Read A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl for Free Online
Authors: van Wallach
of our summer. As I was leaving for a post-internship trip home to Texas, I surprised her with a going away gift, the just-published Sophie’s Choice .] Once you realize that the great cosmic forces are not thumbing their noses in your direction, the malaise becomes less intense. One Saturday, in a particularly superfluous mood, I walked past a movie line near Greenwich Village. The crowd had just started moving in, and the marquee bore the names of films by Ingmar Bergman, whose work I had never seen.
There followed an evening of Liv Ullmann and rollicking Scandinavian angst. It was just what the doctor ordered. After three hours of Autumn Sonata and Cries and Whispers , I felt great and practically bounced up to Penn Station.
Courtesy of The Daily Princetonian.
Happy, carefree days as the Sports Features Editor of the Daily Princetonian, 1979.
Chapter 3
Into the New World, or,
The Search for the Media Naranja
In the 1980s, I generated a social life from the time-tested ways (introductions, blind luck) and through the personals section of New York magazine, with an occasional dip into the Village Voice and New York’s Jewish Week.
Up against the wall, redneck mother? Not quite. A portrait of the writer as a young frozen-food journalist, 1981.
Every week, New York offered up columns of possibilities. From the view of twenty-five years later, the process was astoundingly pokey: Find an ad, write a letter, stick in a picture, apply a stamp, mail, and wait. And wait. If a woman responded, the lag time between mail and call could make it hard to remember who was who, so I typically clipped the ad from the magazine and wrote down the date I sent a letter. Occasionally, I noted the name of the woman and when she responded. Until about a decade ago, the technology of romance had changed little since Babylonian singles exchanged cuneiform calling cards at village wells. Introductions were personal, random encounters at parties or on subway platforms, or via cumbersome and thinly informed ads.
Between 1980 and 1987 my relationships resulted from old-fashioned introductions and responses to New York and Village Voice ads. All involved Jewish women, and all but one lived in Manhattan when we dated. I remember odd details about them. One New York ad, which led to an eighteen-month relationship spanning 1985-1986, read, “Witty, Jewish Female Exec—26, seeks Jewish professional, male 26-32, 5’7” or over, who loves NY and wants to share it.” One woman had an older father—so old he had fought in the Kaiser’s army in World War I. Another’s mother escaped on the last children’s transport out of Germany. Another tried to win my affections by exclaiming, “I’ve been fucked so many times I had to get a bigger diaphragm!” One was with me on a cold January night in 1984 when I learned my mother died of cancer in Tyler, Texas. These and other women moved on with their lives—marriage, children, divorces. One died, and two found me on the Internet.
While I was socially asleep during my dozen years of marriage, the Internet blasted apart the technology of the lovelorn.
Online dating has transformed the way people seek, meet, and, sometimes, meet again. It exploded opportunities for browsing and contact, driving curious hearts across multiple time zones in the search for what Chana, from Latin America, called the media naranja , a Spanish colloquialism for your “better half” or “significant other.” Some sites are general, such as match.com, while others like JDate.com serve a particular religious or ethnic slice. Rightstuffdating.com focuses on graduates of the Ivy League and similar schools. Having lived on my own since October 2002, I hadn’t dated since 1987, before technology turned dating into a form of interactive direct marketing. Back in the dating world, I found I liked the online channel’s choices and depth of information. Scanning a full profile reveals more facts—along with a
There followed an evening of Liv Ullmann and rollicking Scandinavian angst. It was just what the doctor ordered. After three hours of Autumn Sonata and Cries and Whispers , I felt great and practically bounced up to Penn Station.
Courtesy of The Daily Princetonian.
Happy, carefree days as the Sports Features Editor of the Daily Princetonian, 1979.
Chapter 3
Into the New World, or,
The Search for the Media Naranja
In the 1980s, I generated a social life from the time-tested ways (introductions, blind luck) and through the personals section of New York magazine, with an occasional dip into the Village Voice and New York’s Jewish Week.
Up against the wall, redneck mother? Not quite. A portrait of the writer as a young frozen-food journalist, 1981.
Every week, New York offered up columns of possibilities. From the view of twenty-five years later, the process was astoundingly pokey: Find an ad, write a letter, stick in a picture, apply a stamp, mail, and wait. And wait. If a woman responded, the lag time between mail and call could make it hard to remember who was who, so I typically clipped the ad from the magazine and wrote down the date I sent a letter. Occasionally, I noted the name of the woman and when she responded. Until about a decade ago, the technology of romance had changed little since Babylonian singles exchanged cuneiform calling cards at village wells. Introductions were personal, random encounters at parties or on subway platforms, or via cumbersome and thinly informed ads.
Between 1980 and 1987 my relationships resulted from old-fashioned introductions and responses to New York and Village Voice ads. All involved Jewish women, and all but one lived in Manhattan when we dated. I remember odd details about them. One New York ad, which led to an eighteen-month relationship spanning 1985-1986, read, “Witty, Jewish Female Exec—26, seeks Jewish professional, male 26-32, 5’7” or over, who loves NY and wants to share it.” One woman had an older father—so old he had fought in the Kaiser’s army in World War I. Another’s mother escaped on the last children’s transport out of Germany. Another tried to win my affections by exclaiming, “I’ve been fucked so many times I had to get a bigger diaphragm!” One was with me on a cold January night in 1984 when I learned my mother died of cancer in Tyler, Texas. These and other women moved on with their lives—marriage, children, divorces. One died, and two found me on the Internet.
While I was socially asleep during my dozen years of marriage, the Internet blasted apart the technology of the lovelorn.
Online dating has transformed the way people seek, meet, and, sometimes, meet again. It exploded opportunities for browsing and contact, driving curious hearts across multiple time zones in the search for what Chana, from Latin America, called the media naranja , a Spanish colloquialism for your “better half” or “significant other.” Some sites are general, such as match.com, while others like JDate.com serve a particular religious or ethnic slice. Rightstuffdating.com focuses on graduates of the Ivy League and similar schools. Having lived on my own since October 2002, I hadn’t dated since 1987, before technology turned dating into a form of interactive direct marketing. Back in the dating world, I found I liked the online channel’s choices and depth of information. Scanning a full profile reveals more facts—along with a
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