Читать книгу Zen Bender - Stephanie Krikorian - Страница 15
Оглавлениеdating
By the time I reached my forties, it became painfully clear that dating had become like shopping at Marshalls or TJ Maxx. Everything was picked over. The inventory was low and discounted for a reason. All that was left on the shelves were the seconds—damaged, flawed, and ill-fitting. The stuff on the racks was there mostly because nobody else wanted it. At first glance, it was hard to tell what, exactly, was wrong with the goods, but there was always something. (And I’d find it eventually.) Still, I’d try it on anyway, hopeful. Sometimes I would even buy something just to buy something. It wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it was there, so I grabbed it while I could.
Like discount shopping, dating in my forties meant grabbing the most passable thing I could find because one can’t leave empty-handed, but by the time I got home, exhausted from scouring the discount racks for something I didn’t even really love, pretending it would work, I was always left with nothing but regrets. Sure, I’d use it once or twice, hoping it would eventually fit, or look better than I expected. But each time, I learned it was never going to change. Frequently, it just came up short and I eventually discarded or donated it, disappointed yet again.
When I was in my twenties, trying to find a partner felt easier, not that I landed one. Dating in your twenties is more like going through the racks at Bergdorf or Saks. The available inventory is generally high-quality, and there’s so much more of it—lots of styles, sizes, and colors. You can take your time and look through the racks, try on ridiculous things for fun or things that you know will be great, and consider some wackier ones that you’re not sure about. You can splurge and buy something crazy without worrying about the long-term ramifications of having spent your money on a feather-trimmed go-go bolero jacket and having none left for practical black work pants that will last you a decade.
When you are young, you might even be brave enough to buy something you can’t quite afford, but that dazzles you, then wear it once and return it with the tags still intact. And if you’re broke, you can still window-shop and never actually commit to a single item. There’s joy in that.
I dated like that when I was young, but what I didn’t realize was that I wouldn’t always have the luxury of making foolish or frivolous purchases. Time runs out on that eventually.
When you’re in your thirties, you are more likely searching (somewhat frantically) for the father of your child, and maybe feeling somewhat desperate about it. The pressure is really on. The clock is ticking. The inventory is shrinking. Judgment is clouded.
For me, dating in my thirties looked like that episode of Laverne & Shirley when they won a shopping spree at a grocery store. They were on the clock, and whatever groceries they could get across the line before time ran out, they got to keep. (As a kid I watched this episode with my dad, and he told me if I ever won a shopping spree just to grab all the steak because it’s the most expensive item in the store. #LifeLesson #HoldingOutHopeToWinAShoppingSpree.)
Laverne and Shirley overloaded their cart, stuffed items down their pants, and ultimately couldn’t carry everything they had hopelessly grabbed, let alone walk to the finish line, so by the time they dragged themselves to the end, the only items they got to keep were fish sticks and scooter pies. Junk. Limited value added.
They wanted too much, shot too high. They had big expectations and, in the end, got next to nothing.
Restocking the Dating Shelf
A couple of years into my new career as a ghostwriter, I started to get my professional stride. In the career category, early signs indicated that the Universe had been onto something.
There was a steady-ish stream of work coming in, and while I never exactly became a calm and relaxed person in terms of worrying about paying the bills, I had enough work coming in to keep me going. That meant I spent 100 percent of my time focusing on building that business. Losing a job, freaking out about it non-stop, and making radical career choices based on the Universe allowed for little else. That was all the capacity I had at the time.
I was no longer the multi-tasking producer I once had been. Sectioning my life into separate entities was suddenly how I began to get by. That meant, since business was going okay and I was gaining momentum working for myself, it was probably time to start to pay attention to some other aspects of my life.
Dating seemed the obvious aspect to tackle first. That’s what all the books said, anyway.
One book I was working on chronicled the dating disasters of a celebrity and all her friends. I was interviewing a long list of women about their dating calamities. One of my favorite stories involved a woman crawling out the bathroom window at a restaurant to escape a horrible first date. These women, all of them, went on tons and tons of dates—they were playing the volume game. By sheer odds alone, it felt like each one of them would eventually meet someone because they were putting effort into it. I found myself cheering them on as I wrote their stories, thinking each time they were getting closer to finding a match.
That inspired me. And since I had made it a habit to put into practice whatever book I was writing, I at least had to try to get back out there.
Like any decent self-help convert, I assessed both the holes in my own life and the available and appropriate experts to help me fix them.
Shopping analogies aside, my first consideration as I developed a strategy was taking an honest account of my dating life. I could sum it up simply by saying: Nobody had really been all that interested. Not for the long haul anyway.
Period.
But that would make for a boring and short chapter and would also not leave much room for self-reflection.
Also, I was working from home, so not only did I not have access to people “at work,” I had substantially less interaction with humans in general. (Ask anybody who works from home: It’s a lot of alone time.) I needed inventory.
And I had to widen my pool—laws of attraction and all that aside, this was also a numbers game. And in fairness, statistically, the numbers weren’t exactly on my side. One stat I found said that there were, apparently, eighty-six single men for every hundred single women. Another—thirty-three available men for every fifty women.
Those numbers rang particularly true in New York. Cities like Portland and Seattle, from what I read, seemed to have better odds, but before I moved across the country seeking Mr. Right, I was certain I could find simpler ways to beat them.
Factoring in age, those numbers were probably worse. The inventory was obviously better when I was younger. But my methodology for finding a single man, any single man, was going to be harder. I went on blinders (my word for a blind date) back in the day. Back in my twenties, my friends had people to set me up with. And there were some good dates that maybe I should have given more consideration. At the time, though, I was often sent away on an assignment and I ended up brushing off many of those good ones.
Ultimately, my friends ran out of options, or more likely hope—I am not sure which one. Either way, I could no longer count on that method to boost my dating inventory and my odds.
Choosing to ease my anxiety, I swore off speed dating. It was efficient, sure. But I had endured the humiliation of it too many times to give it another chance. If you haven’t done it, picture this: The women in attendance took a seat at a restaurant—either at various separate tables, or in one instance a U-shaped bar with upholstered benches hugging the wall. We remained stationary while the guys circulated through. Depending on the set-up, I would experience between ten and thirty “dates” lasting between three and five minutes each. It was exhausting, torturous, and beauty-pageant-esque.
Kill me. Please.
To round out my plan, I had to be honest with myself about my abilities. One final consideration as I planned to embark upon my dating mission: a quick self-assessment made me start to suspect that I had limited skills, making the shopping that much more challenging. I read the hit book The Rules way back when it came out, but I’d also fully ignored all the rules they offered up. For example, if you called me on a Thursday back then (or now) for a date on a Friday, I’d break the not-past-Wednesday thing and say yes.
Read: Desperate. Why? Because I dated by employing the same tenacious techniques that I had as a journalist.
Unrelenting.
Make it happen.
Pin it down.
Hot pursuit.
Get the interview at all cost.
Call until the source says yes.
In the words of Meredith Grey, I was more of a “Pick Me, Choose Me, Love Me” type. Iron grip.
In retrospect, that may have scared men off.
For example, for a brief time while I was working for CNBC, I lived in London. On one trip back from New York, I was seated on what was then a Continental Airlines flight, deep in the heart of coach. The flight had just taken off and gotten to cruising altitude, and I had reclined my seat. Within seconds, the woman behind me (British and a tad weathered-looking) started slamming the back of my seat, calling me a fucking bitch over and over, hitting the seat so violently, I was bouncing back and forth like a slow-moving game of paddleball.
She caused such a stir that the flight attendants came by to investigate what was happening. I was a little shell-shocked, frankly. I moved my seat forward into the fully upright position to calm the conflict, but that didn’t help. She kept kicking and pushing, screaming obscenities. It became clear that she had hit the bottle before boarding and wasn’t just angry at my seat reclining, but basically at everything.
I have flown hundreds of thousands of miles. This had never happened before, and it has never happened since. This was the year 2000, by the way, so for what it’s worth; September 11 hadn’t yet occurred, and bad behavior on airplanes was perhaps tolerated. I’m not sure Crazy Crammed Weathered Lady’s actions would have warranted the plane turning around and landing, but she might have had her wrists put into plastic shackles or been spoken to by an air marshal, at the very least.
Fortunately, the flight attendants just moved me. All of economy was sold out, but there was one empty seat in the front of the plane. That also wouldn’t happen today, with computerized upgrades for frequent fliers and all of that. Still, pre-innovation, seat 7L was mine.
The seat was not the only lucky part of this. Beside me was a scruffy and rumpled but super cute young guy with messy light brown hair, who worked in banking in London. Uh, this was the Universe, pre-me-knowing-what-the-Universe-was, putting me in the right place for a reason. I learned through conversation (or a journalistic grilling) that this interesting guy I was suddenly seated next to had been to a conference in Las Vegas.
During my conversation, err…interrogation, I was able to get from him the name of the conference, the name of the hotel he’d stayed at, and the name of the bank he worked for, but not his last name. We had a great talk, and one of us had a car waiting at the airport in London, which we shared into the city. I don’t remember whose company paid for the car, but I got out first at my flat in Chelsea. I recall that much.
The next day at work, I shared the details of my plane adventure and meeting of aforementioned cute banking guy with a colleague or two. The consensus following our top-level confab regarding my trans-Atlantic plane experience was that I needed to track him down.
To say that I love a good challenge is putting it mildly.
I immediately got down to business, sort of the way I might have tried to line up interview subjects for a story. Armed with limited information and my ability to impersonate a personal assistant, I called the hotel in Vegas and (believe it or not) successfully got a last name. Then, by calling the bank’s main number, I got their standard email address (first-name-dot-last-name@bankname.com)—bingo, I had this guy’s email. I am not sure that would happen today (pretty sure it would not) either. But I was impressed with my stalker keen detective skills then and frankly still am to this day.
I sent him a simple note. Subject: Drink? Body of email: Stephanie, Seat 7L.
His response: Sure.
Holy shit! It had worked.
We made a plan. At the time, it didn’t really strike me that my behavior was offensively aggressive. When we finally did get together, it became clear it had freaked him out and that he was only there to find out how I had tracked him down. Unfortunately, the entire conversation focused on that topic. Clearly, one of us was a better detective.
I didn’t tell him anything, just laughed at each inquiry like a dumb girl (though damn I would have liked to have shared my brilliant tactics), but his assumption was that I was part of the “American Mafia” (he said that with a straight face, like he believed it) or that I’d gone to the trouble of hiring a detective. (Uh, I was hard up, but not desperate. Not quite.)
Okay, so looking back, that sort of assertive behavior might be exceptional for chasing news stories, but also might be frowned upon, invasive, and a little cuckoo-slash-I’m-not-going-to-be-ignored-Dan Fatal Attraction-esque when chasing guys.
So that was that. He never called. Scared of me having a hit put out on him by Uncle Sal, or just disinterested, I’ll never know.
In fairness, the Universe had teed me up. It gave me the potential to find a partner. Having said that, there was some operator error wiping out the Universe’s good work.
Shiny Hair, Shiny Ovaries
Looking back on that London episode as a standard measure and perfect articulation of my Meadow Soprano-esque dating skills, I knew that eventually I would have to call in the professionals to help me develop a multi-pronged approach to finding a date so that, if the Universe provided for me once again, I wouldn’t muck it up. I’d be more ready.
My first stop was enrolling in a seminar aptly offering a lesson in why I must suck at dating, titled Why You’re Single. There was a promise in the literature, but I can’t remember what it was. Obviously fixing the being-single part of one’s life was the main nugget.
My friend Sarah and I went together. We were both hopeful that we would learn something about ourselves and the skills needed to find a husband before our eggs dried up for good, but as we entered a banquet-type room at a hotel in New York, looking around at all the hopeful and yet equally slightly embarrassed-to-be-there women, we grew skeptical.
There were hundreds of women eager to fix the flaw of not yet having found a mate. It was a sea of sad-sack singles. Surely Sarah and I were better than this. That was my first thought. My second was: This is going to be a waste of my time.
The woman leading the seminar opened by saying that, if we were showing up with the attitude that we knew better and that this seminar was dumb, but we grudgingly came with a friend, then we were not going to learn anything.
Hmm. Okay, so she was a mind reader.
I made my best I’m listening face and tried to control the number of times I rolled my eyes.
Initially, two things struck me as semi-interesting. First, she explained that men sometimes want to get our attention by giving us a gift. That lets us know they have noticed us and lets them snoop around a bit to see if we have noticed them too, or if they could inspire us to notice them with a tiny gesture. For example, the teacher said, should a guy at work drop off a pen at your desk just because he had been to the supply closet, accept it. That’s a gift. Don’t say, “I don’t need a pen.”
Like I probably would have or had often done.
And then, be open-minded. Maybe the pen giver wasn’t on your radar, but maybe he should be.
Both seemed to me like sound pieces of advice. Later, the former transcended dating for me. I started to try to be gracious when anybody did something small but nice for me, or accept what they offered up for whatever reason, because perhaps that was what they had to give. Over time, I started to notice more closely the tiny gestures that people made and to receive them all with the same amount of gratitude. Perhaps it made them feel good to do a little something for someone else, and perhaps saying thanks and accepting a gesture was just the right thing to do.
My attitude, as I sat in my seminar, slightly adjusted. Not fully, but slightly.
But then she lost me.
Her next piece of advice: Keep your hair shiny. Why? If you have shiny hair, a man will definitely think you’re fertile, and subconsciously think you are wife material.
Think about that.
The only way to land a husband was to demonstrate that my ovaries were pumping out prime grade-A eggs, and the only way to do that was with long shiny hair.
News flash: My hair was shiny. My hair had always been shiny.
As I sat there and listened, I was suddenly horrified. As a feminist. As a human. As a person who hoped there were better ways to demonstrate that you had the potential to be a solid life partner.
As someone with shiny hair.
Itching for an opening, Sarah and I could not wait to bolt.
Once class broke for coffee, I left that seminar. Sadly, it never left me.
As insane as that advice was, as the years marched on and the dating got harder, often all I could think of was…hmm…does he think I’m fertile enough to date? It had snuck into that inner voice in my head and swirled around with all the other nuggets of self-doubt.
And I had let it.
Prospecting in Heels
The seminar an epic fail, I moved on to a book called Calling in the One, which basically guaranteed you’d find love in seven weeks if you followed the steps strictly. In fact, I had spoken to several people who knew someone who had fallen in love after reading it. Or, in one case, I knew a person who completed the book, and then quickly and unexpectedly found her life partner and married him!
It worked! There was indisputable scientific evidence in front of my face.
