(no subject)

[seekingferret]

cahn asked me to write a little about dating. Here, let me dig up the question.

Question 1: What is dating like for you? (Related question: is there a lot of marriage pressure for Orthodox Jews, or for you in particular?)



The answer is that I basically haven't been on a date in several years, because I am a socially awkward nerd who struggles with things like asking girls out, and because I've been a little isolated in suburbia and haven't met too many girls I've found interesting in a while. Given my proclivities, if I weren't Jewish I suspect I would date fairly exclusively in the nerd community, but I do also want to find someone that I can share a Jewish life with, which narrows the dating pool considerably, but also forces me to consider dating outside the nerd community since otherwise the dating pool is almost impossibly narrow. When I was at Cooper, where there were, you know, fifteen observant Jewish guys and fifteen observant Jewish girls who were all engineers and almost all giant nerds, the odds of finding someone compatible didn't seem as unlikely as it does now, but since leaving school I don't meet as many people in general, and I certainly don't meet a lot of observant Jewish nerd girls.


However, to tie in question B, there is indeed a lot of marriage pressure for Orthodox Jews, which means that as a single late 20-something I am bombarded by people who want to set me up with someone. When I was in my early twenties, I mostly blew them off. At this point, I don't see the harm in meeting someone even if it seems unlikely to click, so I usually do try to follow up as much as my social anxiety will allow. Usually it doesn't go very far: Most of the single Jewish career women my age, it would seem, appear to be in the 'mostly blowing them off' phase still.

The repeated pattern appears to be that the mothers of these women get together and complain about how their daughters aren't getting married, then one of them says "Hey, I know this guy, he's an engineer, very bright, let's see if he's interested." And I say sure, I'll meet her, because I'm saying yes to everything, and then they tell the daughter and the daughter says "HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU I'M NOT INTERESTED IN YOU SETTING ME UP, MOM?" So uh... that keeps happening.

I was handed the email address of a girl from someone at synagogue this past Sunday. Along with the email address and name there was a single note about her: 5'6". I asked the person handing me the note if she knew what the girl did, where she went to school, what she was like, etc. and she couldn't tell me anything, but for some reason her height was vital information I needed to know. I remain baffled by this. In what strange universe am I going to look at a person's height and say "Oh, that person is not tall enough for me to date?" or "That person is too tall for me to date?"

But that is nowhere near as baffling as the quagmire my mother has guilted me into: the dating website Saw You At Sinai. In which the profile includes such questions as whether I will date someone who wears pants, whether I will date someone who goes to movies, and what style of yarmulke I wear. The second most difficult part of filling out my profile was trying to figure out how to characterize my religious beliefs. The hardest part was picking out my four favorite genres of music, from a list that segmented Jewish music into seven different categories.

SYAS's system involves matchmakers poring through the member rolls to send potential matches, and then sending PM after PM guilting me into looking at the ones they suggested. And if you hit decline, it doesn't let you, but pops up a message saying "Are you sure you've given this enough thought? You can PM the matchmaker for more information. And if you really are sure, before you decline you need to give the matchmaker your reasons." All those social anxieties about dating I wrote about earlier, this site appears tailor-made to exacerbate. Plus my general tendency to overthink everything, about which I don't think we need to say more.

And gah, there's this stream of profiles being sent to me, and I don't really have any reason to exclude any of them out of hand without meeting them, but I'm not going to go on ten dates in the next two weeks, so I have no idea how I'm supposed to respond. And there's a timer that if I don't respond fast enough the matches lapse, and it's all very intimidating, and probably I'm overthinking it, but well, that's me.

But anyway, the reason I finally wrote up this post is because I went on my first SYAS date last night, and it went pretty well, all things considered. We met at a restaurant and talked about work for a bit, and talked about families, and then we started talking about television, which is pretty much what I expected since I accepted the date mainly because her profile mentioned an interest in SF TV. And then the rest of the night was mostly talking about TV shows, with me probing subtly to figure out if it would be appropriate to mention my fic.

And then she mentioned Firefly, and I decided that if I were going to mention fanfiction to an Orthodox Jew who may or may not be totally revolted by the idea, mentioning kass's "Ruth on a Firefly" was a pretty safe bet. It was a well-received suggestion; she was very pleased to learn that there were other fanfiction archives out there besides FF.N.

So yeah, I had dinner with a pretty Jewish girl who likes Firefly and Farscape and sympathized with my rant about Elementary and P=NP and enjoys reading Doctor Who fic. I can't really complain, it was a good night. Except she likes Sherlock over Elementary and is a Loki fangirl, so you know, if I pursue it further I'm going to need coping strategies. :P


But speaking of marriage pressure, this is one of my favorite stories to tell.

When I was in college, I played on our school's ultimate frisbee team. This was a kind of challenging juggle since most intercollegiate frisbee tournaments are all-weekend affairs and I don't roll on Shabbos. What I would typically do is drive up to the tournament on Friday, spend Shabbos at the nearest Jewish community, and then join the team after Shabbos and play the rest of the weekend. Usually, the nearest Jewish community would mean the Hillel of the host school (Dartmouth Hillel, for example, serves as the synagogue for all Jews within five towns in any direction), but at a tournament in Salisbury MD, the Hillel was basically nonexistent and the nearest Jewish community was a Conservative synagogue about a mile and a half from our hotel. So I hiked over there on Friday evening for services and everyone was friendly. And then I hiked over there Saturday morning and everyone was even friendlier, and there was a very pretty girl there. Because, you know, word had gotten out that there was a single, young Jewish man in town, which was a banner headline event, bring out your single daughters! After the service, I chatted with the girl for a while, who was sixteen and a junior in high school and she seemed like a very nice girl, if young. And then I chatted with her mother, who was very eager for me to come to them for Shabbos lunch. And then I talked to her father, who seemed very clearly like he was trying to talk himself into his little girl dating a college boy. "How old are you?" he asked me. "Nineteen," I said, and I could tell in his eyes that he was making a calculation like "Three years. I can live with three years if it means my daughter's dating a Jew." "But I'll be twenty in a week," I said, and his face fell, as all of his justifications collapsed under the strain. And it was kind of funny and sad all at the same time.

Comments

[ambyr]

That sounds like a pretty successful online matchmaking date :-). I hope others continue in that vein.

My favorite marriage pressure story: some years back, I rented out the basement apartment of a pleasant--and very gay--Jewish man a couple decades my senior. When I say "very gay," I mean his job was as a lobbyist for LGBT issues, and his orientation routinely ended up in headlines in the Washington Post and similar publications.

By coincidence, one year at high holidays I ended up at the same service to which he had taken his elderly mother (up visiting from Florida). We spotted each other on our way out, and so he did the polite thing and introduced me--not very precisely.

"Mom, this is ambyr. She lives with me."

I swear his mom's face lit up like she'd just won the lottery.

"...in his basement apartment," I clarified.

Her beatific beam collapsed, and she gave me a very reproachful look. "You had to say that so quickly?"

I never did work out whether he'd been deliberately trying to use me as his beard or not. Which I might even have been willing to play along with, but really, you have a warn a person about that sort of thing in advance!

[seekingferret]

Jewish mothers can be hilarious when they're singleminded and they're not yours.

[sanguinity]

:: sympathized with my rant about Elementary and P=NP ::

Oh, that is encouraging!

:: Except she likes Sherlock over Elementary... ::

Oh, dear.

[seekingferret]

;)

I'll show her Skullcrusher Mountain vids until she repents of her evil ways.

[sanguinity]

Or until she decides that she would very much like a pony-monkey for her birthday.

[seekingferret]

Hey, she's the biotech researcher. I don't do pony-monkeys, I do robot-pony-monkeys.

[sanguinity]

And working together, you could do cyborg pony-monkeys.

Except for that whole Sherlock business, this is sounding quite promising.

[morbane]

Use this method with caution. One of my earliest memories of the person who is now my husband is of him dragging me into a computer lab to play me "Skullcrusher Mountain". And "Future Soon". Etc.

[I may have interpreted "I'm so into you, but I'm way too smart for you," a little too literally...]

[kass]

Bwee, I am so glad my "Ruth on a Firefly" fic was a useful way to test the waters! I often want to show it to Jewish geek friends, and then have to decide how comfortable I am being "out" to them as a fangirl who writes fic. Happily, these days I feel increasingly comfortable with that, though I do tend to hope they don't click over to my explicit slash unless they already know what slash is and know that they're interested, because…yeah. *grin*

[seekingferret]

:D It's such a great story.

[seekingferret]

The most treacherous 'outing' for me was when I shared "18 Chalakim of Life" with a close friend who is from a much frummer background than I am. I warned him that some of the other stories in the challenge were slash, and was very relieved that the response I got from him was a very satisfying, enlightening, and challenging conversation about how Orthodox Jews should approach the queer subtext in the story of David and Jonathan.

[cahn]

Ah, thanks for answering my nosy questions! (The impetus came from the comment you made a while back about Magic Flute being a great date, but I was also curious to know how the Judaism and geekness intersected, if at all.) I’m awfully glad the date went well – that sounds very promising :)

Koreans are much the same with respect to trying to set up their kids. I was lucky in that my mom would pass on to me setups that she got from other parents, but she never tried to force me to accept a date. It probably helped that I usually had a boyfriend (…the ratio being much better for geek girls in general, although I never did really date within my faith for various reasons), but also I think because my mom had a quasi-arranged marriage and was always a little wistful about the idea of not having to have one.

And LDS, of course, have a great deal of marriage pressure (which was why I asked), especially the men, as there are many fewer eligible men than women around.

I would never have guessed that you had any social anxiety from interacting with you online (you were the one who started talking to me, I do believe :) ), but I have been told (and I also think) that I also come across as rather more extroverted and less quiet in writing than I am in person…

(Replying to your other comments will happen! May be slow and in an odd order. I'm trying to catch up on eeeeeverything right now...)

[seekingferret]

My social anxiety is inconsistent and random in its popping up, because it is something that I have been aware of for a long time and which I have worked hard to shed. I am also much, much better at it than I was when I was younger. I used to be completely terrified of making phone calls. Being at a job where making phone calls to vendors and customers is a thing I have to do all the time has been helpful with that, but when I was about to call to set up this date I went into #yuletide and asked people for a pep talk, because I was getting nervous and needed some cheerleading.

And I am a digital native, and have been part of online communities since I was about twelve, and I'm much more comfortable being social on the 'net than I am in person.

Take your time, I still owe you an answer to the opera recordings question. (The answer is going to be tl;dr, but will boil down to here's a bunch of opera recordings I recommend even though the live versions are always better)