h2>Dating : Dear Single Women of NYC: It’s Not Them, It’s You.
My long stretches of New York City dating — in case you’re tallying, there have been 12 — have included a great deal of folks, short-and long-and mid-term. My longest relationship kept going two years. My most brief — short the coincidental hookups that we as a whole know aren’t “dates” in any way — was some place in the scope of about fourteen days. There have been genuine crazies, similar to the Eastern European individual who broke my window angrily and advised me not to gripe that he’d broken my “screwing window.” There was the Jersey kid who worked in ladies’ satchels; affectionate recollections include him alcoholic vomiting at the Hilton, at that point chuckling insanely, running, and “covering up” our grimy sofa before another person’s entryway down the lobby. There was the super-fruitful corporate honcho with a cardboard box for an end table. The closest companion with whom I had zero sexual fascination. Oneself depicted “bi-waterfront however not in a gay way” fellow who didn’t return home one night since he’d dropped in a grower underneath the Manhattan Bridge. (We kept on dating for at any rate a month after that.)
Their ages have extended from almost 15 years more youthful than me to going on 15 years more seasoned. There were Peter Pan Syndrome–beset man-youngsters, undeniable grown-up guys with zero want to grow up, perhaps ever. There were alcoholics and medication addicts and possibly once a nondrinker. There were Christians and skeptics and Jews. There was a clammer from Cape Cod — a genuine, live clammer, with his own one of a kind waders. There was a man who shaved everything . . . down there . . . each and every day. There was the running Argentinean just around for seven days; the Ronkonkoma store specialist scarcely mature enough to drink; the ambushed I-broker who came over consistently just to drop on my sofa. Furthermore, I can’t overlook the “absolutely qualified” magazine manager who moved to suburbia while we were dating, persuaded me to take a transport to visit him, flaunted his two-story block house with stone kitchen counters and a real lawn, as though realizing it was actually what I yearned for — and afterward speedily wedded another person. There were men who have dropped me on my head, actually and allegorically. I could give you wounds.
Eventually, I shouted at practically these men for not being “what I needed,” and, as we as a whole do, went to my female companions for relief and backing. “He doesn’t merit you,” they would state, my own Greek melody. “You’re such a great amount of superior to him.” Then, unavoidably: “For what reason are New York men such butt nuggets?”
In case you’re a solitary, hetero lady of a particular age living in New York City, you’ve clearly heard some adaptation of the regret a greater number of times than you can tally: “There are nothing but bad single men living in New York City! They’re all gay or taken!” It’s trailed by different stories of hardship with respect to “commonplace NYC jerks” and the indecencies they have exacted after stunning, upstanding, alluring, clever, powerful New York City ladies who are such a great amount of better than the men they date.
You’ve likely met in excess of a couple stylishly, will we say, “lopsided” couples, in which the man is short, chubby, uncovered — or distractingly hirsute — with one of those pudding faces just a mother (or gold-digger) could adore. He’s unthinkably rich, and his woman companion could demonstrate professionally, and potentially does. Additionally, he undermines her. Just in New York!
Furthermore, you’ve most likely heard, and possibly retold, the advanced relationship people story of that companion of a companion who, after “fruitlessly” dating in New York for quite a long time, met her stunning spouse while living or traveling in Austin, or Boston, or Paris, or Rio, and afterward brought him back — or moved there herself. Since, you know, you can’t locate an average man in this city. It’s outlandish. The individuals who do it are the exemption, not the standard. Ask anybody.
Possibly saying and hearing this causes single ladies to feel better. It authorizes the conviction that there is such a mind-bending concept as a “predicament” of the single woman, and that ladies can’t be accused for our absence of accomplishment in the New York City relationship game. It’s them, not us.
The issue is, it’s obviously false. More regrettable, it’s a cop-out.
New York City, to be reasonable, languishes a lot of issues over the female dater. There are a greater number of ladies than men, which everybody wants to lament as the cool, hard foundation of this present city’s relationship challenges. As per insights gathered by Richard Florida, creator of The Great Reset and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, single ladies at present dwarf single men in New York by 149,219. This depends on information from the U.S. Enumeration, which, it bears referencing, doesn’t request to distinguish sexual direction. The uplifting news: This number has really diminished from 2008’s lady excess of 210,000, a hole that caused Lysandra Ohrstrom, composing for the Observer, to release the dismal announcement that “keen, accomplished ladies planning to discover a mate and settle down are in a tough situation.”
In the interim, our fine city was as of late positioned the best position for single men to locate a willing woman to kiss, and whatever else, on New Year’s Eve, as per more numbers from Mr. Florida. We were named number one of 2010’s best 29 urban areas for fellows to live in: a/k/a “heaven for men,” as per needless macho site AskMen.com. Luisita Lopez Torregrosa, writing in Politics Daily, called the proportion of men to ladies “scarily for men,” and prompted women to “go West — San Diego, Dallas, and Seattle. It’s the place the young men are.”
As Tamsen Fadal, relationship master and the female individual from “America’s just spouse wife matchmaking group” let us know, “New York resembles a sweets store to men. In the event that they think, ‘This present young lady’s not giving me what I need, or pushing things excessively fast,’ they discover another person. It’s an unlevel battleground.”
Obviously, love is innately not a level battleground — its territory is rough, unfamiliar, totally unreasonable. The lovely, the savvy, the fruitful, and the youthful will pull in more than their allocation of admirers, while the terrible, the urgent, the “excessively old,” and the socially unsuitable out of the blue are simply not going to have similar dating openings. In case you’re a stalwart confident person, perhaps you accept that there’s somebody for everybody, except there are unmistakably more somebodies for a few, male or female.
In case you’re a solitary man who has moved to New York City, odds are it has to do with being acceptable — even the best — at something. Henceforth the obsessive workers, status-aholics, power-aholics, and whatever else desire breeds. Then, the roads are copious with always appealing ladies. In the midst of all that, there is a feeling of unending youth, a fighting off of the features of adulthood — like “settling down and getting hitched” — far into our 30s and even 40s on the grounds that, to be perfectly honest, we can pull off it. Furthermore, there’s such a great amount to do! Why get hitched when you’re having a great time? As one man conceded, “Folks in New York have unreasonable norms for what their lives ought to be.”
However, it’s not really reasonable for state that New York City ladies haven’t come here for much similar reasons that men have, or that they don’t have comparatively unreasonable desires. “I think there are a few distinct issues in New York,” says Fadal. “Individuals who live in New York are effective in their field or need to be. We’re not somewhere where such a large amount within recent memory is given to connections. We at that point understand our years kind of passed by.”
This is valid for us all, people. However some way or another, helped along by romantic comedies and self improvement guides and chick lit, eventually we figure out how to disregard the basic actuality that there are two individuals in each relationship, and that the two of them contribute to whether it succeeds or falls flat. Furthermore, something different: that the achievement or disappointment of most connections can, in the event that we take a gander at them with open eyes, presumably be anticipated from the earliest starting point dependent on some basic markers.
Take an “idea” like “He’s Just Not That Into You,” which puts fault decisively on the man’s shoulders. How liberating: He is simply not that into you! However, when did we lose the ability to be as “Just Not That Into You” as the men? In case we’re to anticipate a general public where people are really viewed as equivalents, ladies need to acknowledge their part of the duty, and the fault.
Here’s the arrangement, ladies of New York City: The supposed predicament of the single woman? It’s not about him. It’s about you.
A few years back, having lived in New York City since moving on from school, I was visiting my folks for Thanksgiving. A more seasoned male neighbor who had been welcome to supper took one gander at me over the table and said to my mom, “She’s single? She’s lovely. What’s going on with her?”
You can likely envision the irate reaction that followed, in which I (and my mother) safeguarded my decision not to be hitched and not be dating anybody at the mature time of, state, 26, since it’s New York and that is how the children get things done there, and in addition to I’d quite recently said a final farewell to somebody, and why should you disclose to me I should as of now be combined off and rearranged down the walkway for an existence of repetitiveness and home life at any rate, old neighbor man?
However, the inquiry hit home on the grounds that there was truth to it. There was (and still is) a major issue with me. Also, it’s something very similar that is “off-base” with basically each and every lady in New York griping she can’t locate a not too bad man, or who has maybe even surrendered in quest for her own proceeded with dramatization and small beguilements with the sort of folks she’d never need to settle down with at any rate (more secure that way): We don’t have the foggiest idea what we need. Thus we need a smidgen of everything, again and again.
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Auntie Mame said famously that “Life is a banquet, and most poor bastards are starving to death!” But those poor bastards don’t live in New York City, where the banquet is 24 hours a day and everybody wants a piece of everybody else, if just for a little amuse-bouche. We’re free and “grown up” and independent; we can do what we want, sexually and otherwise. Which is part of the problem, if you’re going to call it that.
When asked what he thought about the “plight of the single lady” — and women who blame men for the state of dating in the city, a single New Yorker in his twenties admitted, “I see where they’re coming from, but, in a lot of ways, they bring it upon themselves. I think if girls were more withholding, boys would be more likely to commit, but because boys can get most of what they want without having to commit, they do. That implies that all boys want is to hook up, which I don’t think is true, but I think that is a lot of it. That’s why when a girl says, ‘Oh, sure, we can hook up and I won’t be weird about it,’ they end up yelling at you a week later.”
For every loser I’ve screamed at, there have been nice, normal single guys with perfectly acceptable ZIP codes and ages and jobs and habits who never did a thing wrong but for some reason were chucked after the first or second, or maybe even third, date for being boring, predictable, too nice, too normal, not successful enough, or . . . admitted to no one, perhaps not even myself: too available. The scariest of scary words.
If you’re like me (and I think a lot of us are), you might say you can’t stand drama and that all you want is a nice, stable relationship with someone who loves and treats you well, but “nice” and “stable” have hardly the appeal of words like “exciting” or “passionate” or, well, “drama.” Our status as single, independent, financially solvent New York City women in the year 2011 has us sitting on a mountain of unprecedented options. Options: Those are exciting. So we want all the options, bigger and better and faster and shinier, or taller or sexier or stronger or smarter, and yet somehow also different and completely our own. We want the tippy-top of what we can get — why shouldn’t we? And we want to push those boundaries.
That, to a large extent, is why we live here. It’s not because we wanted to settle down with the patient and reliable plod-along schmo, and have babies and live in a three-bedroom house with a two-car garage where we peaceably grill in the summer and make casseroles in winter until we die. It’s not because we wanted our lives charted out before we lived them.
My high school boyfriend was probably the best man I’ve ever dated. One time, for no reason whatsoever, he printed out a dictionary definition of “beautiful,” circled the word, drew an arrow to it, and wrote “THIS IS YOU.” He left it for me somewhere I would find it, as a surprise. He told me he loved me. But at the end of high school, when I knew I was going away to bigger, brighter things while he stayed in town and continued at the local community college, I tried to dump him over and over again, eventually making out with a random guy in a band on high school graduation night and telling the would-be ex about it the next day. The ex has a little boy, a dog, and a wife now; I don’t even own a cat. But I have options! I wanted them then; I still want them now.
Yet these never-ending options wreak havoc with us, as does the idea that we can dally with each of them without ever deciding on any and just hope it will all fall where it may — that someday our prince will come, and he better be fucking good. As a married friend mused, “Holding out for everything we want — maybe it’s a delusional expectation. Maybe it’s more about self-reflection, an exercise in goals. It’s more you-centered soul-searching than about the guy, necessarily. In most relationships, there’s a huge, huge focus on timing. A lot of it is just a matter of reaching the point where you’ve figured out what you want.”
Florida, the man behind those male-female NYC dating stats, writes on his website that “one reason ladies in the prime marriage years flock to big cities is to compete for the most eligible men,” and intelligent women who gravitate to “vibrant cities are more likely to stay single — for longer, at least — because they rightly refuse to settle for someone who can’t keep up with them intellectually or otherwise.”
“Rightly refusing to settle,” especially for someone who’s boring, otherwise uninspired, or just a bad choice, sounds pretty good — even empowering. Somewhere along the way, “settling” became a dirty word, evoking visceral reactions of distaste and even disgust, particularly for the strivers among us. Take the negative reactions to Lori Gottlieb’s book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, which suggests that women who are still single after 35 are just too damn picky.
But I’d argue that it’s not about being picky. It’s about having all of these options, and not knowing how to choose from among them, or whether we even want to. It’s about the years of being told we can have it all, and suddenly being deeply afraid to admit that that house of cards has been a sham all along because no one really gets to have it all. (And so, the self-professed adamantly anti-marriage Elizabeth Gilbert — who ate, prayed, and loved her options into a bestseller and a Julia Roberts movie — ultimately “caved” to marrying her foreign-born partner so that he could live in the U.S.)
Everyone has to make choices. This isn’t to say that if you want a successful career and to be a wife and a mom, you can’t do it. Nor that you can’t do it fairly well. But inevitably, you’ll have to give up one thing for something else. Why should you settle? Because that’s what all humans do when they make choices.
If Carrie Bradshaw were here and an actual person, she would say, “But what about the ‘za-za-zoo’?” And after berating her for that corny terminology, I’d grudgingly agree that, yes, there needs to be something — call it magic, or a spark, or a connection — with regard to our romantic relationships. But the magic pales in comparison to the simplest, and yet most difficult, of things. Knowing what you want. It’s timing, but it’s more than that, because you dictate your own timing. You hold the cards.
If Carrie had wanted marriage and kids back in Season 4, she would have stuck with Aidan. Instead, she got panicked and neurotic and self-destructive and Carrie Bradshaw–esque, and started to have an affair with Big, who was clearly (until the unbelievable ending of the series) never going to marry her. Why do that to yourself? Because you aren’t quite sure you want to get married, either. Because the grass is ever so mysteriously greener in the yard (does he even have a yard?) of the guy who doesn’t want to marry you. And because it makes for good drama, or, at the very least, tragicomedy.
Still, at the end of the movie, or the TV series, everything gets wrapped up neatly and tied with a Tiffany-box bow. In the film version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly is eventually tamed by the love of a good man who has been there all along. In Working Girl, the girl gets her career-with-corner-office and Harrison Ford to pack her lunchbox. In The Apartment, Shirley MacLaine’s character attempts suicide on account of Mr. Wrong, but in surviving finds her Mr. Right. Harry and Sally run through the relationship ropes course as enemies, friends, lovers, and enemies again, only to end up an old married couple. As do, of course, Carrie and Big. It all just seems to unfold, without anybody doing too much soul-searching or goal-plotting, much like a movie. A movie set in New York! This is what we’re supposed to want.
People who have been married will tell you that it’s not all butterflies and lying in the grass together clutching hands. It’s actually work — not magic, and not the movies. Which means the dream we expect for ourselves drastically needs to be tempered with a dash of reality, a dose of self-reflection. As a thirtysomething New York woman said, “Ultimately, marriage has more to do with knowing what you’re looking for. Sure, there are a lot of guys out there that suck, but I don’t think that’s a New York–specific issue. There are all of these successful, smart, workaholic women who have their shit together and strong views and senses of who they are. Their expectations are a bit higher. And in New York, there’s not this worry about being the only single person; we all have friends who are married, married with kids, divorced, single.”
