In fact, there was one final “expert” I had to talk to.
23
A Visit with the Rabbi
The “expert” was my local rabbi.
The more I talked to experts about dating, the more it seemed that part of the problem for single people today was a lack of meaningful connection to their local communities. In the past, when it came to relationship issues, family, neighbors, and spiritual leaders routinely offered commonsense advice to young singles, but now “community wisdom” seemed to come more from reality series, daytime talk shows, and single friends texting with the latest “boy story.”
So I wanted to know: What would a rabbi say about things like passion and compromise and picking the right partner? I called up David Wolpe, the head rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. He’s a hip, fiftyish married guy known for his wisdom, and he’d just been named the number one pulpit rabbi in America by Newsweek magazine. When I told him I wanted his thoughts on relationships, he invited me to stop by his book-lined office for a chat. Here’s what he had to say.
FEELING TOO COMFORTABLE
Me: How important do you think sparks are in a marriage?
Rabbi Wolpe: It’s interesting—a lot of people when they’re dating come to me and say, “I just want someone I can be myself with. Someone I’m completely comfortable with.” But the same thing that you want in marriage, people don’t like in dating. The same comfort and ease also translates into, “You’re too comfortable and easy with me. You don’t try!” So which is it—do you want exciting, or do you want comfortable? What do you want long-term?
Me: What do you think matters most long-term?
RW: The biggest predictor I’ve seen of whether a marriage will work has nothing to do with sparks, but how similar two people’s expectations are. If they have very different expectations in the marriage, or very different upbringings that they haven’t really worked through, it’s going to be a struggle. And I actually think that kindness, long-term, is the most useful—and overlooked—quality people should be looking for.
DATING ROBERT REICH
Me: You’ve seen the list of what I was looking for in a guy. If a forty-one-year-old woman brought you that list, would you say, “This girl is dreaming”?
RW: Mm-hmm! I would say that at thirty-one, too.
Me: At thirty-one?
RW: I would even say it at twenty-one, that much more, because, at twenty-one, you’re going to be really dazzled by stuff that doesn’t matter. You can marry somebody who has lousy taste. Who’s colorblind, who can’t pick a painting out. You could do that and be perfectly happy.
Me: What about physical characteristics?
RW: So, Robert Reich comes along. You’re not going to date him? He’s four feet ten and a half.
Me: I’m flexible on height within reason, but four feet ten? I don’t think I’d be attracted to someone who’s four ten. RW: I understand. But don’t you think someone could change that?
Me: Would you say that to a guy? Would you say, “There’s this woman, and she’s 250 pounds, but she’s really special—is that okay with you?”
RW: I think it works this way. Let’s say there’s a 50 percent chance that you could be with a guy who is five feet nine. That’s a height you like, but it could go either way depending on what else he brings to the table. Now, there’s probably a 5 percent chance that you could be with someone who’s under five-four. But there’s a chance. To immediately assume—I mean, maybe if you spent an hour with Danny DeVito or Robert Reich, all of a sudden you would say, you know what, this is somebody that I actually could spend my life with—even though the height is never going to be ideal. On the other hand, take somebody who is unkind. There’s a one hundred percent chance that you won’t want to be with him. So I’m saying: What are the real irreducibles as opposed to the very unlikelies? And it seems to me the real irreducibles are the character questions. It seems that Danny DeVito’s wife is happy.
MARRIED TO THE MARRIAGE
Me: What do you think single people should think more about when they’re dating?
RW: Well, I think that a marriage is like a construction in the sense that, at a certain point in the marriage, you’re no longer just married to the person, you’re married to the marriage and everything that it means. The children, the past that you share together, the friends that you have—you’re married to the whole thing, so it’s not so much about the individual in a vacuum the way it is when you’re dating. When I look at my wife, for example, I don’t just see my wife. I see my daughter and the life that we built and the friends that we have and the things that we’ve surmounted to get to this moment.
Me: And people who are holding out for exactly the right guy don’t realize this?
RW: When people are dating they don’t know that. I mean, even if they know it in theory, they can’t know it in practice. In the same way that people have all these plans for their kids, but they don’t know what their kids will be like. The fact that we had a girl instead of a boy makes our family a very different family than it would have been if I were to have had a boy. And six months after my daughter was born, my wife had cancer. So we couldn’t have more children. This is all part of what went into making the marriage what it is, and you aren’t thinking about, “Is he tall enough?” or “Is she pretty enough?” so much. In some ways I think all the qualities that seem so important while you’re dating—they get overwhelmed by what happens subsequently if you build a life together.
Me: What do you think of the idea of soul mates?
RW: Soul mates are a beautiful notion to believe in once it happens. But it’s a dangerous thing to believe in before you’ve found the person you’ve decided to spend your life with. In reality, there are many people we could be happy with—it’s just that your soul develops in different ways with different people.
BREAKING UP WITH HIS WIFE
Me: What do you mean you once broke up with your wife?
RW: We broke up once for a brief while, while we were going out. She wasn’t my idea of what a rabbi’s wife was supposed to be like. She ran a horse farm before I met her. But even though I had a preset role in mind, the person overwrote the role. We got back together because she was just the person that I wanted to be with.
Me: What were you looking for?
RW: I think I probably would’ve said I wanted to be with an intellectual. But that’s not who she is. I wanted to be with somebody who loves English literature. That isn’t what she loves, but it doesn’t matter. And because I’m a rabbi, I thought I’d be with somebody who was comfortable in formal settings. For the first few years of our marriage, every time my wife and I had to go somewhere that demanded anything other than jeans, it was angst and struggle. In fact, after I met her mother, she told my wife, “That’s the first man you’ve ever gone out with who didn’t wear Birkenstocks—he wears shoes!”
Me: That’s interesting because the marital researchers I spoke to said that differences might seem cute in the beginning, but ultimately people who are temperamentally similar do better. So why do you think the differences work in your marriage?
RW: We’re not together because of the differences—we’re together because of our similarities. There are deep similarities between my wife and me. We like and dislike the same people—almost a hundred percent of the time. We look at the world largely the same way, politically and religiously. The way we think about raising our daughter is very similar.
So, I would say, though I may not have been aware of it at first, on the deep currents of life we were similar, and on the things that we weren’t similar about, we were moveable. The deep similarities overcame the surface differences and the differences didn’t matter nearly as much as we built a life together. She said, “I encourage you to do your world—are you comfortable going to those dinners by yourself?” And the truth is, it’s perfectly fine for me to go by myself
because I’m busy being the rabbi anyway and I go around to the tables and so on, so we worked that out. Early on, I had this fixed idea of what a rabbi’s wife would be, and over the years it’s changed and become more flexible.
TAKING OUT THE TRASH
Me: What Talmudic wisdom do you give couples right before they’re going to get married?
RW: The most common thing that I say is not Talmudic. It’s actually from early on in my marriage, which is about taking out the trash.
My wife said to me early on, “Will you take out the trash?” And I said to her what I always say when someone asks me to do something, which is, “In a minute.” And I came in a few minutes later, and the trash was already taken out. And I was furious! Because I knew, since this is what my mother does, that she had done it to make me feel bad that I didn’t do it when she asked me. And my wife was shocked that I was angry because she thought she was doing me a favor. But I didn’t believe her for a very long time. This type of thing became an issue between us.
And that’s because many people, I think, have an inability to believe that other people work differently. We don’t realize that you have to learn someone in the way that you learn a subject. You can’t do it only by feeling. You actually have to listen to them and believe them when they tell you how they work. That’s a very counterintuitive thing to do because we all trust our instincts about people, but you really can be very wrong. Your instincts are based on people you know, and this person you’re getting to know is not your mother or your ex-girlfriends or your sister.
So one of the things I tell young couples is that they need to be open to the fact that they will work differently from each other and from the families they grew up in, and that they have to respect that, and listen to that. In dating, people break up over these things and they miss the opportunity to really get to know the other person. They dismiss people without really understanding them—and then they wonder why they can’t meet anyone and why they’re still single.
HOW THIS ALL RELATES TO SHELDON 2
The rabbi was right about not dismissing people without understanding them. On our third date, Sheldon2 wore a bow tie. To a movie. It wasn’t even the same bow tie he’d worn in his online dating photo. This one was a checkered gray and white number. How many of these did he have?
“I guess I should have dressed up more,” I joked when I opened the door and saw the bow tie. He laughed, and told me about his fondness for bow ties, even though he knows it’s unusual. Then he explained how it started.
When Sheldon2 was a little boy, his grandfather always wore bow ties, and his grandpa was his best buddy. One day, he told his grandfather, “When I grow up, I want to be just like you!”
“You want to be a dentist?” his grandfather asked, and Sheldon2 replied, “No, I want to wear a bow tie!” That became a running joke. Twenty years later, after his grandfather died, Sheldon2 inherited all of the bow ties—his grandfather had remembered! So Sheldon2 likes to wear them because they remind him of his beloved grandfather.
I was so charmed by this story that it made me like Sheldon2 even more. And to think I almost didn’t e-mail him because I thought, “What kind of dork wears pink polka-dotted bow ties?”
After I left the rabbi’s office, I felt like I’d done enough asking questions for the time being. Everything I’d been told about relationships over the past several months—from the rabbi, scientists, marriage researchers, dating experts, and matchmakers—I’d seen play out positively not only in my life, but in the lives of women I spoke to.
So while I was off dating Sheldon2, I asked a few of these women to share their own stories.
24
Claire’s Story—Getting Over Myself
Claire was like a lot of women who seem to have everything but the guy. She had no shortage of boyfriends, but couldn’t find the one to spend her life with. Then something changed—her. Here’s Claire:
When I was single, people used to tell me all the time that I was bright and attractive, so I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t find love. I’d always had boyfriends, but in retrospect, they weren’t people I’d want to marry now. I went for very attractive guys. You know, blond hair and blue eyes or your classic dark hair and handsome. I felt good walking down the street with them. My boyfriends were very intelligent, and they made me laugh. I’m an extrovert and I had to be with someone outgoing.
But none of these relationships worked out. One boyfriend drank too much. One was stressed out all the time and didn’t take care of himself. One broke up with me because he said I was too demanding, but I don’t think asking him to be reliable or honest was demanding. The last one didn’t want to have children. When I met him he said he possibly would. I didn’t want to hear the word “possibly.”
I did a lot of Internet dating, but I was particular. I would write guys off immediately if they talked too much, or snorted on the phone when they laughed. I thought, I’m not going to be able to live with this.
When I was growing up, I thought I’d just meet a guy in the supermarket. I’d drop a can of peas and he’d pick it up. We’d live happily ever after. Then you grow up with fantasies like “tall, dark, and handsome,” and that prototype unconsciously stays with you and prevents you from seeing beyond it.
WHAT HE WASN’T
I met my husband, Chris, online, when I was 38 and he was 45. I was looking to get married. I was concerned about having children but interested in meeting the right person. I liked his profile. His pictures were cute, but you can’t really tell what someone looks like from online dating photos.
On my first date with Chris, we met for coffee and we talked for a while and I thought he was very nice. He was somewhat attractive, but it wasn’t like the guys I normally dated. He’s short—he’s 5’8”—and he didn’t have a full head of hair. He wasn’t slick like the guys I usually went for. There was no banter, which I found so sexy with other boyfriends. He’d slip up on a word. He was just so different from the guys I’d been excited by in the past. So I didn’t think, ‘This is the guy I’m going to marry.’ I just thought, ‘He’s a nice guy.’ I guess the only way to describe it is that I felt safe with him. I felt like I could trust him.
So I went on a few dates with him, but afterward I’d call my friends and say he’s too skinny, or he’s not ambitious enough, because he was in the same job for years and he never got a raise. He comes from a small town and is kind of laid-back, and I thought, this is crazy, I’m a city girl. This won’t work. But I liked being with him more than with any other guy. I really fell for him about five months in, and we dated for about a year. But I always had my reservations. On my birthday he came over with balloons, and all I could think when I saw him was that he was too scrawny.
I know that sounds horrible, but I had a job where I was dealing with men who made a lot of money and who had stylish suits on every day. I was surrounded by handsome, successful, charming types, but I’d dated that kind of guy before, and being with Chris felt so different. The day-to-day with Chris was so good—we could have fun in the supermarket together, we’d go kayaking, he was always very respectful. But it wasn’t exciting in the way I thought love had to be. He wasn’t exciting in the way I thought the man I would marry had to be.
There were other things that bothered me. I wondered what was wrong with him if he was still single in his mid-forties. This wasn’t a commitment-phobic guy—he really wanted to get married, but couldn’t seem to. Later I learned that he’d gotten hurt a couple of times by old girlfriends who dumped him and it took him a while to get back on the horse, but at the time, I wondered why I should want to be with him if none of those other women did. Also, personality-wise, I’m on fast pilot and he processes information on a slower speed than I do. But I came to realize that he can say something very profound with fewer words. I loved that he was grounded. There’s something about him that’s very calming, and he’s just a really go
od man.
But still, my attraction to him would come and go. I felt that if I had so many doubts, this wasn’t the right guy for me.
FORTY AND CONFUSED
At 39, I broke up with him. I thought, I’m not going to settle just because my biological clock is ticking. I told Chris this wasn’t working. Then I met a guy who was very handsome. I was so attracted to him—I was blinded by the attraction. He was smooth and knew how to seduce me. He had a great apartment in a doorman building on the Upper West Side. He kind of wowed me. But he decided he didn’t want to have kids and he couldn’t relate to me the way Chris could. Chris won’t join me in argument if I’m starting something. He’ll wait—he knows me so well. Chris wanted to get back together, and we did.
I was 40 then, and lonely and tired of dating. I was confused about why I’d left Chris and I wished I was more physically attracted to him. It’s a very confusing thing when somebody loves you so much and you just aren’t there yet. When I saw him again, he had gained weight and I thought, I’m not attracted to him like that. I used to be turned off by how scrawny he was, and now I was turned off by how heavy he was! But I knew that Chris would do anything for me and I shouldn’t listen to these other parts of me that seemed so superficial. I looked at women older than me who were single and serial dating and I thought, I don’t want to be them.
THE STATUS MAN
For six months, I was still ambivalent and I was looking everywhere for validation. I read books, I asked my friends. I had a friend who was single and not in a relationship, and she’d say, “Are you sure you love him?” She would encourage me to be ambivalent, but I think she just didn’t want to be the last single person in our circle of friends. Misery loves company, right? My friends who are married always said they truly liked Chris. They thought he was kind, down to earth, loving, and grounded.
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