Zen Bender

by Stephanie Krikorian

  Also, I was told in a coaching session that dates aren’t dates, they’re meetings, at first. For me, that helped take the pressure off. Plus, in this artificial world of meeting online, it makes sense to adopt this attitude. What can one possibly glean from a few sentences and a professionally taken photo?

  Additional rules:

  When communicating, treat emails and texts like a salesperson would, by mirroring the tone of the sender. If a suitor writes only two sentences, you respond with only two. Also, mix up the speed with which you respond (to keep him guessing, I presume, and to make clear you aren’t sitting by the phone waiting to hear from him—which I was, of course, because I treated the coaching endeavor like a sport), and never respond on a weekend.

  Once you’ve made an interesting connection, get off the platform and start communicating directly. An initial text or two is fine, but stop texting immediately to force a phone call, so you can get a better read on the person.

  Take your time and spread out the courting process to best be able to assess whether the guy you’re communicating with is indeed a good person.

  Keep that first phone call to thirty minutes max (make him want more).

  First meeting: Don’t have more than one drink, so you can judge his character and make a good choice, and keep it to one hour (make him want more). I was rather ungraceful at this one-hour thing. On one date, I was deep in conversation when I realized it was a couple of minutes beyond the one-hour cutoff. I interrupted him and, in a panic, said, “I gotta go,” stood up, and basically Cinderella-at-midnighted my way out of there.

  Dating coach results: One guy actually wanted to marry me. Though it wasn’t an on-the-knee proposal, he said a couple of times he could see marriage happening between us, and he came to this conclusion just a few dates in. Frankly, I found that a little creepy, given that he didn’t really know me, but rather, perhaps, thought I looked good on paper.

  I had less than zero interest in him.

  I did, however, play out the dating coach’s advice, even though I had an inkling early on that it wouldn’t work. Like, within the first five minutes of the first meeting.

  Still, my coach said to stick to it to see if there was a good guy in there for the long haul and reminded me not to make my choice based on superficial reasons. I did try that. And I was not being superficial in my thinking.

  Don’t judge me and think that I only wanted to be with unavailable men and all that stuff people say about chronically single people. In the end, the best way to explain this particular misfire was to say that our values and political viewpoints were far from aligned. That made it a certainty it would not have worked, because, for example, he was strongly in favor of teachers carrying guns in schools, and he thought the finest restaurant in New York was a theme restaurant in Times Square where the staff wore costumes.

  Other red flags: He had never heard of a place called the West Village, despite having technically grown up in New York City. I’m not a snob. That’s not an I’m-so-fancy comment. I come from as humble beginnings as the next guy. But if you live in New York, the most amazing city in the world, rich with restaurants that offer world-class cuisine for anywhere from ten to five hundred dollars, and you’re single, which he was, you gotta be curious enough, or even hungry enough, to once venture out to the West Village to see what’s on the menu.

  Or try a non-costume-wearing-staff restaurant.

  I saw it through, though, assessing the experience, just like the dating coach told me to do, until it seemed I had been as open-minded as I humanly could have been.

  Then I shot the horse and moved on.

  But I will say this: Those rules and directives were easier to follow when there was no immediate spark with someone. While Mr. I-Love-Theme-Restaurants was easy to hang up on, later, when I had a date with someone who seriously piqued my interest, I a) drank too much, b) let the evening drag out on date number one for four hours because it was fun, c) didn’t follow the mirror exercise, and d) so on and so on.

  That didn’t go anywhere.

  My dating coach’s advice didn’t revolve around online dating. She had another system for meeting men as well. It was called prospecting. For several Sundays in a row, I would get up, go to the Drybar for a blowout, put on the motherfucking high-heeled boots, and go to a coffee shop in a different neighborhood each week. The task at hand was not to read the paper or stare at a phone—rather, it was to work the room. Every time a seemingly single guy went to the milk-and-sugar station, Stephanie went to the milk-and-sugar station.

  Not for the milk.

  Not for the sugar.

  I went to strike up a conversation.

  I capital-D-detested this activity. Actually, to say I detested this task is akin to saying that Canadians occasionally say “sorry.” (I have a “sorry” habit. I say it a hundred times a day, even if, or especially if, you knock into me.)

  Still, I got it done. Coffee-shop prospecting was a nine-to-noon venture. I’d lunch-counter prospect after that, and then I’d men’s-clothing-shop-prospect after that. Why waste a good blowout?

  Dates yielded from prospecting: zero.

  But! I built up my wilted confidence doing so because, as I started talking to strangers (even while wearing sneakers and a ponytail on non-prospecting days), I noticed something interesting: Human beings, even in New York, talked back. And sometimes they checked out my cleavage. Perhaps that wasn’t newly happening, but I started to notice it.

  Exhausted just reading about prospecting? I promise you it was beyond exhausting. Calling in the One said not to complain about the effort because relationships take work, too. Few truer words were ever spoken. It was all work.

  I kept at the online dating thing for a while, as I’m not a quitter. But I reached my breaking point one day while on eHarmony, a site on which you spend hours filling out questionnaires and providing particulars and specifics because they use an algorithm to make the most perfect personal connection a computer can make.

  I noticed that, after a few months, the matches were less than perfect and found myself knocking my requirements down considerably to widen my pool.

  One day, I was given a peculiar connection to consider.

  My match was a subway driver. Photo posted with his profile: in the subway car, driving the train, in uniform, with a subway map in his pocket.

  Remember, my dating coach said to only go on the sites that I had to pay for because that meant the guys were making an effort, which indicated a desire for a relationship rather than a fling. Not changing out of one’s uniform for one’s profile picture didn’t feel like an effort.

  Yet, I had to blow out my hair and wear high heels.

  Also, other than the fact that I frequently took the subway, I strove to see how our profiles matched, but I couldn’t. At a quick glance, and after a full forensic investigation, it was clear that we had nothing in common.

  Saying all this, of course, makes me sound like a mean girl. I understand that. I struggled with passing on that particular match, as I was told clearly to accept all dates. Remember, I told myself as I stared at the photo, these are meetings, not dates. I was scoping out a pool of people I might not have otherwise encountered, giving myself exposure to as many people as possible who wouldn’t have waltzed through my living room while I watched TV.

  It made sense—that it wasn’t a date until there was more of a spark or a decision to reconnect after the initial meeting. Judging someone by their photo isn’t the way to find true love. I understood that, and I had found myself previously working to be more open-minded and to take meetings even when, in my gut, I didn’t think things would work out. But the subway driver situation nagged at me. Rejecting him on the basis of what he did (if that was what I was doing) tugged at my class sensibilities, because I didn’t want to be a dick. And of course, there were the opinions of all the smug and coupled peop
le who gave me the overused “Who knows, he could be really nice.”

  I felt discouraged, but I knew I had truly tried. Eventually I came to realize that all that I struggled with, and all the advice of the dating coach and the married friends (who would never, by the way, have taken half the “meetings” I and my single friends endured), was, to a degree, dumb if blindly and universally followed.

  As a result, I stopped even telling married or coupled people what I was doing. I focused on the singles, out there in the trenches, doing the same thing.

  In doing so, I sought the counsel of my friend Alison, a fellow single-woman-of-a-certain-age. She is a doctor of psychology who had hit the online dating scene in an enviable way. Textbook-hard, with precision; multiple dates on any given day.

  She too had found it somewhat of a struggle. Often, she found her meetings intellectually unchallenging. She and I had lengthy discussions about this: Was it okay to want to date someone who was as educated as she was? I had a master’s degree, but I wasn’t as educated as Alison. She had a PhD. Still, the guilt over being choosy was overwhelming for us both. As in, was it fair to ignore the subway driver?

  Her research revealed that, yes, we could be choosy. More, we deserved to be choosy.

  She had consulted an expert of her own, who told her that she’d worked hard to get a PhD and a post-secondary degree could be her line in the sand; that it was okay to seek out a professional partner for herself.

  And so she did.

  And guess what? Her now-husband, we learned later, had also set a high bar for himself. But, unlike Alison and me, he hadn’t even remotely struggled with his decision to check the box on his online dating platform for “graduate degree only.” (If you’ve never experienced the horror of online dating, that is indeed a question—along with preferred height, income, religion, and political views, just like the menu at the local seafood shanty. If only it were as easy to land a husband as it is to land some fried clams.)

  More, his decision to do so is what led him to find Alison. His only concern was that he was narrowing his pool. But he had done it in reaction to having dated several women previously that he felt might have a hard time carrying on a high-level conversation at a work event. While Alison and I had been questioning whether our choice to shoot for an equal was snobby, her now-husband had not.

  There was something else that we decided, too: While the stakes for a younger woman are mostly about aging eggs and faltering ovaries, the stakes for women over forty are quite different when dating. Presumably, we’d all worked hard to survive to that point. I had. As the breadwinner, I had bills to pay, and in the mid-forties, I was hit with the realization that retirement was looming, and that added another layer of financial stress to my situation.

  Sure, I didn’t have kids to pay for. But I had psychics and Reiki and coaches. And a mortgage. And health care.

  When the stats revealed that approximately one-quarter of single women live below the poverty level in retirement, as opposed to just 6 percent of those who are married, the stakes soared. Taking on a partner who couldn’t afford the bills was a challenge I was ill-equipped to tackle.

  The uncertainty of my financial future, based on my lumpy self-employed income, changed the dating equation by the time I hit forty-five. Sure, Calling in the One made a fair point: Look in places you might not have. I did. But financial facts sometimes overpower love will find a way. And for that, I wouldn’t apologize.

  I suspect there will be an argument made here by some who say: Women marry men for money all the time and expect to be taken care of. Great work if you can get it. But it wasn’t for me. It was not for the 99 percent of the women with whom I associated. And, on the flip side, I know many women who are the breadwinners in their coupled lives, and for them I’m thrilled.

  At the end of the day, lowering the bar (whatever that bar was for me) just because I was of a certain age would have been the wrong choice. Not only did Alison and I deliberate about wanting an intellectual equal, I recall a time when someone told me to “dumb it down” on a blind date and not to mention that I owned an apartment and a rental property because that was intimidating.

  We can all play that very anti-feminist game of letting him do the asking, letting him set the tone of the conversation, and letting him drive the pacing of the relationship, but I suspect that’s setting the table for the relationship as well. I’m unapologetically opinionated. I’m unapologetically smart. Settling was not the way to go; rather, waiting for that great value-added guy out of want, not need, is quite okay by me.

  All of this is not to say that I won’t meet a great guy who I wouldn’t have expected to be a match. But when I was filling out forms, checking boxes, and being ruthlessly judged both by the men reading my profile (I assume, based on the low volume of interest) and by the friends who accused me of being choosy and suggested that I settle when my gut was telling me not to, then the criteria, to me, are very different. Being unapologetically choosy simply seemed part of the equation—baked in from the start because of the questionnaire—rather than simply meeting someone, liking him, and worrying about the details later. Match services feature unnatural, built-in judgment, forced choices, and checklists.

  And maybe the subway driver was conducting some sort of experiment and was really a nuclear physicist but wanted to see who wasn’t too shallow to consider him, but I wasn’t ready to find out.

  And with that last match, I deleted my profile and took a break from online dating.

  The Modern-Day Spinster

  I like to learn from any situation—my mistakes, my wins, and my awkward encounters. Dating and all my classes and experts and quests included. For a long time, I felt stressed about my non-marital non-status, which was in part why I worked so hard to fix it. I thought it said something negative about me, that there must be something seriously wrong with my character. In fairness, I also did it because the company and grounding of a life partner would be nice.

  As I thought about the work I’d put in, I also gave some thought to society’s and the world’s opinion of being single and how that may have clouded my judgment and pushed me to actually worry about how shiny my hair was.

  Single men are bachelors. Single women are spinsters. Spinster, in the world’s eyes, is not a good look.

  The definition of an Old Maid: A single woman regarded as too old for marriage. A bachelor, on the other hand, is viewed as virile and young. Probably with shiny hair, too. There’s no equivalent.

  That makes me and a long list of friends un-marry-able. Old Maid, childless spinster pals, who are way past our prime.

  That notion has certainly been reinforced by society. I remember shortly after first moving to Hoboken, after graduate school, I’d return to my hometown and see people who I had worked summer jobs with or people from high school. The conversation would often go something like this:

  Random judgy person: Hey, Stephanie, what have you been up to?

  Me: Hey, I got my master’s degree at Syracuse (and a scholarship when I got there!), and then I got a job in TV in New York!

  Random judgy person: But have you met anybody?

  Me: No, not yet. But I bought my own apartment (before turning thirty) and I have covered the Olympics (in Australia) and interviewed tons of celebrities, and even Fidel Castro, and I lived in London for a year while working for the network (acting bureau chief!), traveled all over the world (etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.).

  Random judgy person: But still single? That’s too bad.

  Rinse and repeat.

  That was standard-issue return-to-hometown conversation. It got stale after a while. It still happens on occasion, and it’s still stale. Or else—as most of my single-at-this-age friends agree—everybody just thinks you’re a lesbian, but too afraid to come out.

  One day, when I was doing research for someone’s book, I needed to find
out about the purchasing power of single women over forty. I learned that if I typed in single wo… all I got was a stream of stories intended to help single women get over a common ailment: being single.

  10 Reasons Single Women Over 40 Make Amazing Dates

  If You’re Single Over 40, Should You Ever Settle?

  2 Huge Reasons Single Women Over 40 Have a Hard Time Finding a Partner (Answer: you’re too picky)

  What Does a Single Women in her 40s Do with Her Life?

  The 5 Types of Single Women in Their 40s

  In case you’re interested in learning what I was actually looking for: Single women account for more real-estate purchases than single men according to the National Association of Realtors. Despite lagging incomes, our spending clout is significant (the She Economy is, apparently, a thing). Single adults now outnumber married ones, and a 2014 stat showed that 62 percent of the adult population has never been married, double the percentage in 1960. Single women are now a powerful voting block too. The Census Bureau recently revealed there are more single fifty-something women in the United States than ever before.

  When many people think about single women over forty, they often think how sad it is for them to be single, like it’s an illness. Given all the heroic measures I had gone to in order to change my circumstance, it became clear that I thought of myself that way, too.

  Bottom line: It’s hard to feel comfortable with a life circumstance choice when nobody else does.

  It’s hard to differentiate between what’s right for your life and what you think is right for your life, based on what everyone else dumps on you as a measure of success in life.

  It made me wonder: Shouldn’t we older single women be harnessing that power to do something other than compromise and apologize?