Posted on 01/08/2004 8:37:53 AM PST by Mr. Jeeves
By her own admission, Sara Cambridge was "totally cruising."
She spent hours trolling online dating sites, sending e-mail messages to potential mates and creating "a real connection," which would invariably sour into deep disappointment within the first five minutes of an actual date. At which point she would return to the sites, send more e-mail, make another connection and suffer another snap disappointment.
Finally, there was the left-leaning writer, who took her to a Japanese tea garden and, like so many of the others, seemed so perfect from his resume.
"In the e-mails, he would say, 'Tell me a story,' which I thought was kind of charming," said Cambridge, 38, a graphic designer in San Francisco. "When we got together it was, 'Tell me stories, tell me stories, tell me stories.' I felt like I was auditioning for a play."
That was it.
"I realized I could be starting my own business in the time I was spending looking at these ads and crafting these responses," she said. So instead of going back online, she began taking a class in small-business administration and designing funky planters.
Cambridge's tale is one small act of resistance against what might be called the Dating-Industrial Complex, a mighty fortress increasingly hard to ignore. To Match.com and Nerve.com, add DreamMates, The Right Stuff, eHarmony and eCrush (neither to be confused with Etrade, though the general concept is the same). TurboDate, HurryDate, 8minuteDating - or It's Just Lunch.
Reality television shows - The Bachelorette, Average Joe - have fed the impression that finding the right mate is as simple as being presented with a room of 10 people and picking one. Bookstores bulge: Surrendered Single, Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, Make Every Girl Want You. That is just a sampling from the last year; the next two months will bring one manual promising to lure the love of your life in seven weeks, another in a sleeker six.
"There's a fetishization of coupling," said Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who studies perceptions of singles. "It's made the pressure that's always been there more intense."
Yet like Cambridge, longtime combatants in the dating wars, psychologists and those who study the lives of singles talk about increasing dating fatigue. They say that more and more people are taking dating sabbaticals or declaring they will let romance happen by chance, not commerce. Once-obsessive online daters are logging off, clients of speed-dating services - which offer dozens of encounters in a roomful of strangers - are slowing down. A book due out this month, Quirkyalone, offers "a manifesto for uncompromising romantics" - those not opposed to romance but against the compulsory dating encouraged by the barrage of books, Web sites and matchmaking services.
Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma report that singles are signing up for housewarming and birthday registries, deciding they do not have to wait for a wedding to request the pastamaker and flatware. Smaller stores report single women registering for china patterns and crystal, without ring, proposal or mate.
"I have no doubt that there is a great, committed relationship out there for me," Cambridge said. "I don't identify at all with people who think, 'I'll never find another person.' I just think the best thing to do is pursue my goals, and whatever unfolds will be a new story."
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, the co-director of the National Marriage Project, who relied on a national survey as well as in-depth interviews and dating histories of 60 women for her 2002 book Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman, said this hard-won wisdom is increasingly common. "People are making some kind of private agreement with themselves that they're not going to do this in a panicky, driven way that implicitly buys into the notion that if it doesn't happen to you, you'll be miserable," she said.
The discontent, Whitehead said, is not limited to women. Marc Johnson, 33, describes his late 20s and early 30s as a cycle between looking for dates, planning dates, going on dates or deconstructing dates with friends.
It all began to seem a bit small last year when he returned to New York from a trip to Vietnam, and was greeted by friends hassling him about when he was going to date various women.
"When you're seeing the world and civilizations that are thousands of years old - it seemed so petty to focus on 'meeting the right match,"' he said, his voice mocking the phrase. "You get a bit older, you go through this a couple of times, you start to think that life is short."
Like others, Johnson now feels that you can't hurry love. "It's not a backlash or resenting the whole dating thing," he said. "It's just, you've gotten over it, it's no longer of the utmost importance to go on a set number of dates or be on dates or to meet some specific person. By taking off that pressure you allow yourself to just go through life, enabled to meet people."
Kara Herold, 34, who lives in San Francisco, grew increasingly alarmed as friends succumbed to the pressure to find a mate, buying - and buying into - the endless supply of love-help books.
"In college when I was 20 it was dieting, now it's men and relationships," she said. "I was in a panic, but part of me thought, 'This is crazy, why are we concerned about this?"'
Herold is turning her disgust into a documentary, Bachelor, 34, which captures her mother's urging her toward a relationship ("He's Catholic and Republican, but it's nothing you can't change") and her online experiences.
Sasha Cagen, the author of Quirkyalone, wrote her book after being, as she said, "thoroughly messed up by The Rules," the best-seller that advised women to play the old-fashioned game of hard-to-get.
"The whole idea that you shouldn't ask someone out, that you're putting yourself out there to be rejected, that's just stupid," she said. "It just reinforces this warped, passive vision of what it means to be a woman."
Cagen, 29, is not against setups or dating. She is emphatically not against sex. Rather, she writes, she is "anti dull relationship."
She reminds her followers of the power of not yearning for a relationship. "If you are in a relationship to feel normal," she writes, "get out."
Still, the dating industry steamrolls forward, particularly in online services, which claim a huge jump in membership in the last two years.
Although the services love to talk about the success stories, they also admit, more quietly, to the dropouts. Matchmaker.com says its internal surveys show that the No. 1 reason people leave is that they do not find the right person. Just below that is that they have met someone, and men are twice as likely as women to say they met that companion offline, not on. (Women who drop out after meeting someone are twice as likely to cite an online connection.)
Ethan Watters, the author of Urban Tribes, which began with his own exploration of why he had remained single into his 30s, said that as people delay marriage, they begin to rely more on friends and see relationships less as the missing piece that will complete their lives. "They realize that a good love affair has as the basis a really good friendship," he said.
Oh, by the way. I know where the Holy Grail is.
Remember the classic - "What's the strangest place your husband has ever asked you to have sex?"
Liberal women aren't very bright, are they? They run from good men and then wonder why they end up miserable.
PS - Thanks for your service to our country.
Hmmmm.
I'm female and I'm not a twit or an emotional retard AND I have have values and discipline. AND I'm Polish/English/German/Irish American and so I guess I don't have an excuse for MY TEMPER, but I was a DARN GOOD CATCH and I'm CUTE, TOO.
I really can't believe some of the posts on this thread.
Maybe it's because I'm also intelligent and I know that I can't judge all men because of a few idiots.
Flame away. :)
You mean that happens more than once a month? ( for a couple of days. )
Wow, thanks for the compliment... maybe you're not so bad, after all. :)
As for the accent, you're right. Mine isn't cool like your wife's accent: it's cool like Dubya's - authentic fifth generation Texan.
Well, there you go...Finding a young, single, Republican woman is like, in the words of George Catanza, finding Plutonium lying on the ground...
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