Authors: van Wallach
Tags: #Relationships, #Humor, #Topic, #Religion, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography
Maybe the Love File reflects my highly literal mindset: if part of my life exists in a tangible, printed form, then it really did happen. The quip of late
New York
Times
columnist James Reston describes me perfectly: “How do I know what I think until I read what I write?” I never did trust my memory, hence my reliance on a camera, a journal, a letter to capture the light of an incandescent moment of high feeling. I don’t want to die having forgotten my memories; rather, I want them to surround and wash over me and testify that, yes, I did all that.
The Love File helped me make sense of the experimentation and turmoil in which I tumbled. The contents remind me that I had relationships and that, however lonely I felt, I had plenty of company in my frustrations on the New York social scene.
Every clipping tells a story about a time and a relationship.
New York
magazine’s “Single Forever?” issue, from the summer of 1984, turbocharged the angst of a woman I was dating who had just turned thirty. I observed how her life played out, as she soon married and moved to Long Island. Endless iterations of the man shortage coldly amused me, as I faced the more relevant woman shortage. One favorite was “Older Women are Pooling Their Male Resources,” from the
New York Times
of Feb. 5, 1986. Even the
Village Voice
chimed in with a round-up of books in February 1986, with the story, “The Mensch Shortage: Or, What Do Women Want?”
In those pre-digital days, most Love File items came from newspapers and magazines. I didn’t save copies of the letters I wrote to
New York
and
Village Voice
ads. Personal items include a stack of birthday and Valentine’s Day cards and scrumptious morning-after notes tied in twine in the Love File Annex. I’ve got the wedding announcement, sent by my mother, of a woman I dated in the Bicentennial summer of 1976.
An envelope holds photos of women I dated, with names like Shulamith, Adina, Joanne and Amy. I threw in an item I submitted to the
New York Times’
“Metropolitan Diary” that was never published, as well as a letter I wrote to relationship columnist Susan Dietz. I pushed the file’s contents back to July 22, 1976 with a photo I took of a high school friend competing in a beauty contest.
The Love File swelled between 1986 and 1988 as I approached and then passed my thirtieth birthday. I saved a profile of actress-director Melanie Mayron, who battled Amy Irving in my mind for the title of Sexiest Jewish Woman Alive. AIDS and condoms articles appeared, as men and women negotiated terrifying new realities. Parenting articles such as “Older Parents’ Child: Growing Up Special,” from the
New York Times
of January 26, 1987, became relevant as I gamely looked ahead to marriage and fatherhood while approaching my thirtieth birthday.
Then I found the woman I would marry, and the collecting mostly stopped. Why clip those angst-wracked articles, when I had my
beshert
(Yiddish for “intended one”) with me daily, nightly? Some final articles dribbled into the Love File as the ’80s became the ’90s. Whatever was published in the next decade passed me by. Marriage freed me from the need to worry about how the trends of single life warped my life. I was looking no more.
Alas, the Love File commented on my married life as it unfolded, refolded and fell apart. I clipped Dear Abby’s column on “Ten Commandments for a Successful Marriage” from the
New York Post
on Valentine’s Day, 1992. I prayed it would work like a rabbit’s foot, a four-leaf clover, or a rattlesnake’s tail, with lessons to help us in a marriage beset by crises. For years I carried it in my wallet, until it became so worn I transferred it to a binder that holds insurance policies, my birth certificate, my passport and other important papers.
I edged into dating several months after I moved out of the house in late 2002. I found that the dating game had changed drastically while I was married. Forget personal ads in the back of magazines; online dating sites had taken over. This paperless virtual world challenged my notion of the Love File. My drive to document remained strong. However, I would no longer clip ads from the Personals section of
New York
magazine, paste them in a journal and note the day when a woman responded, a process that took weeks. By the time a woman called, I could barely remember what her four-line profile said.
Online profiles gave far more information and even pictures, but they only existed on my computer screen. Our emails and chats flashed like lightning; they were there and then gone unless a site saved them. While Match deleted emails after a month, I did get an emailed copy of each one, which of course I always kept. JDate stored all messages indefinitely, so I could sort emails from special women into their very own folders so I could either delight or brood over them any time I wanted, so long as I paid for full access to the site. This was heaven on earth for a scrupulous sorter and sifter of romantic longings.
But I had a problem with JDate: without a paid membership, I had no access to emails. In response, the Love File moved in a radical direction. I began to print out some profiles and emails. Not all of them—I’m not that obsessive-compulsive. I only saved those with visual, psychic or sentimental appeal. The sheer amount of paper soon equaled years of Love File accumulation. Stuffing more materials into that bulging folder made no sense, nor did starting a new manila folder. The solution: I punched holes in the print-outs and slipped the pages into three-ring binders.
The initial, physically limited Love File has evolved into the open-ended Love File 2.0.
The binders recreate in print the digital reality of my dating days, with profiles and letters. They can trace the rise and crash of relationships from the first tentative “Hi, I connected with your profile on many levels, so that tells me to write to you ... just write back and we’ll see what happens” through sharing and meeting to my hopeful “I had a great time, let’s do it again soon” notes. The collections can be painful to read in retrospect, knowing how some encounters ended—with messages such as, “I know how you hate long silences.”
My Love File folders expanded and provided raw material for this book. The stack grew to rival the heft of the Federal Tax Code. With a printer and enough ink, I could document my dating life to my heart’s delight. An insightful therapist might ask whether the energetic collecting was one more way to put distance between myself and painful emotions. I would reply—yes, and the collection would be useful when I got around to writing a book about online dating.
Once I started dating a woman steadily, I let my site subscriptions lapse and I stopped printing profiles and emails. I did tear out an article from the Valentine’s Day 2011 issue of the Village Voice about the travails of women in New York as a reminder of the hardiness of the literary genre of women’s romantic woes in the big dirty city. Otherwise, the Love File captures a moment in my life, rather than a reflection of my current reality. I hardly ever look at the Love File, much less add to it. As with the time during my marriage, research on the singles life is pointless.
Why read when I can live?
Living in a Connecticut suburb made me GU—geographically undesirable—for many women in New York City. I saw the logic; the train schedule set the rhythm of relationships when I dated there, for I had to calculate the time needed to reach Grand Central and settle in, gritty-eyed, for the late train to Stamford. The only way around that was to not let the date end. And that was a whole ’nother issue.
However, my location took on another meaning when women I knew visited New York. I might be in the suburbs but, compared to the Jewish male situation in some women’s cities, I was right where they wanted me to be. For vacations and Jewish holidays, women cycled through New York and when they did, I could be there.
Over the years, I met a dozen women when they visited New York. One even stayed with me, although our relationship remained as pure as the driven snow, despite some ludicrous expectations on my part, quickly squashed.
One woman I’ll nickname Peaches and I actually had the rarest of confluences—we met in her city and later in New York. We first met on her home territory in one of my most amusing dating stories. I had flown to Atlanta one December for business. My colleagues and I planned to stay for several days, fly back to New York to recover for the weekend, then return to Atlanta to finish the project.
I was already in touch with Peaches and had let her know I would be in Atlanta, where she lived. Given the intense nature of the project—a dawn-to-past-dusk way to make a living, especially on the road—we couldn’t find time to meet. Still, I kept her informed.
Then on Friday a major snowstorm hit New York. My colleagues and I monitored the weather and changed our flight plans to Saturday morning. Sitting in the restaurant at our hotel having a high-calorie waffle breakfast, I saw my options, if not my waistline, shrink. The corporate travel office representative said we could get a flight into New York, but she couldn’t guarantee, because of the weather disruptions, that we’d be able to return to Atlanta. That settled it: we would stay in Atlanta for the weekend.
Back in my room I immediately called Peaches. The weekend loomed. I told her about my situation and the vast vistas of time that suddenly spread before me.
“
Wanna be my date at a bar mitzvah?” she asked. She was attending one in an Atlanta suburb that very evening.
“
Sure!” I said. I would meet her at a suburban temple for the party.
Attending an upscale Southern bar mitzvah hadn’t been on my mind when I packed for Atlanta. I found myself woefully underdressed for the event. Undaunted, I hopped on the local subway system and headed for a mall to upscale my ensemble for the night.
This being Atlanta in the fall, I just happened to stumble upon the highlight of the football season, the big game between Georgia and LSU. Thousands of fans in their respective colors crowded the streets, good-naturedly ribbing one another. The scene on the MARTA was like a middle-aged version of
West Side Story
, with Bulldogs and Cajuns as understudies for the Sharks and the Jets.
At the mall I nosed around and settled on a black sweater. It would, at least, cover me up and provide some warmth. Back at the hotel, I found the football game had ended, in LSU’s favor. I got in a cab, gave the address to the temple and settled in for the quiet ride.
But
quiet
it was not. I got a talkative driver, who learned I was a former journalist and writer. He connected that to a book he had read,
The Case for Christ
, by another novelist who set out to debunk the Gospels and instead found himself believing them. I politely listened to this for about twenty minutes, including a few rounds of driving aimlessly trying to find the temple. We finally arrived, to my relief. I wanted to snap, “Man, I’m past all that. I’ve got a brand new bag now,” but I wisely held my tongue.
I had never met Peaches and had seen only one picture of her. I went into the temple, where crowds already milled about. Where was she? I went outside into the cool—nay, freezing—Georgia night to call my son for his traditional goodnight conversation.
I wasn’t sure what to say through my chattering teeth. My social and dating lives ordinarily stay well apart. Tell him I’m at a bar mitzvah with a stranger who had yet to arrive? I kept the conversation light and not specific. That wasn’t so hard.
I waited inside to keep frostbite from nipping my fingers, toes and nose. Peaches, quite recognizable, arrived and we greeted each other. She was that dating rarity—a woman significantly shorter, enough to make me look tall. We talked and she broke off to mingle with people she knew through her work in the community. The black sweater made me feel anonymous enough. We ate, talked, ate some more. She introduced me to people and I had somebody take photos of us. She said a friend later commented, “Aren’t you a cute couple!”
The delicate matter of what we would do post-party hovered over us. Nobody at the suburban synagogue was heading downtown. As the last people who still lingered at the temple other than the cleaning crew, we finally called a cab for me. I waited, and waited, and waited, calling the company several times on my cell phone to see when they might grace me with their presence.
Finally, after a lonely forty-five minute wait—Peaches had gone home—a cab rolled up and we headed to Atlanta. No Christian driver this time. The new one played Middle Eastern music; I wondered what he thought about a temple pickup, but he didn’t say anything.
The total fares for my night of adventure came to $90. I put every dime of it on my expense report and got reimbursed, no questions asked. A few months later, these expenses would not have been allowed. My night at the temple became a legend among my coworkers.
Years later, Peaches came to New York for several weeks. Now I got to play host. We hadn’t really kept in touch, except for yearly emails, but I still remembered the chilly bar mitzvah so we met twice. The first time was at South Street Seaport for a Latin music evening. Before long we shrugged off the music and found an outdoor restaurant, as windy on that summer day as Atlanta had been cold. We talked and took the subway together until she peeled off at a stop near the apartment where she was staying. We met again for lunch near my office, at my favorite lunch-date hangout, a diner across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Nothing happened, although I wonder if we could have glided into a back-clawing madcap Manhattan escapade. “Seize the day” has never been easy for me to adopt as a romantic philosophy. More like “Wait a couple of days.”