The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth

Last night I had the pleasure of being the only woman at a table of 4 at Haru on Park Ave South. Two of the men were single and eyeing everything and anything with xx chromosomes and the other was trying to be as helpful as possible in not only spying targets but offering ideas of entry.

These are two great guys, successful, smart, funny and not unattractive. So why did it seem that they were having trouble meeting women? Of course, it’s not easy to approach a woman knowing that rejection may be a very likely outcome. But these guys have every reason to be confident and self-assured and not in a way that makes them creepy.

Yet, they sabotage themselves, by over compensating either on a self deprecating level or a defensive aggression that really only comes from a good place. Their insecurities get the better of them.

But here’s the clincher… as I was on my way to dinner in a cab I looked down to a very tired, sweet, peaceful and momentarily vulnerable 36 year old head on my lap, I was struck by a thought. Women fall in love with a man’s weaknesses not his strengths.

If I look back on every relationship I’ve ever had two things are certain. Yes a man’s strength may attract a woman, his confidence, his character, his "game" if you will….but it’s a man’s weaknesses, vulnerabilities and the shortcomings he is trying to overcome that make us fall.

This is true for two reasons:

1. Women need to feel needed. A man who has no need for the comfort a woman can provide (I'm not talking sex, I mean emotional comfort) is depriving her of exercising her natural care-giving instinct and makes her feel like he’d be just fine without her.

2. A woman needs to feel that she knows her man intimately and that there is a softer side of him that he only feels comfortable sharing with her and her alone. That’s why you’ll find so many women in relationships with “assholes”. I promise you, he may come across as a dick to most people who meet him, but he’d probably lay down in traffic for her and she knows it.

That’s pretty powerful stuff. I’ve also learned that the ones that are over confident, crack too many jokes, and need to be the center of attention definitely are good at attracting the opposite sex but rarely make the best long term partners. Usually, they are too insecure, and self centered to make anyone else a priority.

Last year after attending a dinner party my mom called me and said, you know what, geeks make the best husbands. She wasn’t talking about my dad, though she thinks no one compares to him. He also is the coolest and a Clooney clone. She was talking about her group of women friends all married to Dr.s of one kind or another, medical, scientific geeks who probably had their heads buried in books during high school while the others experimented with drugs and sex and worried about being popular. She was probably right. “Cool” didn’t necessarily keep well when not refrigerated after being opened.

Today my mom told me about a friend’s brother who was leaving his wife after 20 plus years of marriage and putting 2 kids through college. He just wants to be free she said. His sister is devastated, she and her husband love the sister in-law so much and hurt for her.

"He always looked like an asshole," she said. I guess if it looks like an asshole and acts like an asshole, then guess what...it’s an asshole.

But back to the topic at hand. I’m going to boldly suggest that there is nothing wrong with the way these guys are approaching girls. There’s probably something wrong with the girls they’re approaching. You can read The Game and other PUA Straussian self help guides and though they may help you with an in, they can’t help you have staying power. When 2 people click, they click whether you’ve got game or not. And if you’re bumbling and fumbling and tell her she makes you nervous because you think she’s pretty and you’re a bit shy and she responds well, then guess what…She’s probably just the kind of girl you’re looking for.

Dangerously Romantic

A good friend of mine recently likened me to how someone once described a much younger Carly Simon…Dangerously Romantic.

What could be so dangerous about romance? A lot. I’m a huge fan so let’s get that out of the way right now.

I used to live off of romance like it was a drug. My first relationship with my college boyfriend, who went to another college, ended as a an 8 year romantic rollercoaster of passionate weekends together, airport greetings and goodbyes, and wonderfully long phone conversations just before bed. I could have gone on like that forever. It was passionate to say the least but for every emotion, there is an equal and opposite emotion that comes into play and we had that too. It was a relationship of fantastically high, highs and fabulously low, lows. It was indeed dangerous. Not only while it was going on but the memory of that taunts you as you try to move on to other relationships that may have less to be desired in the smoke and mirrors category but a lot to thankful for in the areas that count…the hem...err…practical ones. But it takes a long time for an addict to forget the taste/effect of a drug, to forget the hold it had on you and how good it actually makes you feel. Romance is no different than any other substance-all well and fine in moderation but if you’re an addict…you’re an addict.

But in watching my parents who have had their ups and downs, as expected in all relationships, and in my own personal recent experiences with a fabulous guy, I've come to realize that real romance comes after...after the flowers have died and the chocolates have been eaten with the calories having taken permanent residence on your thighs; that it is in a simple holding of the hand, preparing someone breakfast, making sure his/her needs are met. That’s romance.

I’d have to say this is the most "unromantic" relationship I’ve been in and holds the most promise. He’s got all the qualities: character, integrity, honesty, genuineness and a whole hell of a lot of smarts. He’s also self aware, easy to talk to and most importantly…there for me. So what’s the problem? He’s not a romantic. But I am learning. I have learned to see what is there, not what’s not there. Actually, thanks to Steve Harvey for writing Act Like a Lady Think Like a Man. I read it one night when I had worked myself up into a real anger over something rather insignificant. A text that read “dinner tonight? Are you still up for it?”

What? Was I still up for it? Was He not???? To me, dinner had been set days ago. There should have been no question mark whatsoever, unless it was at the end of “where do you want to go to dinner?

Also the lack of I’m looking forward to dinner, haven’t seen you in a few days remained irksome to me. I was about to blow my top and certainly the call to a girl friend saying...”I think I just did something bad” as I explained my response to his text was, “I’m not sure. You?” didn’t help calm me down. Also, I got a “haha” back. He had no clue that there could be good reason for my being upset which on the one hand made it hard to be upset with him and on the other hand made it so much more satisfying.

So with an hour plus to spare before the meeting I made my way to the Borders at Time Warner Center and read the book that my mom had told me to read months ago after seeing Steve Harvey on Oprah. As usual, mom was right. Steve had some pretty good insights that actually readjusted my crazy before dinner and made me realize that I was very much loved by this man who simply wasn’t as romantic as I would have liked but who loved me deeply just the same. And I realized if I looked at the other things that were there and not the romance I believed to be missing, I might see that romance is offered in a whole host of ways.

That’s not to say that when I came to his apt the other day and asked about the two orchid plants that hadn’t been there earlier that morning and he explained that there were a whole bunch of flowers (including roses- yes he mentioned there were roses) and plants left on a corner in the neighborhood and he brought these back, and there were no “flowers” for me, I was secretly a little upset, maybe even a lot. So I tried to cover it up but still get to the heart of the matter by saying “you couldn’t carry more than this back”? He simply answered, “Well I wanted to leave some for other people.” I just thought, a good guy, I really do have a good guy and he’s thoughtful too.

The Modern Day Love Letter

Texting is the modern day love letter but how are you supposed to keep them? I have a tin of letters from my first love. Countless professions of love, one more tortured and true than the other.

I have, on the rare occasions that I’ve found myself in the 3rd floor storage room of my parent's house, opened up the tin to rifle through a few letters that span an 8 year push and pull long distance romance. All the other relationships since have relied on email to send messages of love, and the random notes attached to flower deliveries. At least you can keep emails though there is no evidence of a tear stain the smell of cologne or dare I even say DNA left behind from sealing the envelope shut, but fine, there's a record...you were loved by someone and you have a time and date stamped document to prove it.

So now, as new relationships and flirtations arise texting seems to be the new mode of communication, which not only doesn't keep well for posterity but offers limited space in which to profess. I hope that’s no correlation to the space one holds in someone else's heart.

The old jr high note that may have been passed to you by the first guy to scribble “will you go with me?” on a scrap piece of paper is now replaced with a text questioning whether or not your dynamic is destined to remain a friendship. Trust me, the latter is not without it's charm but there's no cyber texting tin in which to keep it for future reference. You must be sure you don't delete it and scroll through the myriad of crap that your phone is now capable of storing and sift through it every time you want to tell your friends exactly what he said, what witty retort you had and exactly how many minutes it took him to respond with something which clearly indicated he didn't get the humor through the allotted character space you were given. Plus, things like hope to see you soon even lose the little spark they were intended to create when written as hope 2 c u soon.

Someone please bring back good old-fashioned pen and paper. Think of it, whole generations that have never put a stamp on anything in their lives and we wonder why the post office is cutting back it's hours. Plus, no generation has gotten to the stage in life when they're looking back on all the technostalgia and have to show their grandkids their emailed love letters and the love text conversations they transcribed to a word document for safekeeping.

I'm so glad to have 8 years of love letters in storage. I think I'll sign different names on all of them. By the time I'm old enough to go back and look, I'm sure I'll have forgotten who they're from anyway.

I Want The Guy Who's Going To Give Me His Umbrella

Years ago when catching up with a high school friend while we were both home on a college break, she asked me to explain how I knew I was in love with my then boyfriend, the 8 year passionate roller coaster I wrote about in the previous post. We were crazy about each other back then. Looking back now, I think we were both just crazy. I told her I just knew I'd be happy in a field picking berries with him. Why I used that example I have no idea considering picking berries is not an activity I would normally take pleasure in. A few years later when we both ended up living in NYC we reconnected. She told me she used my picking berries idea as a benchmark for how much she liked someone. I felt honored. I had offered her a love litmus test.

It's been a while since I've thought about picking berries with anyone, a long time.

I believe, though it's getting harder to do so, that there is one perfect person out there for you. If I'm wrong, I'll settle for someone who'll at least offer me his umbrella when it's raining.

My Life's Not Over

The last thing I ever wanted to be was conventional; not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just not for me. I am however a romantic. I just spent the evening with 3 generation of couples. I'm in Pittsburgh for the christening of my childhood best friend's first child. Around the dinner table were my friend and her husband, her in-laws and her aunt and uncle. I heard the most wonderful stories of how these couples ended up together. The In-laws: Helen was still in college and Art had gone away to law school. Their relationship had been over for quite some time. Somehow, Helen ended up in the infirmary, surely sick but misdiagnosed with dysentery. Perhaps that's what lead to her entering the nursing field, but I digress. She was there, in bed, with "dysentery" and out of the blue, in walks Art.

"All I could do was put the sheet over my head! “Remember when you came to the infirmary?” Helen reminds Art as she puts her hand on his shoulder. He smiles and makes a joke of how he had come back to the college to see another girlfriend. “You lie,” answers Helen with all the assurance of a woman who knows she's loved or at least was in that moment.

The Aunt and Uncle: Rogie and her family came to the US from Hungary during WWII and ended up in Cleveland. On a trip to Hamilton Canada to go to a friend's wedding, she fell in love with the best man. And so their romance started over the telephone wires. He called her every Sunday. He wanted to marry her but, a modern woman before her time, she said, "why don't we get to know each other better first." She was so modern in fact that she even got to go visit him in Canada... on her own. Remember a road trip back then from Cleveland to Hamilton took about 10 hours, now it takes 7 thanks to modern highways! Her father wasn't that thrilled, but he let her go. “You're going to marry him?” he asked disapprovingly. Rogie's family waited 6 years to leave Hungary to come to the US and now, after all that, she's going to live in Canada! 60 yrs later, the answer is still Yes!

And then there's my friend's story. Her brother and her husband's brother were freshman year college roommates and the families happened to live close to one another. So Vicki needed a prom date and well one brother asked the other brother if his younger brother would want to take his sister. Read that again if you need too.

“What about you?” Art asks me. “I have a broken engagement on my resume,” I answer. “Broken by my doing.” I feel the need to add. “And I broke up with someone in January- again by my doing.” Helen interjects, “I find it's always for the best when that happens.” She's right and I explain that out of all the men in my past (I realize the line sounds like there were many but there weren't, they just all lasted a long time) my fiancé is the one I rarely ever think about in a should've would've could've sort of way. Maybe because it’s the one that got the closest to fruition, maybe because it was evident to most people living in the real world, besides myself of course, that it was doomed from the beginning. Those are the only answers I have for the unanswerable.

Back at the house Vicki pulls out a photo album, a “How I Met Your Mother” photo album a la Ted Mosby- This Album was full of photos, mostly from 1952 when her father, George, met her mother, Ida. To say Ida was a looker is a grave understatement. Rogie commented on how on any street corner on any given day when she and Ida were walking around Cleveland the men would roll down their windows to get a better look at her. And if they had the courage, they'd actually say something.

George, after much persuasion, won her heart. This album was full of black and white photos of the two of them in their best clothes on what would be a normal Sunday where today we'd feel over dressed in anything other than jeans. I wonder if modernity has really bettered us at this point. Beneath each photo is a caption in his neatest handwriting saying things like “I don't know about you but I find her to be tres jolie.” We reminisced about how George was indeed such a romantic, how in love with Ida he was from the moment he saw her until his last breath. I feel like they and their love are immortalized in those photos that are so old they fall out of the album as you turn the pages because the glue has worn off.

Even my own parents broke up for 3 years and then found themselves bumping into one another as my mom was on her way back from the beach and my father was back in town from medical school. He asked her to have dinner with him that night and when he left, my mom turned to her friend and told her “I'm not going to the movies with you anymore, I have to get my hair done.”

As much as I don't want a conventional life, I seem to find everything about life in a time when convention was revered and Donna reed reigned to be so ideal. Photos from the 50's look better than photos from today, women dressed better, women dressed period; and things seemed mapped out. You went to school and you got married. I know that it wasn't all wine and roses, those days are certainly not long. But what strikes me is what the thought of those days and those stories evoke. Does Serendipity come close to the romance in Casablanca? I love serendipity don't get me wrong. It's just a feeling that somehow, as we've become more modern we've lost our charm.

Love is elusive. I think you're either lucky enough to find it and hold on to it or you're forever trying to find "the one" as you string one relationship after another around the cord you eventually wrap too tightly around your own neck.

I was recently at a wedding of a friend in NYC. It was a small wedding at the courthouse that preceded their official ceremony with family in Mexico. A small group of us were in attendance, 7 guests to be exact. While you could assume that there were seven individuals all random good friends, you'd be wrong and well, I'd have nothing to write about. Indeed, there were 3 couples and...me. When someone joked about tossing the bouquet it was graciously pointed out that she should just give it to me since I was the only single one there. A fact that I didn't really take note of until the comment was made.

So I wondered, how did all these couples know...know that the other person whose name they took or whose in-laws they agreed to suffer was the one.

One person from the wedding party, whose parents oddly enough were also from Hungary, told the story of how her mother and father met. Her mother was riding a cable car and saw him, her hero- a filmmaker whose films she adored. She jumped out of the cable car, professed her love and said, "Do with me what you will." He had only one question for her, “Will you move to NYC?” Later that day, in her black leather mini skirt, they got married. They divorced after 25 years. But I don't think the one means you're going to be happy with them, I believe the one means, they're the one-and this is where for better or worse comes in-barring any kind of abuse of course.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the one, how you know, if there even is a one to begin with. My ex-the one that lives a block away-asked me if my first love, an 8 year long-distance passionate roller coaster of a relationship filled with one major car wreck, outrageously high telephone bills, airport greetings and inseparable weekends and a refused marriage proposal, was the love of my life. I, being quick-witted and hopefully skilled in the art of flirting replied, “Well...my life's not over...I sure hope not.”

In a time where finding the one seems even more unlikely than winning the lottery I think I should have answered yes.

For someone who wants so much to be unconventional, it seems that all I really want is an unconventional love that so many people seem to have, making it ironically-conventional. Then again, my life’s not over.