Thanks for Waiting

by Doree Shafrir

  “Yup,” he said. “In this apartment.”

  It seemed so L.A.—a romantic, beautiful apartment that had formerly been occupied by a well-known actress, with another well-known actress and her director husband who used to live downstairs. Never mind that no one famous lived here now; it was the history that mattered, so when I told people back in New York where I was living, they would be suitably impressed. I felt like I needed to fulfill their fantasy of L.A., as well as mine. And besides, I didn’t yet know that almost every older apartment in Los Angeles has had someone at least semifamous living in it.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I MOVED to L.A. in 2013, I was more than ready to start a new chapter, and so I decided: I would say yes to everything. I’d gotten too comfortable with my insular media world in New York; it had been too easy to go to all the same parties where I saw all the same people, get into the same routines, eat at the same restaurants, and drink at the same bars. So I threw myself into my new life. I went to open gallery nights, I went to dinner parties with people I barely knew. I spent Saturday afternoons hiking. Was I losing my jaded New Yorker–ness in my newfound lust for life? I wouldn’t go that far, but I was, actually, enjoying myself.

  I also tried to broaden my dating horizons. I went out with a children’s social worker who took me on bike trips all over L.A. County, but who was very cheap in a way that I had initially chalked up to environmentalism (he didn’t use paper towels!) but turned out to just be an allergy to spending money on anything besides weed. He was also a terrible driver. He drove his Toyota SUV leaning forward, almost hunched over the steering wheel, and way too fast, with a nervous energy. One sunny weekend morning, we headed out from his apartment to go on a bike ride in the Apple Valley, about an hour and a half out of town. As he sped along the 10 Freeway cursing at drivers, switching lanes without signaling, and cutting people off, I clutched the passenger-side door, praying that we’d make it back alive.

  I realized you could learn a lot about guys based on what and how they drove, a piece of data, as Cynthia might say, that had not been available to me in New York. (That said, I preferred accumulating that data while not being terrified I was going to die in a fiery car crash on the 10 with a guy who snored so loudly I’d once had to sneak out of his house in the middle of the night.)

  Car culture was another new aspect of my life in L.A., and I embraced it in true New York transplant fashion: I leased a convertible. I loved the idea of driving around the city, top down, sun shining. When it came time to actually get the car, my friend Michael, another BuzzFeed reporter who’d recently moved to L.A., accompanied me to the Volvo dealership in Culver City. Michael was also all about his new L.A. life; he’d bought a shiny silver Mercedes coupe and rented an apartment in the Hollywood Hills. “You gotta get the convertible,” he said. His bright blue eyes were shining. “It’s perfect.” The convertible was a Volvo C70, the last year they’d be making this car. We sat in the salesman’s office as he went over the lease terms. “Take it!” Michael urged me.

  “Can you get the total payment down a bit?” I asked. The salesman could. I was sold. Michael high-fived me on the way out. Never mind that I was almost thirty-six and buying (well, leasing) a car for the very first time—I felt accomplished, grown-up.

  The car I’d selected—black on black—wasn’t in stock, so the dealership gave me a loaner car that was the same model, in baby blue with a white leather interior, a car that looked like I was on my way to my weekly canasta game with the gals. When I drove the car home, I immediately encountered a problem. My building had a carport in the back, and each apartment had an assigned parking space. Mine was in the middle, and there was very little space between the garage and the building. I felt my hands get clammy as I attempted to maneuver the car into the space. Then I heard a sickening crunch. While dripping with beautiful period details, vintage Los Angeles apartments were built at a time when cars were much smaller, and thus, the garages and carports in these buildings were also tiny—a seemingly minor detail that I, who had never parked a car in a garage before, had overlooked. I might have been okay if I still had the MINI Cooper I had driven around on my initial visit, but this car was substantially bigger.

  “Fucking A,” I said as I got out to survey the damage. The only small consolation was that I had scraped it along a wall of the carport, and not damaged the car in the spot next to mine. But still. I had broken the mirror and put a long gouge in the passenger-side door. I’d had the car for approximately two hours.

  I wanted to be the kind of person who says, “Let’s go for a drive!” and puts on her leather driving gloves and red lipstick and huge sunglasses and silk kerchief and slides behind the wheel of her 1966 Ford Thunderbird with her best friend, like Thelma and/or Louise, minus the attempted rape and the whole thing about driving off a precipice in the Grand Canyon. But in reality, I recalled that during brief periods of my life when I’d had access to cars, it had been a disaster: I scraped the sides on walls, dented them, crashed into fences, sideswiped other drivers, and took my passenger-side mirror off because I’d miscalculated the distance between my car and a gate, just to name a few of my priors. My driving debacles went back to my driver’s test when I was sixteen. It had just snowed, and some streets were still unplowed in Somerville, where I was taking the test. The state trooper giving me the driving test told me to drive up and over a steep hill, but I miscalculated where to stop at the top, and the car started sliding slowly down the hill. Somehow, I still passed.*

  The accident in the loaner car seemed like a bad omen. But a couple of days later, when my actual car got delivered, I slid into it and pushed the button to make the top go down, and up, and down, and up, over and over again. I would put the accident behind me and embrace the new car—and my new life. But I also decided that I would park on the street.

  * * *

  —

  A COUPLE OF months after I moved to L.A., I turned thirty-six. I celebrated with a housewarming-slash-birthday party at my new apartment; my sister flew in from D.C. to celebrate with me. “Your apartment is gorgeous!” people said, one after the other, as they came in, and then I turned around and the apartment was packed. I had friends! These friends were pouring themselves drinks and admiring the art on the walls! I remembered the conversation I’d had with my former Gawker co-worker Alex, when he’d warned me about breaking up with Jon and being, at minimum, thirty-six before I’d be having a kid. But here I was, thirty-six and single, and yet somehow feeling calmer about my situation than ever before. I may not have been married, but I was figuring out what a fulfilled life meant—on my own terms.

  Maybe I’d needed to get out of New York in order to see that clearly. For so long, I’d been so focused on getting the approval of everyone else, men especially, and trying to make myself into someone that other people would like, that I’d completely ignored what and who I actually liked. And now, I was ready for this to change.

  Skip Notes

  * Three years later, the same state trooper was arrested for participating in a scheme to sell drivers’ licenses to undocumented immigrants, which made his comment during our test that he was “happy to be testing someone who spoke English” not just racist, but ironic.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  In college, I was friends with a guy named Phil who lived upstairs from me in our freshman dorm. Phil was a charming, preppy weirdo who often wore an ascot to eat dinner in the dining hall. He also loved to party. For Spring Fling, he installed an inflatable pool in his single room and filled it with a hose connected to his sink and invited friends to sit in the pool and drink beer. Unfortunately, he lived directly above our RA, and when water started dripping into her room through the ceiling, the pool had to be deflated. He became a ubiquitous presence at my school’s parties—frat parties, underground parties, cocktail parties. You name it, Phil was there. Years later, I was out one night wit
h him and a few other friends, and the conversation turned to how Phil hit on women. “If I’m at a bar, maybe I’ll talk to twenty women in a night, okay?” he said. “Nineteen of them will blow me off, but there’s usually one who I’ll hook up with.”

  “What?” I said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, laid out so starkly like this.

  He laughed and said, “It’s really just a numbers game.”

  I was horrified by this on a few levels: by the sheer energy required to approach so many people, by the cold-blooded approach to dating, by his view of women as essentially interchangeable, and most of all by the idea of being rejected nineteen times in one night. If I got rejected once in a night it was enough to send me into a self-loathing spiral. But it didn’t seem to faze Phil at all. He didn’t take it personally; he knew he wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but he also knew that the reasons a woman might not want to talk to or hook up with him on any particular night didn’t necessarily have to do with him. Maybe she had a boyfriend, maybe she was tired, maybe she had a crush on someone else, maybe she wasn’t interested in men, maybe he had inadvertently said something that rubbed her the wrong way. It didn’t matter; he didn’t dwell on it. He moved on.

  This felt like an approach to dating that was probably only physically safe for male-identified people to do. Plus, when a woman approaches multiple men in a bar, she’s assumed to be a sex worker and/or “desperate,” but when a guy does it, it’s just guys being guys. Thanks, patriarchy. But when I got to L.A., I realized I didn’t need to try to hit on dozens of men in bars every night. Instead, I allowed myself to stop thinking that every guy I went out with had to have soul mate potential. I could say yes to guys I might not have given a second glance in the past. And besides, maybe I’d had too narrow a definition of the kind of guy I “should” be with: I didn’t necessarily have a visual ideal, but it felt like a deal breaker if a guy misspelled a word on his OkCupid profile, or posted with a fish he’d just caught in one of his photos. Not just because I thought he needed to look “good on paper,” but because I had assumed that I wouldn’t have anything in common with someone who spent his weekends on a river. But maybe my perfect match was hiding behind what seemed to me to be imperfections. Maybe I was supposed to be with a grammatically imperfect fly fisherman!

  Then I remembered I had a friend, Tamara, who had basically done exactly this. After she turned thirty-one, she had gone on thirty-one dates in thirty-one days, and ended up meeting her now-husband on one of these dates. She even wrote a book about it, 31 Dates in 31 Days. Yes, it was a gimmick, but there was something about it that had worked. Maybe there was something to the idea that quantity influences quality. I didn’t want to go on a date every day for thirty-one days, but I did want to start dating a lot more than I had been. Maybe dating a wide variety of guys would help me figure out exactly what I was looking for.

  * * *

  —

  A THING I quickly picked up about living in L.A. is that everyone makes fun of The Secret, the book about the law of attraction, which basically says that you can will things to happen for you by changing your thoughts and “putting things out into the universe.” But even though it’s widely mocked, I started to encounter a lot of people—even other former jaded New Yorkers!—who kind of believed that The Secret was real. Of course, the lessons of The Secret aren’t new. L.A. has a long tradition of religions, cults, and self-help organizations like Scientology, Landmark Forum, and EST that all traffic in the belief that we are in charge of our own destiny and that we have the power to “speak things into reality,” and they are an outgrowth of a uniquely American bootstrap, individualist mentality that is skeptical of little things like, I don’t know, mental health struggles, structural inequality, systemic racism, and the centrifugal economic inequalities of capitalism that just may contribute to some people not becoming gajillionaires by the time they’re twenty-five—or even just having a job that pays the rent. But without even really realizing it, I started picking up on this vocabulary, too.

  “I really want to meet someone,” I told my friend Gabrielle over brunch. I had typically shied away from announcing my intentions so baldly—I had previously thought that it meant you were a sad, desperate, lonely person if you actually articulated that you wanted to meet someone. Now, though, I realized that not only was it okay to be all those things, but also that being single didn’t mean that you were sad, desperate, and lonely, and it was also okay to let people know that you wanted to be in a relationship. I added, “I’m just putting it out into the universe.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “Have you heard of Tinder? It’s a new dating app my friend told me about.” She pulled out her phone. “It started on college campuses, so it’s a lot of really young guys, but it’s still kind of cool.” She opened the app and showed me. “It just shows you guys’ pictures with a short description, and then you swipe left or right on them. Left for no, right for yes. And if they also swipe right on you, then you ‘match’ and you can contact each other.”

  In my online dating life, I’d mostly used OkCupid, which sometimes seemed overly concerned with making exact matches. It had you take surveys that asked questions ranging from “Would you date someone who kept a gun in the house?” to “What is your opinion of sarcasm?” and then based your percentage match with someone on how you’d answered the questions and what you said you were looking for in a partner. The result was that I matched with a lot of guys who were a lot like me: highly educated, often working in media, with the exact same outlook and interests and goals. There was comfort in this, but I was also wary. Was my perfect partner someone I matched with at 99 percent, or was that too similar and I should be looking for a match that was more like, say, 85 percent? It was too easy to become obsessed with these numbers, to think that an algorithm could instantly spit out the perfect partner if you both said you believed that dinosaurs had never existed (to be fair, I didn’t want to date someone who didn’t believe in evolution, but this also felt like a pretty low bar).

  I also felt like OkCupid encouraged people to write long emails, which I found time-consuming and tiring to read and respond to. It’s one thing to be clever and flirty over text with someone you’ve never met, but another to be clever and flirty over a five-hundred-word email with a total stranger. I called these guys pen pals—they weren’t actually interested in going on a date; they just wanted someone to dump all their thoughts and feelings on.

  So Tinder intrigued me, because it eliminated all pretense of trying to match people based on preferences or beliefs or desires. You could tell the app where you were interested in dating people, how old you wanted them to be, and if you had a sex or gender preference. And that was it. The immediacy and the gut instinct appealed to me. I could see how it could be construed as superficial, because so much emphasis was placed on photos. But having been dating online for a while now, I knew that people revealed a lot, intentionally or otherwise, in the photos they chose for their online dating profile. I still didn’t think I was a “guy who is posing with a fish they just caught” lady, but was I a “shirtless guy doing a handstand on Venice Beach” or a “guy in front of a microphone doing stand-up” kind of gal? These were types of guys I hadn’t encountered in New York, where the men were easily categorizable in buckets like finance bro and media nerd. Where did I fit in in this new dating taxonomy? Maybe I wasn’t either a shirtless handstand person or a stand-up comedy person. And also, Tinder didn’t solve the fundamental dating app predicament: What if no one liked me?

  In keeping with my whole new saying-yes-to-everything philosophy, I went out with a very, shall we say, wide range of people, and because I was new in town, I usually deferred to them when it came time to plan our dates. There was the children’s social worker, but there was also an Orthodox Jew who installed AV equipment for a living and liked to go to Vegas with his buddies and hole up in his hotel room on Shabbat with kosher food he’d br
ought from home, and who took me to a secret live acoustic show where Chris Martin was performing. (I think I failed to act suitably impressed by this, because he ghosted me not long after.) There was the guy from Orange County, who seemed uncomfortable the whole dinner and told me that one of the main reasons he liked living in Orange County was there was so much more parking; a newspaper editor I’d met at the BuzzFeed L.A. launch party back in November who never texted me back after going camping in the Sequoia National Forest (he’s alive, I checked); a sweet guy who worked in digital media who took me to an improv show at UCB; a TV writer who knew a bunch of people I knew in New York who took me to a fancy Mexican restaurant; a quiet guy who took me for amazing fish tacos at a restaurant near the airport; a guy who went to a museum exhibit with me at LACMA; a guy who played the piano; an agent who took me for drinks at a hotel in Beverly Hills; a guy who was a good sport about running into some of my friends on a first date; and a guy who hit me up for a job at BuzzFeed after we had a mediocre date at a wine bar near my house. There also was an ex–Orthodox Jew who was a truck driver, and a guy whose brother was a famous actor. I even went out with Marc Anthony’s touring bassist.

  I found that I had to keep two competing thoughts in my head before each date. One was: It’s just a date, it probably won’t go anywhere and that’s fine, just relax and have fun. The other was allowing myself to get excited about the dates: picking out my outfit, doing my hair, making sure my lip gloss wasn’t on my teeth, spritzing just a smidge of Chloe Eau de Parfum on my wrists. (I drew the line at bikini waxes, though. If I ended up sleeping with a date, he was just going to have to be okay with whatever I had going on down there.) And then a funny thing started happening as I was going on all these dates: I started worrying less about whether the guy I was on a date with liked me, and more about whether I liked him. As I went on more and more dates, the stakes for each subsequent date didn’t feel quite so high, and I was able to relax and be myself more. And I was able to recognize when a guy just wasn’t right for me. Maybe The Secret wasn’t anything mystical or magical—maybe it was just the not-so-revolutionary-but-sometimes-impossible concept of knowing yourself well enough to know what you want. (Which, I should add, is different than the old dating cliché that you need to “love yourself first” before anyone else can.)