Every guy with an online dating profile thinks he’s this guy.
The men with the best profiles are 5’8 or shorter.
It’s not okay to give that guy you lived with in college or the guy you kinda had a crush on in high school 4 stars or to “like” him. Just pretend you never saw him. You’re not doing yourself any favours. If you want to see him, send him an email.
Every guy is a laid back kind of guy who likes to cook and travel and wants a true partner in crime.
If he says he’s 5’9, he’s really 5’7. If he says he’s 6’2, he’s really 6’4.
The last time anyone read “The Great Gatsby” was when they were 14. It is also everyone’s favorite book. Listing it as a favorite is a waste of characters.
Every guy has been either Indiana Jones or Maverick at least once for (and possibly every) Halloween.
Your match percentage is entirely based on sex-play preferences and religious views. You are as likely to be incompatible socially with someone who is a 90% match as someone who is a 90% enemy.
Online dating and bar pick-ups — equal probability of meeting a serial killer.
No one is really comfortable with being on a dating site. A ridiculous truth because no one should be comfortable meeting drunk strangers at a bar. Your odds of meeting a serial killer or an organ harvester at either venue is entirely equal.
It’s a bad idea to lead with a selfie.
Speaking of profile photos… The ideal photo selection includes: one full body, one smiling, one of you doing an activity you really enjoy. Limit yourself. No one needs to see your instagram feed.
Brevity is the source of wit. Long-winded folks that feel the need to list every book they’ve ever read, or every movie they really, really love have more than a few reasons why they’re single.
There are some great people out there and online. If online dating hasn’t worked out yet, that’s okay. It may not. But if you’re not having fun while you’re doing it, then you’ve only got you to blame.
The worst break-up I ever survived was not with a boyfriend. It was with my best friend.
When I got my college freshman room assignment, the first thing I did was shoot an IM to my teammate, Suki. We were only slightly better than acquaintances, but we lived in the same area, trained at the same fencing club, and were both going to be spending our next 4 years at Columbia together. Great news! We were assigned single rooms a floor apart. We spent our summer preparing for college life by becoming bosom buddies. By the time orientation week started, we were thick as thieves, bonafide best friends.
As the year unfolded, our bond as friends grew stronger. There were few things we did apart. This was our first big mistake. We were always invited to things as a set, and when only one of us were invited to things, we’d usually bring the other. While we were each on different academic courses and had a handful of friends that didn’t overlap, for the most part we were peas in a pod, attached at the hip — one person to the majority of the outside world.
Nothing could possibly come between us. But 19 year old girls can let anything come between them, and in our case, it was 2… make that 3 boys.
What exactly happened over the course of a year and half is less important than the fact it culminated in me calling her a slut, she locking me out of our shared dorm room and both of us flushing our friendship down the toilet. She had picked boys over our friendship while putting other relationships at risk. I take loyalty very seriously. There was no option for recovery.
We had timed our break-up well — a week before reading week, 2 weeks before finals, and a month before we called it quits for summer recess. We lived together, but she had an upperclassman friend who would let her crash at his place on week nights. I’d go home on the weekends. Without coordinating it face to face, we had worked out how to avoid each other. There was a mural on the wall behind our beds — something we had started working on one sleepless night when we didn’t feel like studying but never really finished — I took a sponge to it.
I sat in a kind of quiet depression through that summer. I was fragile and jaded. I had confided in her in a way I had never confided in someone before — she knew all my secrets. How could I trust anyone — friend or lover — again? I lashed out at friends that tried to push us back together. Perhaps a few other relationships fell by the wayside. The collateral damage was almost too large to measure.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that 9 out of 10 boyfriends become ex-boyfriends. But best friends, those are supposed to last a lifetime… so when best friendships come crashing down, we’re left feeling abandoned, betrayed, and wounded in a way no significant other can ever effect us.
Of course, a decade later you get the benefit of saying “things happen for the best.” And for us, the end of our friendship was probably the best thing that ever happened to us both. She found true love outside our complicated polygon. We found our unique identities. I moved on, and while I’m more cautious about who I let into my life, years later, I learned to trust again.
If only good girls keep diaries, then I must be a very good girl.
“When did I ever have time to write this much?” I said to myself when, in another rainy-day induced fit of house cleaning, I uncovered over a decade’s worth of journals and diaries. Most are thick enough to be worthy of the label “tome.” Few contain content worthy of any label besides “meaningless nonsense.”
I can’t remember ever not having a book to write stuff down in. In my tween and early teen years I keep “diaries.” While most kids would sneak a flashlight under their covers to read Treasure Island (or US Weekly?) I’d make a tent and take an erasable pen to a notebook. Each entry began with the ceremonious “Dear Diary.” (I know. Right? Gag me with a spoon.)
At 16, with a driver’s license pending, college nearing, and hormones raging, I decided daily happenings in my life might become significant enough to start treating my “personal” notebooks more seriously.
Good-bye, diary. Hello journal.
Good-bye faux letters that droned on and on about the boy who threw crayons at me in art class. Hello mini faux essays with an imposed sense of the profound… about the boy who studied with me before each calculus exam.
As a scholar, journals accounted for a third of my resources on any research project. At times it was a tedious process — reading the day-to-day accounts and musings of someone with whom I had no direct personal relationship, hoping to find gem of a detail that would prove a revelation in the history of art… Mostly, I learned what my subject liked to eat for breakfast…
In my own life, I make it a habit to sit down and read the pages of my most current journal. In doing so, I mostly discovered that meaningless nonsense is surprisingly revealing — there are life lessons to be gleaned from your unpublished, unedited, unmediated autobiography. Mistakes I made in dealing with challenging situations, mistakes I made in love, right life decisions, questionable life decisions — it was all there, laid out in my own words. My journal was my own handwritten guide to” what not to do.”
There are many reasons to keep a journal — for the sake of having memories, as a place to vent — but perhaps the best reason to have a journal is to have reminder that you’re constantly moving forward.
These days, it takes a sailor or two to rock this boat…
Whether we want to admit it or not, we all have a type.
Tall + Dark + Handsome.
Architects.
Blonde hair + blue eyes.
Drummers.
For most women, it’s the wrong guy. For me, it’s sailors…
It used to be cowboys. Macho, wild-bull-wrangling types who lived by a creed and by their own making. Men with stetsons who wore their jeans like they were poured into them.
Yum.
My cowboy phase infiltrated my wardobe
This was mostly the result of what I can only define as my “John Wayne Phase” — a period in my life when I’d abandoned romantic comedies (I mean, how many times can you really watch Knotting Hill?) and turned to westerns. I queued up classics like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and contemporary remakes like 3:10 to Yuma (did I mention I was also going through a Russel Crowe phase… which I’m still in…) I even went so far as to stage a version of Othello set in the wild west. (Did you know I once wanted to be a screen-writer/director?)
As a result of this phase, I can single-handedly outfit the entire cast of Dead Wood.
He mistook my RL Crest for my sailing club… I probably should have lied, but then I might have drowned…
“So what club do you sail with?”
The question came from a tall, blonde, exceedingly handsome lawyer from New Zealand who was a good friend’s older brother.
“The Ralph Lauren Yacht Club.”
He had seen the crest on my blazer, and assumed I raced sailing vessels. He did. And that was kinda hot.
Shiver me timbers…
I did not race sailboats. I was simply embarking on my nautical wardrobe phase.**
I grew up around boats. Mostly speed boats and kayaks, but I had heard stories about my parents as a young, married couple learning to sail in Vancouver harbor.
This always appealed to me — the idea of working together to navigate around troubled waters… or to buried treasure. It certainly felt like a more appropriate metaphor for life than taming a wild mustang.
There’s that and then there’s the romanticism of the man at sea coming home to his loyal girl. A sort of Penelope and Ulysses. And then there’s the Navy uniform…
A girl is always a sucker for a man in a sailor’s hat
__
*”This Fire” was one of the defining albums of my teenage years, along with Globe Sessions and Jagged Little Pill — both of which still have at least one song on every playlist I create…
**Apparently, the choices I make when I shop are completely analogous to the choices I make when I date (let’s not get me started on my “hippy” summer…)
Apparently my wardrobe choices and my taste in men go hand in hand…
An additional note:
My favorite Jane Austen hero is Captain Wentworth, from her final novel Persuasion. Not coincidentally, Wentworth raised himself from meager beginnings by distinguishing himself in the Royal Navy, where he eventually became, well, a Captain… and the object of every gal’s affection. Duh. Anne Elliot is the Austen heroin I most relate to. Over the decades, there have been several excellent screen adaptations of the novel… most recently starring Mi-5’s (or Spooks, for all you UK folks) Rupert Penry Jones as Captain Wentworth… swooooooooon. This might actually explain it all.
It’s all on us, isn’t it? The “us” being women under 35 and “it” being the fate of romantic relationships, and therefore, the modern family.
I’m so over it.
If you’re been keeping track of the New York Time’s Sunday Style section and the Atlantic Monthly of late, you’ve probably noticed a slew of pieces examining the current state of the dating world. The choices and mindsets of single women seem to garner the most attention. The verdict, it would appear, is that we’re the ones directing the dynamics of contemporary relationships based on how we decide to answer a handful of questions:
Do we engage in casual, no strings attached sex?
Do we purely practice monogamy?
Do we wed early?
Do we focus on careers first, family later?
Do we try to “have it all?”
Frankly, I’ve had enough… Leave me alone. The kids are alright, I tell you.
In this past Sunday’s NYTimes, in a piece entitled “She Can Play That Game Too,” writer Kate Taylor reported on the sex lives of college-aged woman enrolled in UPenn. Taylor seemed to give a fairly straight forward account of the mindset of the Ivy Leaguers who applied cost-benefit analysis to their romantic encounters and generally considered college a stepping-stone and vital life-directing period of resume-building. Surviving those 4 years with honors under their belts didn’t exclude also earning notches on their bedposts, but made seeking serious romantic relationships a low priority on the totem pole.
I flashed back to my own Ivy League college days.
My future was mine to mold… or make a total mess of
I was an economics major — you bet I applied cost-benefit analysis to dating (and well, to everything else… and everything, including men, got rated in terms of its “utility.”) But more significantly, like the women Taylor interviewed, I realized the stakes were high. I had a very unique opportunity. I was a Division 1 college athlete and in 4 years, I would have a degree from one of the most lauded universities in the world. The molding clay that was future had been handed to me on a silver platter and I had all the power in the universe to turn it into a masterpiece.
I could also make a total muck of it.
And let me tell you, making a muck of it was far easier.
I’ll always remember that night during my final week as an undergraduate when one of my best male friends took my hand and said to me: “I’m so proud of you and happy for you for everything you’ve accomplished. But our relationship could have been very different if you’d been around more.”
Your first question is probably: Do I have any regrets?
My answer: Absolutely not.
I’m 19. I’ve Never Had a Job. Oh, But I’m Supposed to Know What I want in a Husband?
What irked me the most about this article was the seeming pressure it put on women to make-up their minds in their early 20s, or hell, even late teens about how their life was going to unfold.
And Susan Patton wonders why young women are cautious about getting married and pregnant young
Susan Patton, who was widely quoted as the “anti-feminist” in the article was disappointed when she asked a class of Princeton undergraduate females if they wanted kids and a family and met hesitation.
Today’s young women are the witnesses of an increasing divorce rate and pre-nups, and the beneficiaries of new job sectors. This is not the generation of my mother, who was married at 18, went through college a wife and left her country and family to follow her husband’s career.
Are you surprised a teenager or 20-something would proceed with caution when it comes to committed relationships?
What I learned in college, burning the midnight oil on papers, clocking my hours at practice, writing for the college newspaper, and making friends more important than lovers, was who I was and what was genuinely important to me.
At 21, no boyfriend was going to figure that out for me.
I wish I could say I went to Columbia to find a rich husband — of course if I did, my 6 years on campus would have been a complete and utter failure. But I went there to find me, Kathleen.
In my mother’s day, the flowers a boy would send you would become keepsakes…
A pile of flaky dust fell from the pages of my mother’s 1961 college student handbook and course listing as she pulled it from the shelf.
“What the hell is that!?” she cried. “I just vacuumed. Goddammit.”
“It looks like flower petals.”
She examined the bits more closely before brushing them into the dust pan and determined that they were, in fact, the fragments of a carnation.
“One day, when we were first dating, your father pulled off the side of the road on his way to pick me up and bought me a bouquet of carnations. I hate carnations. But they were such happy little things and I was thrilled. So I tried pressing them. We did things like that in those days. Pressed the flowers a boy gave us so we could have it as a keepsake if we ever got married. Of course, most of them turned out to be bastards. The boys, not the flowers. But I always did a shit job, totally mangled them, and usually forgot what book I used.”
“Case in point.”
When it comes to women, a well-picked bouquet from a fella goes a long way.
Which is why on Wednesday, along with my sneakers, a cluster of sunset-hued roses wrapped in damp paper towels and the cellophane from my 3AM room service order passed through the x-ray scanner at LAX.
An elegant birthday bouquet from a class act kind of guy.
My birthday had been only a few days earlier and these roses had been the feature of a bouquet that greeted me on that July 1st morning. Despite the resort’s legendary service, the elegant arrangement, I would soon learn, was not courtesy of my 5-diamond resort, which had also sent a cake. Even better – the flowers were from my new flame.
5-diamond concierge fail.
New flame home run.
The SoCal sunshine may have mellowed the east coast gallerist, but the roses from the boy who set my heart a flutter with just a glance put an indelible smile on my face for the duration of my “birthday week.”
“Did you go to a wedding while you were out here?” my flight attendant asked when she saw me wedging the roses gingerly into the seat pocket in front of me.
“No. They were a birthday gift.”
“From a beau?”
I nodded with a blush.
“Looks like he’s a keeper to me. Those are stunning.”
Thousands of miles and several changes in cabin pressure later, the roses looked a little worse for wear. Despite the suggestion, I elected not to press them. Much like my mother, home crafts and remembering where I put things are not my forte. I think for now, I’ll leave the act of preserving memories to my Canon… and a moleskin notebook.
… too elegant to leave to the cleaning staff, I valiantly tried to carry the roses cross county, neatly tucked into the seat pocket in front of me. Call it sentimental, call it futile, I call it a noble “thank you.”
They Told Me to Find a Rich Husband 