“All I want is a sweet, smart, artsy boy,” I sighed to my friend, a tall Ukranian 20-something with reams of chestnut hair that swish around her knees. We rolled up our yoga mats and sighed. “We’ve gone over this a thousand times,” grimaced my friend, who–for the sake of anonymity–will go by “Scorpio.” “If there were a nerve center for fabulous, artsy men, we’d be there.”
As a busy sculptor and graphic designer who was also seeking someone to overwhelm her with creative fireworks, Scorpio, too, had become disillusioned. We’d tried the traditional routes: bars, temples, classes. All we got from bars was other people’s smoke stink and the occasional minty toothpick. The religious tack wasn’t going to do it, either: although my rabbi told me he has a “running list” of eligible, interested bachelors, I have yet to see a single man of my generation attending services. (I have creeping visions of older couples telling the rabbi that they know “a nice Jewish boy for that single girl we see so often,” then running home to call their son in Antwerp…and bribe him to “dump the shiksa.”) Truthfully, I did attend one Jewish singles night; if evenly distributed, there was approximate enough male hair in the room to cover one cranium. As for our classes, the estrogen count was phenomenal. Although I’d dated non-Jews, frankly, one can only date for so long before the inevitable “I want to raise my kids
Jewish” conversation belches in to destroy young love like a religious steamroller. It’s like asking a first date’s salary “just to see how well my kids will be provided for.”
It is worth noting that in spite of the fact that I never went to Hebrew school, didn’t attend temple and only celebrated high holidays as a child, my Judaism is extremely important to me. I sense a kinship with Isaac Bashevis Singer¬–especially the Chelmites. I’ve always said “oy” a lot and I owe a deep debt to God for my ability to smell Loehmann’s within a five-mile radius.
I also want to be able to invite a man to temple without his checking inside the yarmulke for Super Glue. I want a date to attend a seder with me without expecting a midnight visit from a moyle. I couldn’t help my heart from sinking when a non-Jewish date assured me that he couldn’t live without bagels–the Lender’s kind. Somewhere, my grandmother was rolling toward H&H in her grave.
So it was that one night, I was noodling around on JDate, the Jewish dating website, when Scorpio came to visit.
“You didn’t tell me you were doing that!” she said, pulling up a chair.
“Yeah, I did,” I said, scrolling through a page of men. “Remember, I signed up a year ago, went on a couple of blah dates, and basically gave up on it.” If you don’t sign on, I yawned, your profile drops to the bottom of the pile, and you stop getting responses from interested JDaters. But occasionally, some seriously determined Jdater would find me, and I would look up their profile “just to see.” “The last one I met took me to a diner where he emptied sugar packets, jelly, ketchup and pepper on my dessert,” I said.
“Oh right,” she vaguely recollected.
“I decided the whole thing was kind of sketchy.”
Both of us tried to look nonchalant. And yet we couldn’t ignore one thing: the computer screen. Without even realizing what we were doing, we’d clicked on the “search” function.
And now, quietly, something sparked within us.
Fever.
Shopping fever.
And the more we searched, narrowed our criteria and read profiles, our pulses quickened as we realized…We had found it: eBay for Men.
To be continued next Thursday
“Miss Gemini” (Jamie Kiffel-Alcheh) and “Miss Scorpio” are dating experts and co-authors of Gemini and Scorpio’s Fabulous Guide to Online Dating.
