Deliberate Dating - Part One

This is part one of a multi-part series about dating. I dated for 15 years, from the time I was widowed at the age of 39 until my recent remarriage. After going on what seems like 100 first dates, and suffering through the ups and downs of trying to find love I developed a system to make it easier on myself. These days, I'm a married lady again and I talk to single women who may be finding dating as exhausting as I did.

Why I had to date again

In January 2008 I was a very ordinary person. I was living in Cleveland, married to an engineer. He was 45 years old and I was 39 year sold. We lived in an old Victorian house in the older part of town and spent our days doing ordinary things like renovating the house, going to work every day and enjoying the antics of our three cats.

All of that changed in August of 2008. Dave was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia.

You’ll have to forgive me, but since this talk isn’t about Dave’s illness I’m going to tell you a shocking story in a few sentences, rather than leading up to it and softening the blow. I know this is the first time you’re hearing about it and that people are often shocked if I don’t tell it gently, but I suppose in this case the shock is helpful, if only because Iam going to tell you another shocking (though much happier) story in a few minutes.

Dave was admitted to a local hospital the second week of August that year. He went through a course of chemotherapy, which didn’t work and landed in the ICU with fungal pneumonia by the third week of September. The doctors tried everything, but nothing worked and ultimately he passed away, leaving me a widow.

I’m not complaining or trying to make you feel sorry for me, but I could sum this up as a six-week journey from being an ordinary person to being an extraordinarily unlucky one. That’s how I explain it when someone tells me a loved one has cancer. “Most people get better,” I gently say. “We were just extraordinarily unlucky.”

It’s true. In a world of common and uncommon events, someone has to be the person to experience the uncommon. Someone has to be the person who wins the lottery or gets struck by lightning or loses a healthy spouse before age 50.

In this particular case, those people were me and Dave.

Naturally, that was the catalyst for significant change in my life and my very identity. If you want to hear more about what happened next, I wrote a book about it, but that’s not what this essay is about.

You clicked on the link to read about dating. Presumably, you’ve all tried it and found it to be as mystifying as I have and you’ve come here hoping I can shed some light on it. I believe I can, but first I’d like to explain why I deliberately go around asking people if they’d like me to come talk about something as painful, embarrassing and potentially rewarding as the search for a lifelong partner.

It’s like this… It seems to me that we hear a lot of messages in our day-to-day lives saying that we are somehow insufficient, but not in the way we usually talk about discrimination. I think we could be discriminating against ourselves by believing that our feminine perspective, strengths and desires are somehow inferior to masculine characteristics. Many of us seem to feel threatened all the time by something we can hardly even name. I think it’s because we’ve never been able to believe in the power of the feminine and we act it out by shying away from asserting our femininity in the world.

When I say femininity, I don’t mean frilly dresses and sparkly nails (though I like those too). I’m coming at this from the perspective of a religiously observant Jewish woman and Judaism sees the world as separated into the masculine and the feminine, with certain characteristics belonging to each category. It’s not that men can’t have feminine characteristics or vice versa, it’s that different aspects of God reflect the masculine and feminine.

You’ll find feminine characteristics in Proverbs 31, in the Woman of Valor poem. The Woman of Valor has good judgement. She is diligent, she nurtures the people in her household and her business projects in the world. She cares for people in need. She speaks wisely and kindly. She is industrious and joyful.

She is in no way inferior to her husband. It says, בָּ֣טַח בָּ֖הּלֵ֣ב בַּעְלָ֑הּ וְ֜שָׁלָ֗ל לֹ֣א יֶחְסָֽר “His heart relies on her and he shall lack no fortune.” They are partners with complementary strengths. They and millions of other couples, masculine and feminine, working together all over the world provide a stable foundation, indeed the very bones, of our societies.

Depending on your background, you may never have heard that before and if you never heard before that women, with our particular feminine characteristics, are a critically important part of society then it’s because older women didn’t tell you. I’m sorry about that. We should have told you and I’m telling you now. If you want to get married, if you want to nurture a husband and family that’s a noble and important goal and you should be proud of it. Other people may want to be single and/or childless, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean you have to want that too.

Older women should encourage younger women to value our feminine characteristics and to value what we bring to the table; to value that we do things in our own particular feminine way. I’ve always worked in male-dominated fields and I’ve seen firsthand how one woman in a male-dominated space can transform the whole endeavor for the better.

At this point in my career, I work in the auto industry as an auto broker. I help people, mostly women, buy cars. In that time, I’ve seen how the whole team has learned from my colleague Lauren and I. They've learned how to listen better to what our clients want, and to be more patient, more kind and even more joyful as we find the right car for each client. The men bring the drivenness, the energy and the obsession with technical detail. My colleague Lauren and I complement their strengths and make the usually difficult experience of buying a car fun and fulfilling for our clients.

I didn't always believe this was important. I believed that I could be just like the men, after all, I have energy and drive too, but over time, I realized it wasn't to anyone's benefit for me to ignore the unique strengths I brought to the job ... or to my personal life.

Stay tuned for part two...

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