.

I was a ball of utter chaos: Was I supposed to offer to pay? What would happen at the end of the date? What was I supposed wear? What is dating? As we walked into the coffee shop, I tripped for no apparent reason. A kid laughed. Later, my date—a tall, dark, handsome Jewish law student—drove me through a cemetery. We did not go out a second time.

A lot of people are nervous on first dates, but I seem to experience excessive anxiety—or at least, I used to. Why? Because I grew up Modern Orthodox. I attended a yeshiva where there was no opportunity, really, for boys and girls to learn about the secular dating world. My school was co-ed, but it didn’t help the matter. Following halacha, the school’s message about was sex was firm: none of it before marriage. One of the main administrative goals each day was to  keep boys and girls away from each other.

Modern Orthodoxy is kind of a gray area, encompassing was wide range of religious practice. When people ask about my parents’ practic, I hesitate about how to describe them. They keep Shabbat, but my mother wears pants, and they eat vegetarian food at non-kosher restaurants. Some members of my extended family who also call themselves Modern Orthodox are strictly kosher, and cover their hair after marriage. Most Modern Orthodox people venture into the secular world for study and work, but many only socialize with other Orthodox Jews. The level of familiarity with pop culture varies greatly from family to family and person to person.

The messages we received in my community about dating were confusing. Only certain activities were acceptable, and the rules seemed arbitrary. “Dating” meant that you walked to class together and maybe went over to their house for Shabbat lunch. My first boyfriend—who I ogled for three years before we actually started hanging out—lasted all of two weeks. We rode our bikes and sometimes sat next to each other when the whole gang went to the movies. Romantic. As far as the physical aspects of the relationship, hugging was about as far as it went. Maybe the occasional touching of the elbow. No hand-holding and certainly no kissing. It wasn’t just us.

When I was 15, a friend told the entire neighborhood that I was a whore because I sat next to a boy on a shul trip to Hersheypark. I was comfortable hanging out with boys in a friendly, platonic context, but unfortunately, some people in my Modern Orthodox neighborhood did not feel the same. (That same “friend” later got sprung sneaking out with boys, which led to some difficulties getting into seminary. The neighborhood covered for her.)

Every love connection I had was accidental. When you grow up together, you just get thrown together. You don’t date in a traditional sense, you simply hang out closer, with an almost imperceptible increase in frequency.

My first “real” relationship started just before eleventh grade, with a guy whose religious observance swung from eating at Olive Garden and making out with girls, to Orthodoxy, to some variation of the two. The first and only time he spent a weekend at my house, he showed up with a giant black hat that he had spent too much money on, which scared my parents, who wanted me to be observant, but wanted to make sure I stayed true to my own beliefs. With him, I got a taste of almost every type of Judaism.  I thought it would broaden my relationship horizons, that I wouldn’t be so scared of guys and dating. It didn’t. He was the first guy that I had any sort of physical relationship with. Most of that had to do with the fact that he was from a different community and wasn’t raised Modern Orthodox.  When I started dating him I kept most things from my friends, but a few warned me that being with someone who wasn’t religious was a bad idea.

Once I left the bubble of yeshiva and found my footing in the secular world of college and dorms and parties, I realized that those other folks in my community—the ones who attended Orthodox, single-sex high schools—had it easy. My friends whose schools were more Orthodox than Modern were having an easier go at college life because all they went to the same schools (Queens, Stern, YU), never completely leaving the bubble. They dated within their community, with people who had the same level of romantic experience and the same expectations. Their rules of dating were clearly delineated. Most of them are married now. I was the one with the problem: I was dipping my feet in dating pools beyond my depth, with people who were far more experienced and comfortable than me.

In my freshman year of college, my sculpture TA caught my eye. He walked into the studio with his newsboy cap and glasses, making me want to marry him. I lost all motor skills each time he approached my table. Once I accidentally smashed my little statue. My friend Sammi would stand next to me molding her clay and I’d nudge her, asking “What do I do?” The semester was grueling and I was in jeopardy of not finishing my final work of ‘art.’ The closest I got to flirting with him was lying to him about liking to fish. (I saw it on an episode of Gilmore Girls.)

When the semester ended and we all went home for the summer, my big move was sending the TA a Facebook message confessing that I had a big-league crush on him—something a sixteen-year-old might do. Needless to say, the relationship never blossomed, though we did stay in touch.

My yeshiva left me with a pretty solid education, but almost no life skills. It wasn’t until I was nearly done with college that I started to feel at ease in the world of dating, and that was because I decided to work on an ethnography-type thing about the culture of online dating for credit. I actually picked dating as my writing project for the semester so that I’d be forced to learn how to go on a date.

And so, I went on dates. Many dates. I became a student of flirting, plate-sharing, coy glances, teasing. Each dinner or seat at a bar taught me something new. I learned that people who have been dating since they were 14 still get nervous. One of my first dates couldn’t seem to remember the college he went to. Another spilled beer all over the bar counter. And more than a few of them, jittery and clumsy, confessed to me that they were “a bit nervous.” So if I didn’t know how to answer a question or if I spilled my drink or tripped (which happened a lot), it was okay. More importantly, it was pure immersion therapy: the more I pushed myself, the more comfortable I became. After a while I stopped walking into glass doors. Making conversation became much easier. One guy even called me a good “verbal-spatting partner,” which I considered a win.

About three years after I confessed my crush to the TA, he messaged me on Facebook and asked me out. Butterflies were swing-dancing in my stomach, but I kept my cool and it went well. I accidentally called him by a codename Sammi and I had given him, but I covered it up with a cough and a smile. I didn’t feel uncomfortable and I didn’t feel as though I was playing dating catch-up. I felt normal. We didn’t get together, but I finally felt as though I had finally graduated into the adult world of dating.

There were many awkward moments along the way, but I think I have finally leveled off with my peers in the school of love. I am more comfortable now. Not confident all the time, but not frightened whenever I have to talk to a guy.  I’ve found someone to be with who, I think, would be surprised to know what a disaster I used to be. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who grew up in communities similar to mine, and learned that we all share a common naïveté when it comes to the world of secular dating.  But everyone has their ‘thing,’ no? Every person goes into a relationship with baggage or quirks or expectations—so it’s a process of consciously keeping those neuroses in check and not letting them hinder the progression of a relationship (or even that one date). There’s no formula to what works, it’s just a process of trial and error until you one day realize “Hey, this ain’t so bad.”

Daniella Bondar is a MFA Creative Writing Nonfiction student at The New School. Wandering New Yorker. Insomniac. She’s working on a memoir about her gold dress phobia. Follow her on twitter and find her writing at DaniellaRobin.com.

(Image: Shutterstock)

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year

The post “50 First Dates”: Learning About Love After Modern Orthodoxy appeared first on Jewcy.

The first time my partner asked me to come home with him to meet the parents, I couldn’t have been happier. A relationship milestone so soon after we’d started dating held such promise. Plus, I had it on good authority that his previous girlfriend, whom he’d dated on and on-and-off for nearly two years, had never had the pleasure. So, when we packed our bags for that first Thanksgiving in Florida, I felt far more excited than nervous. Parents tend to like me. Except this time, it occurred to me, I already had one strike against me: I wasn’t Jewish.

When my partner and I began dating, I was only vaguely aware of his Jewish background. Unless the name ended in “Stein” or “Berg,” I didn’t have a clue. I’d grown up in a suburb of Buffalo, NY and I simply didn’t have a lot of exposure to Jewish people. Of course, it didn’t help that I’d attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

My friends and family were a bit taken aback when I announced that I was dating a Jewish guy from Long Island, given that my past serious relationships had been with men of African descent. Steve was short, funny (funnier than anyone I’d ever met) and extremely ambitious, and sometimes, when he grew animated, he’d adopt a Brooklyn accent, learned from his father and perhaps leftover from his first few years as a boy in that borough. I remember early on in our courtship a friend remarking that Jewish guys were great “because they really know how to treat a woman well.” I learned that they were also stereotypically regarded as ‘mama’s boys.’

I became fascinated by the all of the ways in which Jewish culture is characterized and defined—especially since some secular Jews offhandedly dismiss the religious component. My partner is not a serious practitioner of his faith, which I am grateful for, I suppose, not that I would’ve minding his going to temple regularly or seriously honoring the Jewish holidays or even fasting—though keeping a kosher kitchen would’ve been a big adjustment for me. Since I’m not a practicing Catholic, the two of us on the religious fence somehow seems more manageable than one or both of us strongly devout.

Eventually, as the relationship progressed—that first meeting of the parents behind us—we began speaking in earnest about our future. It had been clear early on that the relationship had legs, and as we both wanted to get married eventually, I started pressing him about what that would mean for us, a Jewish boy and a Catholic girl: What kind of ceremony would we have? Where would we do it? Would he want me to consider converting for him? I assumed I knew the answer to the last question—no—since my partner’s belief in a higher power is more muddled than my own fluid thoughts on the subject, but when we got to discussing how a non-denominational ceremony would affect our parents, he nonchalantly told me that on the day his sister had married her husband, who was raised Catholic like me, his mother had said, “Well, he’ll never be one of us.”

His mother, tiny and chatty and sweet, but not effusively so, could also, apparently, be quite cutting. I had spent little time with my partner’s family, but I hadn’t sensed anything odd or off about his brother-in-law’s interactions with the Jewish family he’d married into.

Anyway, what did that even mean? ‘Not one of us’? I reasoned that converting to Judaism was a moot point for me—for us—unless we decided to have kids, and neither of us wants children. In my few visits to Florida, I’d never received the cold shoulder from his mother, but neither had I gotten a sense that she was interested in me all that much either. Was she just waiting for him to settle down with a nice Jewish girl? Perhaps she saw me as temporary.

As it was obvious to both of us that I wasn’t going anywhere, I boldly broached the topic with my partner.

“So, were you supposed to marry a Jewish girl, or what? Did you parents ingrain that in you when you were growing up and started dating?”

Accustomed to my out-of-the-blue questions, he simply looked up from his laptop and said that although it wasn’t an issue that had been discussed directly, it was implied. “I don’t remember anybody saying this outright,” he admitted, “but it was definitely the model I grew up with.”

Uh huh. Seeing the confused (and, I don’t know, hurt?) expression on my face, he pulled me onto his lap and promised me that he didn’t care, that he wouldn’t be disowned or anything like that.

“You’re my little shiksa,” he said affectionately, and though I understood the root of the word to be derogatory, I heard it as a term of endearment.

I began to wonder if his mother had simply given up on his marrying one of his own, or if perhaps I was just fooling myself. While I was happy to celebrate Hanukkah with his family last year (when the first night of it happened to fall on Thanksgiving), I don’t really get it, nor, if I’m being honest, do I care to. And yet, maybe that was the exact problem. The not caring would certainly peg me as an outsider. If he were any more invested in his faith though and wanted me to take the same interest in it as his other passions—baseball, Marvel comic book movies, barbecue—I certainly would.

On Christmas Eve at my house, when my large, boisterous family partakes in a meatless Polish meal as is tradition on this holiday, and my meat-loving man says he thinks the pierogis should be stuffed with pork or beef and not just potato, cabbage, or cheese, I patiently try to explain that that’s our way. There’ll be a roast on Christmas day, I assure him. There, he’s the outsider, but it’s in such a small way and on a such a small, insignificant level (to us, at least) that I hardly think it matters or even really affects him.

My family has embraced him as far as I can see. There was a time when my parents would have been adamant about my marrying a Catholic man (or at least a Christian), but as time’s gone by, and my faith has lapsed, it’s been years since my father has threatened not to pay for a wedding if it’s not in the church. My sister, who married a Presbyterian three years ago, chose to have a traditional Catholic ceremony because she says, “Mom would’ve been crushed if I hadn’t.” It was just easier that way.

Converting to Judaism, however, would not be so cut and dry. The little I’ve read on the subject is enough to tell me that it would require a great amount of discipline and education, not to mention a renunciation of the religion I’ve been immersed in since I had water pored over my head in a baptismal ceremony 33 years ago.

When the time comes for us to take that next step, we’ll have to take a united front. Our wedding will probably be in Brooklyn—not in my hometown or in his family’s current place of residence, but in our home. The slight sting of not being “one of them” according to his mother may always be felt, but as long as my partner’s on my side, it won’t matter.

Stacey Gawronski is an editor at Refinery29. Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, New York Family, Yahoo Shine!, The Billfold, xojane, and more. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their dog, Odie.

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year

(Image: The OC‘s Seth and Summer, one of the most famous interfaith couples of all time.)

The post Interfaith Dating: I’m Catholic, He’s Jewish—And We’re Just Fine With That appeared first on Jewcy.

It was past midnight and we were driving home when I broached the subject. “Who can we set him up with?”

“I was already considering it,” my husband answered a bit too quickly. “Actually, it’s all I’ve been thinking about since we walked out of the theater.”

We had spent the evening at a big Broadway production. A friend from high school had a prominent role. I’d seen Andy rarely in the years since we’d graduated, at weddings mostly. Still, I was eager to cheer his success. It was exciting, but I was dreading the visit backstage after the show. I hate feeling like a hanger-on, waiting around awkwardly while I try not to look like a gawker.

This time was different, though. Andy was so sweet and generous, asking about our kids and excitedly introducing us to the actors. I felt not at all a gawker, more a visitor to a friend’s for an intimate dinner party. When my husband asked Andy if he was involved with anyone, Andy—looking almost longingly at the iPhone pic of our brood—answered, “No, I’m all alone.”

And so there we were, stuck in construction traffic at one o’clock in the morning, paging through our mental Rolodexes under “Jewish gay men, 30s, artsy.” After trying on a few matches for size, we both settled on someone we thought would be a great match: Jeremy. He was sweet, smart, good-looking, and a successful musician to boot. A little younger, maybe. There was only one problem.

We weren’t positive he was gay.

Well, it doesn’t always come up. I mean, we kind of assumed he was gay, but I couldn’t tell you precisely why. And when, exactly, is the right time to ask? Maybe it could be added to the requisite question list when you invite someone to dinner. “Any food restrictions? Allergies? Vegetarian? Gay or straight? Gluten-free?” Not exactly practical.

Because my husband is a rabbi and our family is religious, gay people are sometimes unsure whether they should reveal their orientation to us, concerned we might reject them—or try to turn them. But keeping the laws of Shabbat should not cause a person to be less compassionate or understanding. As far as I’m concerned, if a Jew reads the Torah and her takeaway is a list of people she’ll never accept into her “club,” then she’s missed the point.

Someday in the not-so-distant future, I choose to believe, the sight of Yeshiva kids walking into school with their two Abbas will be old hat. In the meantime, I identify with those Abbas in so many ways. As a religious Jew and a feminist, I have to gauge how “out” I can be in all kinds of situations.

Is this the kind of Orthodox shul where I can wear a tallit when I pray? Can I go into this bookstore and buy a Gemara and reveal that it’s for me? Or would it be safer to say it’s for my son? And lest someone think I’m being paranoid, I relate this story that happened two weeks ago. I started an online conversation about women wearing kippah and tzitzit in Jerusalem. The response I got from one woman was chilling. If you are interested in being safe, she said, you won’t ever do something like that. Someone could, God forbid, break your jaw. Or, God forbid, throw acid in your face. It was like a conversation out of “The Godfather.”

I’m a mother of four with a masters degree, but part of me remains a 12-year-old girl, angry as her body begins to betray her and advertise her sex on the outside. When your sexuality and gender are the first things people notice about you, it’s exhausting. I get it. But still, I was determined to make the match.

After discreetly inquiring with an acquaintance of Jeremy’s (who couldn’t answer with any certainty), I realized my best option was to be direct. My husband agreed to take one for the team. He casually texted Jeremy to give him a call when he had a chance. Jeremy called back. While they talked, I did what I often do when faced with an awkward situation: I hid.

While I cowered idiotically in the next room, I thought about the conversation I had had with my kids the previous night when they overheard us discussing our predicament. Why, they wanted to know, had we been assuming Jeremy was gay? How could you tell just by looking at him, or having a conversation? “You’re just stereotyping!” they insisted. I knew they were wrong, but I was having trouble with the why.

The truth is, we’re constantly making assumptions about people based on superficial evidence—the car they drive, the shoes they wear, their accent, their haircut. Using these limited clues, we determine class, education, politics, religion. Sexuality is more complicated, though. As a child, I was a serious ballet dancer. Dance had a culture of its own, but even then I noticed that some teachers and choreographers deliberately and consciously carried their delicate movements with them outside the studio. It was complicated to be out in the eighties. Yet these men proudly announced, by the tiny choices they made about how to present themselves to the world, who they were.

As self-involved ten and eleven year olds, my fellow dancers and I didn’t dwell on the private lives of our teachers. As far as we were concerned, they vanished into thin air when we left the building. So when one of our favorites stopped teaching, and didn’t even attend our performances, we felt only a vague annoyance that we’d have to get used to a new set of expectations with our next instructor. A year or so later, when we heard that he had died, you could almost see the little light bulbs clicking on above our identical, perfectly groomed buns. Oh. Our hunch was correct. No judgment. Just sadness.

I suppose that’s what I want my kids to know: thinking someone is gay is only bad if you believe being gay is bad. It’s the negative judgment that’s harmful—not the supposition itself.

I got the transcript of the conversation as soon as my husband gave me the all-clear.

“Jeremy,” he’d started, “can I ask you a strange question?”

“Sure?”

“Are you interested in being set up?”

Pause. “Well… I’d be interested, but there’s a twist.”

And here, I’m pained to admit, is where my husband was a rock star, while I hid in other room with a pillow over my head, mortified by the awkwardness of the situation. “So,” he replied, “if the twist has anything to do with the fact that the person we had in mind for you is a man, you’re in luck.”

There’s a Jewish tradition, more a superstition, I suppose, that anyone who makes three matches—presumably ending in a wedding—is automatically granted entrance into the world to come. It’s holy work, to help people find partners and build homes together. I don’t want to go back to a time when people felt compelled to extinguish a piece of their essence in order to conform. But all the uncertainty is a little too stressful for me, I’m not sure I can handle the pressure. I’ll take my chances with charity and good deeds.

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Recently engaged Crown Heights couple Zevi Goldin, 25, and Chana Simon, 21, are indebted to an unorthodox—but very determined—matchmaker: UPS deliveryman Terry Spiers.

Spiers has worked in the neighborhood for many years, delivering to various Jewish families and businesses, and has long had his heart set on making a shidduch. Two of the regulars on his delivery route are the Goldin family and the educational non-profit where Simon’s mother works, and a couple of years ago he began to focus his efforts on their respective families, trying to arrange a match.

“He always tries to put people together,” the bride’s mother Regina Simon told COLlive.com, “but I never looked into it… I didn’t take it seriously.” Then, to her surprise, one of her married daughters suggested setting Chana up with someone called Zevi Goldin, which prompted further investigation. Spiers acted as the go-between, asking Goldin for his shidduch resume and passing his number onto Chana’s uncle, a local shadchan (matchmaker).

“I was dismissive of the entire thing until he came back and told us, ‘Yeah, her mom is really interested. Do you have one of those things, a shidduch resume?'” Goldin told DNAinfo New York. “Next thing I knew, her uncle was calling me up to try to set up a date.”

Goldin says he knew Simon was his bashert by their second date, but he waited two months before proposing. The couple will be married on June 2.

Mazel tov!

Image: Tupungato / Shutterstock.com

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Remember the Princeton Mom? That lady who wrote an open letter to the young women of her alma mater telling them they really, really needed to find a husband in college or else all would be lost? Well, she’s back. And this time, she has a book. In Marry Smart, Susan Patton covers the timeless, pothole-ridden territory of Advising Young Women About Marriage. (I know, you’re blanching, but read on.) Her ideas, though decidedly retrograde, are oddly compelling—mostly because they reveal so much about her own life and disappointments. You know that thing where you try to give advice to someone else but make it all about you? Well, that’s what Marry Smart is.

Anyway, this interview with Patton in New York Magazine is a must-read, in a she-said-what sort of way: her apartment is stuffed with Princeton memorabilia, she’s obsessed with orange, she fantasizes about marrying for a second time in the Princeton chapel, and she has no qualms revealing her insecurities/disappointments/vanities to anyone. (First thing she says to the interviewer: “You’re so tall and thin! Usually I hate that body type.”)

Her parents were Holocaust survivors, and it seems their trauma shaped her attitude towards education, gender, and feminism in a profound way:

It would be easy to caricature Patton as an old-fashioned, paternalistic snob — but her snobbery is actually quite modern, and fueled by an unexpected streak of feminist gumption. Patton was raised in the Bronx by Eastern European immigrants. “They survived the Holocaust. My mother was in Auschwitz; my father was liberated from Bergen-Belsen. They came to America with very old-world ideas about women.” Though she was at the top of her class at her public high school, her parents opposed a college education. To apply to Princeton, Patton had to declare herself an emancipated minor. “I wanted a much broader life than just motherhood. My parents didn’t see the value in that, they couldn’t understand. They saw it for my brother, but not for me. And he would tell you this: He wasn’t much of a student. But I was, and I always wanted a bigger life, a more creative life, a more engaged life, out of the Bronx.

So I guess read the book if you want to! Or don’t! Beyond her advice that women in their 20s should be mindful about whether or not they want get married/have kids (yes, THANK YOU EVERYONE for reminding us about our ovaries), it’s all a bit ridiculous. Not everyone wants to get married and/or have kids, and not everyone wants to do it young. And obviously, marrying someone who went to an Ivy League school isn’t going to make you happy—unless you’re Susan Patton. In which case, by all means, Marry Smart.

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Attention single Jewish men and mothers of single Jewish men! Meet the newest Bachelorette and your potential bashert/daughter-in-law, Andi Dorfman.

The 26-year-old Assistant District Attorney from Atlanta said last night that she is “all in” and ready to find love on the 10th season of the hit show.

Dorfman was a contestant on the most recent series of The Bachelor, which concluded last night in a spectacularly anti-climactic fashion, sans marriage proposal and ring. Turns out bachelor Juan Pablo Galvais wasn’t exactly a prize—throughout the series he managed to alienate a number of potential future wives, including Dorfman, with his arrogant behavior and insensitive remarks. (And let’s not forget the time he said gay people shouldn’t have their own version of the show because they’re perverts! NICE ONE, JUAN.) Dorfman voluntary exited The Bachelor after a disastrous overnight date, but not before giving JPG a memorable dressing down for his failure to show any genuine interest in her. You go girl.

The newest Bachelorette told host Chris Harrison last night: “I feel all in. I feel mentally all in, emotionally all in, physically all in. I am in the place in my life where I am just so ready for this.”

Hopefully we’ll all be singing ‘Sunrise, Sunset‘ very soon.

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