Read A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl for Free Online Page B
Authors: van Wallach
to do something with my sudden solitude, given my new status as a refugee from a big house to a one-bedroom apartment.
I’ve always had an affection for off-brand consumer selection. In banking, why would I select Citibank or Manny Hanny when I could go with more daring, maverick options like Amalgamated or European American Bank? My zeal to support the struggling contender extended to dating. At the suggestion of people in MSN’s anti-JDate discussion group (yes, it did exist), I signed up with the small but scrappy rival, Jcupid, in February 2003.
On a good night, one hundred women were online at Jcupid. The selection got old fast. Yet what it lacked in quantity it made up for in quality. I met several women there who became, if not lovers, then staunch friends. Plus, the site had technical features that I have yet to see on other dating sites. I especially liked the way it kept track of all emails back and forth with a single woman on the woman’s profile page. This feature enabled me to watch the relationship unfurl, like a flower blossoming, as emails zapped back and forth. Other sites simply clump all emails together in sent and received files, so tracking the back and forth with one contact becomes much more difficult. Facebook just adapted this approach to messages, so Jcupid was way ahead of its time (JDate eventually absorbed it).
I can remember the first two women I had contact with quite clearly. I got an email from a French woman in New York, perhaps intrigued by the note on my profile that I was born in France (albeit on the U.S. Air Force base, and we moved back to the U.S. before I was three, so I spoke no French). She sent me a short note, I wrote back, I got her name, checked her out and found she had knocked three years off her age. For the first but no means the last time, I found myself thinking, “She lied to me.” Her European style attracted me, but I never could get a date with her.
The second date from Jcupid started at my initiative. I saw a woman who looked like a Jewish Hobbit, even shorter than me, cute enough. I wrote, she wrote, and when she gave me her name, something clicked in my brain. Mora ... short ... had a job in publishing ... then it hit me. I had worked with this Mora at a publishing company in the 1980s. I was an editor at a monthly magazine covering the frozen food industry (I went to Princeton for this? Well, as an editor once told me, “A gig is a gig.”); Mora was a secretary and also was my secret office crush (until her boss casually told me he knew all about my mooning over her).
I said nothing to Mora on the phone. I wanted to see her in person to confirm she was the Mora of twenty years earlier. With my impeccable sense of inappropriate planning, I convinced her to meet me at the clock in Grand Central Terminal. It was March, 2003, the day of the massive anti-war rally in New York, protesting the invasion of Iraq. I figured we could watch the excitement, see the freakiness, have some fun.
We planned to meet on a street corner in the East Fifties, but the huge turnout and stifling crowd control by the NYPD made movement impossible. The sardine-like crowd density made me feel panicked and claustrophobic. I tried calling Mora with my cell phone but I just got her voice mail. She must have been on the subway.
Swaying with the crowd like seaweed at Bikini Bottom, I watched the rally as I fought to reverse directions and reach Grand Central. I saw several people wearing buttons for a politician I had never heard of—someone named “Howard Dean.”
Finally I reached Grand Central and found Mora. I was bursting to reveal the big secret. She had not associated my unusual name with her lovestruck coworker of the early Reagan years. Once I saw her, I said, “Mora, it’s me, Van. Don’t you recognize me? We used to work together. Your boss was Moe, right?”
Gradually, recognition spread over her face. My first great dating coincidence.
We talked about the
I’ve always had an affection for off-brand consumer selection. In banking, why would I select Citibank or Manny Hanny when I could go with more daring, maverick options like Amalgamated or European American Bank? My zeal to support the struggling contender extended to dating. At the suggestion of people in MSN’s anti-JDate discussion group (yes, it did exist), I signed up with the small but scrappy rival, Jcupid, in February 2003.
On a good night, one hundred women were online at Jcupid. The selection got old fast. Yet what it lacked in quantity it made up for in quality. I met several women there who became, if not lovers, then staunch friends. Plus, the site had technical features that I have yet to see on other dating sites. I especially liked the way it kept track of all emails back and forth with a single woman on the woman’s profile page. This feature enabled me to watch the relationship unfurl, like a flower blossoming, as emails zapped back and forth. Other sites simply clump all emails together in sent and received files, so tracking the back and forth with one contact becomes much more difficult. Facebook just adapted this approach to messages, so Jcupid was way ahead of its time (JDate eventually absorbed it).
I can remember the first two women I had contact with quite clearly. I got an email from a French woman in New York, perhaps intrigued by the note on my profile that I was born in France (albeit on the U.S. Air Force base, and we moved back to the U.S. before I was three, so I spoke no French). She sent me a short note, I wrote back, I got her name, checked her out and found she had knocked three years off her age. For the first but no means the last time, I found myself thinking, “She lied to me.” Her European style attracted me, but I never could get a date with her.
The second date from Jcupid started at my initiative. I saw a woman who looked like a Jewish Hobbit, even shorter than me, cute enough. I wrote, she wrote, and when she gave me her name, something clicked in my brain. Mora ... short ... had a job in publishing ... then it hit me. I had worked with this Mora at a publishing company in the 1980s. I was an editor at a monthly magazine covering the frozen food industry (I went to Princeton for this? Well, as an editor once told me, “A gig is a gig.”); Mora was a secretary and also was my secret office crush (until her boss casually told me he knew all about my mooning over her).
I said nothing to Mora on the phone. I wanted to see her in person to confirm she was the Mora of twenty years earlier. With my impeccable sense of inappropriate planning, I convinced her to meet me at the clock in Grand Central Terminal. It was March, 2003, the day of the massive anti-war rally in New York, protesting the invasion of Iraq. I figured we could watch the excitement, see the freakiness, have some fun.
We planned to meet on a street corner in the East Fifties, but the huge turnout and stifling crowd control by the NYPD made movement impossible. The sardine-like crowd density made me feel panicked and claustrophobic. I tried calling Mora with my cell phone but I just got her voice mail. She must have been on the subway.
Swaying with the crowd like seaweed at Bikini Bottom, I watched the rally as I fought to reverse directions and reach Grand Central. I saw several people wearing buttons for a politician I had never heard of—someone named “Howard Dean.”
Finally I reached Grand Central and found Mora. I was bursting to reveal the big secret. She had not associated my unusual name with her lovestruck coworker of the early Reagan years. Once I saw her, I said, “Mora, it’s me, Van. Don’t you recognize me? We used to work together. Your boss was Moe, right?”
Gradually, recognition spread over her face. My first great dating coincidence.
We talked about the
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