Tag: love

3 Guys and 3 Dates vs. the Blizzard and “Say Yes to the Dress”

On By KathleenIn Dating, insights/observations, New York City1 Comment

The best-laid, over-ambitious plans of mice and single women often go awry.

3 guys. 3 dates scheduled, snowed-out and rescheduled…all for one Friday. Could it be done? The men and the proposed timetable seemed agreeable: one date would be with a doctor for a professional NY sports team who had an afternoon off. The second would be early evening drinks with a guy I had had crush on when I 17 . The last would be dinner with a guy I had uncharacteristically made-out with at a bar. I had the dress, the shoes, and the stamina. They had the charm and the credit cards. What none of us had going for us was the weather.

It was a romantic winter wonderland... but a winter wonderland condusive for 3 dates in one night?

I woke up Friday Power-Date Day to a raging blizzard. Hand-sized snowflakes blurred the trees 10 feet from my window and coated the streets. Date 1: snow-checked, again. Dates 2 and 3: pending.

By early evening, the snow had relented and the streets were being cleared. It would not have been impossible to forsake the new designer pumps in the name of sturdy boots. It would not have been impossible to head out into the night for lightweight flirtations buoyed by liquid fortification. I called Bachelors 2 and 3 — the winter-weather advisory was still in effect until morning. Should we meet wearing our snowshoes or cross-country skis?

3 guys. 3 dates scheduled, snowed-out, rescheduled, snowed-out, and rescheduled.

My dates now canceled, I was content to be snuggled in alone. With my phone turned off and my sweat pants on, I turned my TV on and tuned in to TLC. Sometimes, hot cocoa tastes better when enjoyed along side other guilty pleasures… like wedding-themed reality TV.

Outside, one snow storm settled while another loomed in the coming week.

Somewhere in the city a couple was grateful for sloppy street cleanups giving them an excuse to be snowed-in for a weekend together.

Inside my living-room, a “Say Yes to the Dress” marathon raged and I was a willing, if not unexpected captive.

What to do when your date gets snowed out? Watch a "Say Yes to the Dress" marathon, of course!

Becoming a Horse of a Different Color

On By KathleenIn Bio Pics, Breakups, Love1 Comment

Sometimes when you’re expecting bad news, the best thing to do is run away.

That’s exactly what I did in March of 2009 when I was in the thick of writing my masters thesis and awaiting responses from a handful of PhD programs. Given that the recent economic downturn had significantly reduced university endowments, I wasn’t optimistic that I’d be a paid student come September. I thought bad news would sound much better when received on a beach with a margarita in my hand. Inspired, I threw a polka-dot bikini and flip-flops into my car and drove 1,200 miles from New York to South Beach, FL for an early spring break.

sometimes bad news sounds much better when you hear it on a beach, with a margarita in your hand

It was a good thing I had such foresight.

While I was in South Beach, every PhD program I applied to sent me a rejection letter. Needless to say, I consumed a lot of margaritas that week.

Spending 7 days in the Florida sun, replenishing my vitamin D stores while getting to know the bartenders at my hotel may have temporarily raised the spirits and enlivened the soul, but once I was back home in a gray and slushy city, holed up in my smaller-than-a-dollhouse studio, the debilitating sting of the rejections set in.

100 pages of writing sat between me and my MA and for the first time in my life, I faced an uncertain future. I felt useless. I had no power to go back and change anything — not the topic I had spent 18 months researching, not the character of my fellow applicants, not the shape economy — yet I felt the need to change or exert power over something.

transforming into a horse of a different color is one way of asserting we're in control of our life... maybe

And so, in an attempt to gain temporary control in my life, I booked an appointment with my hairstylist.

Ladies, we’ve all done it before — broken up with a guy or had some traumatic experience that compelled us to bee-line to the salon for a makeover. Redefining our appearance is a way of asserting a new take on life and exercising power over our future. Sometimes we add bangs, sometimes we go platinum, sometimes we get botox, sometimes we get bangs, go platinum AND get botox.

I went orange.

I walked into a salon on Madison Avenue with long brown locks and hoped to walk out with spunky curls spiked with scarlet. Instead, I hit the pavement with short tendrils the color of pumpkin pie.

I walked into the salon with long brown locks and walked out with short pumpkin-colored tendrils. So much for taking control...

Under the warm lights of the salon, I thought this was exactly what I wanted — a total overhaul, a brand-new, “in your face, future!” me. It wasn’t until I met a friend for lunch that I realized the irony: at the end of the day, my little act of self-empowerment didn’t empower me at all — I asked for red highlights and got a florescent carrot top.

“Your hair is orange!” she cried, knocking over her iced tea in a visible state of shock.

“I know. I thought I needed a change.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little… err…. extreme?”

“It was only supposed to have highlights.”

“It’s a lot more than highlights… and it’s orange. And you’re orange. Where have you been all week?”

“Florida.”

As I sat there, munching on a biscotti, recounting the reasons behind this sudden transformation into a horse of a different color, reality set it. I may have mitigated the rejections by running away for a week. I may have tried, in vein, to assert a sense of control by changing my appearance. But at the end of the day, I stood at a cross roads, and orange hair and a margarita-spiked tan wasn’t going to make it go away.

It was time to go back to my apartment and get writing…

And maybe, en route, pick up a box of Clariol Nice n’ Easy in Chestnut.

Love Letters Lost

On By KathleenIn Love, Love in Brief, romance, Uncategorized2 Comments

His name was Simone Volpini and we met on a blistering August night in Paris.

The penultimate city of romance - Paris - an Italian architect and the promise of letters exchanged. It was too good to be true

I was dining in an over-sized bistro sandwiched between the tall, blond, brown-eyed Italian Simone and a handsome gay couple who had spent the day at the Musee D’Orsay. The couple and I quickly dove into conversation after one of the men compared my full pink cheeks and white skin to a Renoir — it was the only time I felt compelled to like and discuss Renoir. After they paid their check and bid me bonsoir, Simone asked me if I was American.

Simone was from Rome and was the only son of an Italian architect. He drove a white Vespa and was studying to take over his father’s business. He spoke little French and equally minimal English. I read Latin but spoke no Italian. We giggled through a conversation of muddled pig-romance-languages while we sipped our coffee. He called me his American Beauty and walked me out into the street to help me find a taxi. As I slipped into the car, he handed me a piece of paper.

“You will write me. Your letters will teach me English. I will teach you Italian, and then you will come stay with me in Rome.” A kiss on the cheek and we were both off into the Paris night.

Back home in the states, I wrote Simone a letter. His handwriting was atypical for an architect — messy and non-linear — and I could barely decipher the address. His letter was returned to sender.

Alas, I would not get to play the part of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.

The sole letter I've received from a friend, celebrating our graduation from college 4 years ago. I still have it.

It had been years since I had thought about the love letter exchanges that never were, but then a chat with a guy I’d met early last week reminded me why I found the idea of a pen-pal romance so appealing.

“You’re working very hard to get me to go out with you,” I typed in the text box of gchat after having received a handful of flirty texts and emails over the course of the week.

“There’s nothing hard about sending you a text message or an email. I sent them on my way to lunch.”

Clearly, he wasn’t a smooth operator, but Chad had made a very good point: sending a one-line message while you’re working on other things is not very hard.

In the age of texting and sexting, we’ve come to expect constant and instantaneous messages of love (or lust). On the one hand, there’s something extremely romantic about receiving, at any time of the day, a note that lets you know your beloved is thinking of you. On the other, one wonders if this communication blitz doesn’t lack of bit of sincerity. If it’s so easy to key in an “I think I’m in love w u”  when you’re on the go, then do you really mean it? Texts don’t necessarily demonstrate commitment… sometimes I wonder if they might even be a sign of over-commitment.

Writing letters are hard. They require time and thought. They lack that benefit of instant on-screen editing and spell-check — your flaws are more evident. And it seems that sitting down with pen and paper is something we only do these days when we’re taking notes, that is, if we haven’t forsaken a legal pad in the name of an ipad. It was not so long ago that a letter, composed with pen and ink, was our primary means of communicating from afar.  We’re out of the habit of letter writing.

Call me old-fashioned but “Ever thine, ever mine, ever ours” reads so much better when it’s scrawled on paper.

I kept the letter I wrote to Simone and every time I travel to Rome, I stuff it in my backpack. It wasn’t a love letter, but just in case I run into a tall blond architect riding around the Coliseum on a white Vespa, I’d like him to know I didn’t take the easy way out.

Resolving to be Resolute to Find Love or Let Love Find You?

On By KathleenIn Bio Pics, insights/observations, Love1 Comment

January 1st is the universally accepted date of renewal — the calender starts afresh and we get to put behind all the foibles of 2010. As we embrace the new calendar, we make lists of resolutions, of self-made promises to motivate us through the next 365 days (but really, only through January).

The stack of diet books I've accumulated to match my resolution to Lose Weight in the New Year... how do you think I did...

My custom before setting fresh goals for the new year is to flip through old notebooks and diaries searching for records of New Year’s Resolutions past, evaluating my success and accepting my shortcomings. There were a number of constants over the years, namely the universal standards:

Lose weight.

Find Love.

Write a book.

Clean basement.

Find inner peace… Optional and for extra credit: join movement to bring about World Peace.

For the first time, it occurred to me that “Find Love” was the most challenging of the goals. “Find love” — it’s an active, commanding statement that puts the quest for Love Everlasting on par with “lose weight.” It implies that, just as a regimented diet and exercise routine gives me power over my waistline, I have some control over Cupid and his henchmen. It implies that if I grab the bull by the horns, leave no stone unturned and tear the curtains asunder, there will be a shining treasure waiting for me. If I just look hard enough…

But let’s be honest, when it comes to finding love, there are far too many stones in need of turning.

Venus & Cupid: the dangerous yet dynamic love-conjuring duo we try to employ come the New Year

In 2006, I resolved “to fall in love.” This was a mistake. Falling in love is easy and, much to my eventual chagrin, I accomplished the mission before midyear.

So in 2007, I needed a sequel resolution: Make “Bob” fall in love with me. Again, I had conjured a statement that implied I was Venus and Cupid was at my beck-and-call…

It may come as a surprise to you that as of January 1, 2008, I was on a mission to “Fall out of love with ‘Bob.'”

By 2010, after a 2009 dedicated to “Letting Love Find Me,” I had a new journal and a new outlook on resolutions. On the journal’s inside cover, in my best, most decorative script, I scrawled  William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” and decided to commit the poem’s stanzas to memory. I had had enough with these commands to get thin, let love happen, and learn to play the guitar — making this poem my mantra was the closest thing to making a New Year’s resolution I was, and am willing to do.

Yet while “my unconquerable soul” may  resolve to make me the “captain of my fate,” something tells me that if I want to cross “Find Love” off my list of future New Year to-dos, my heart may have to accept being anything but unconquerable.

Solving the Hard-to-Shop-For-Mother Quandary: A Little Macaroni and a lot of Inner Child

On By KathleenIn Bio Pics, LoveLeave a comment

“Remember when you used to make me cards and presents for Christmas?”

I should never have made her that scrap-wood jewelery box when I was 8 -- I set the bar too high.

My mother, my wing-woman, is an Italian-Irish Catholic Canadian, but I swear, she’s got that New York City Jewish Mother knack for instilling a stomach-churning sense of guilt.

“I always liked it when you made me cards and presents for Christmas.”

She said this to me one December 22nd as she drove me home from college. I had just grumbled something inaudible about being behind on my gift-buying. Not 30 minutes had passed since I was freed from the relentless push of the semester’s end and I was worn out from two weeks of exams and term papers. There had been no time to eat and sleep let alone tackle the NYC holiday shopping crowds. Not surprisingly, I was in that typical student mode of pure selfishness. Forget holiday shopping and bow making. Forget fa la la la laaaing and joy to the world. I was going to sleep for the next 24 hours… some one else could deck the halls.

My mother, like all mothers, is a notoriously bad person to draw in Secret Santa. Shopping for her Christmas gifts makes me sweat, ties knots in my stomach, and often causes hyperventilation — I started carrying a brown paper bag with me when I hit the mall in Santa mode. Yet, once upon a time, all I had to give her for Christmas was a glittered construction paper and doily card gingerly assembled during afternoon craft hour.

Mum had made a good point (one I’m not entirely sure she meant to make) — homemade presents are not only more thoughtful, they’re also easier: standards are lower.

A summer vacation scrapbook? Who doesn't love a sentimental photo album, witfully assembled?

At home, bedraggled but eager to please, I rummaged through drawers and bins on a hunt for stowed-away crafting supplies. I should never have made her that scrap-wood jewelery box when I was 8 — I had set the resourceful bar high. Many years later, the only materials at my disposal were faded construction paper, colored string, and macaroni.

“You’re an art student,” my father, who escapes the thinking/shopping challenge through gift certificates, said encouragingly. “Surely, you can come up with something.”

“Dad, it’s Art History. I don’t make stuff. I analyze stuff other people make.”

Sitting on my living room floor, in front of the fire, I consulted my creative side and got to work. A humorous scrapbook from our summer vacation? Who doesn’t love a sentimental photo collage?

A construction paper collage card? It would be just like kindergarten. Half the fun of Christmas is rekindling your inner child, isn’t it?

But the piece de resistance of that Christmas? The pasta necklace.

Despite its aesthetic qualities and the diligence with which it was crafted, like many a Christmas present past, it never got any use. But my mother’s hearty laugh and big hug upon opening it said it all: this time, it really was the thought that counted.

 

A construction paper card and macaroni necklace made by a 20-year old college student. Without a doubt, it was the thought that counted.



How Blogging About Dating Suddenly Made Me a Desirable Date

On By KathleenIn Bio Pics, Dating, insights/observations, Mr. Right, New York CityLeave a comment
Successful Relationship blogger? What do I tell him? Deny thy blog or confess its fame?

“You may not want to lead with the fact you have a blog about dating,” my friend Jake kindly advised me as we sipped lattes and commiserated over our recent dating droughts.

He had just brought to light an interesting dilemma: When you’ve made something of a name for yourself writing about love and its aftermath, do you deny thy blog, or confess its fame? Will guys think you’re clever or dub you as trouble?

“On the other hand,” he continued, “this whole blogging thing might just be the making of your love life. I’m worried that with your recent success, you won’t stay on the market long enough to keep They Told Me to Find a Rich Husband going. Seems now it’s a sooner, rather than a later, that you’ll land your Mr. Big.”

A recent slew of “Can I take you out for a drink?” messages from They Told Me to Find a Rich Husband’s male readership helped me make up my mind and lent a modicum of credibility to Jake’s alternative forecast.

Who would have thought that blogging about dating would make me a hot date ticket?

“What do you do?” — It’s a question we’re always asked when we meet someone and a question I always answer with caution.

“I consider myself a writer on the verge of landing a paying day job.”

“What do you write about?” The inevitable follow up question.

“Dating and relationships… I have a blog.”

Their eyes open wide, an eyebrow rises, a half-smirk curls upon their lips and they lean in a little closer.

“What’s it called? Maybe I’ve read it,” they coo.

“They Told Me to Find a Rich Husband.”

Usually, the next thing the guy will do is take a sip of his drink and pause. “So, do you want to be that Millionaire Matchmaker lady?”

“No…no, I don’t really care about other people finding rich husbands. ‘Find a rich husband‘ — that’s what people tell me to do. I’m the only person I’m really interested in. Blogging is a selfish business”

Pause.

“So does that make you a real-life Carrie Bradshaw?”

We ladies all think we're Carries chasing our Mr. Bigs. Turns out, guys are out there chasing their Carries.

Carrie Bradshaw — she’s the shadow-casting pop-culture icon we who write about dating in New York can never escape. As I chuckle and shrug, part in acceptance, part in denial, his next move is typically to put a hand on the small of my back to pull me in closer. The look in his eyes is telling. He sees his pseudonym in print.

“Carrie wrote a column called ‘Sex and the City,'” I’ve been known to reply. “I moved north of the city a few months ago. If I turned my blog into a column, eventually I’d have to call it ‘Celibacy and the Suburbs.'”

“Well, we’ll have to fix that, won’t we?” Before I have a chance to process or respond, his hand is up the back of my shirt and his tongue is searching for my tonsils. Hold your horses there, Cowboy!

“When you write about me tomorrow, make sure to call me ‘Mr. Hottie,'” more than one guy has said. If they only knew…

Apparently, the prospect of being the subject of next week’s post can be something of a turn on. Thank you, Carrie Bradshaw for making dating columnists sexy. Before you, we might have been considered raging feminists, and a dating no-go. It would just be nice if the men in this city didn’t conflate you with your side-kick, nymphomaniac Samantha Jones… because, as their roaming hands and steaming eyes make evident, it seems they always do.