Whenever I tell people about myself, almost no matter what I say about myself, I have an inner voice that goes, “Wait one second! I don’t think that’s true.”

Basically, telling someone about yourself often feels like a lie, no matter what you say. Are you a bitch? Well no, not always. Are you a nice person? Well, yeah, except for yesterday when you screamed at the bus driver.

Are you responsible? Well yeah, on the outside. But are you responsible about your health? Maybe not so much.

Are you good with money? Are you smart? Are you happy? Are you religious? Are you calm? Stressed? Angry?

So that is the difficulty. We need to explain who we are but our descriptions fall short and feel like they lack. And that, I believe, is why so many people write a million opposites in their profiles. Things like: I like going out but also staying in. I know how to have fun but I also know when to be serious.

Because it is the most clichéd way to say: Stop judging me. Stop trying to understand me from one silly online profile.

Give me a freakin’ break. I’m no bitch. Well, maybe sometimes.

1. I am very good looking. (If you put a picture, let me decide for myself. If you didn’t, I’m feeling a tad suspicious.)
2. I am funny but also serious. (Are you also tall but short?)
3. I love going out but I also love staying in. (Opposites remind me of Sesame Street! I love Sesame Street. I also hate it. No I don’t.)
4. I’m done playing games. (I’ve never played games… Could you explain what games you’ve played exactly?)
5. I’m not like all the other idiots out there. (I think you just disproved that.)
6. I’m not writing anything about myself here. Words are overrated. This site sucks… And the rest you’ll have to find out when we meet! (“When”?!)
7. I am so impressive and wonderful. I’m also extremely modest. (Will you marry me?)
8. She should be beautiful… (And your very subjective opinion of beauty entails… what exactly? No, I don’t really want to know.)
9. She should be beautiful… On the inside and out. (Uh huh…)
10. I’m looking for a princess. (*barf*)
11. You’ve never met anyone like me. (Was that you helping me count my blessings?)

What would be in your list?

I wonder, do you think you’re a good listener? Maybe you do. But especially if you’re a guy, chances are very high that there is room for improvement in your listening skills  (speaking from all my date experience). My main complaint after almost every single first date is that I didn’t feel like the guy really listened to me (aka, it felt like he wasn’t totally paying attention, he talked about himself way too much and he didn’t ask enough questions).

Look, it’s also my fault in a way because I’m a damn good listener and I think it blows people away. I mean, it’s exciting to have someone really listen to you and show interest, right? Especially since people are so easily distracted since the start of the cell phone era.

Of course all of this is extremely unfortunate because, alas, I do need someone who will actually listen to me.

Sigh…

But now my hope has been restored! Yay!

Please… for me and for the good of humanity, I think you should take this very telling listening test. Imagine finally knowing the truth about your listening skills!

You’ll need to find someone you associate with closely and ask them to answer the following 10 questions. (Honestly.)

The ultimate (or whatever) listening test

1. During the past two weeks, can you recall an incident where you thought I was not listening to you?
2. When you are talking to me, do you feel relaxed at least 90 percent of the time?
3. When you are talking to me, do I maintain eye contact with you most of the time?
4. Do I get defensive when you tell me things with which I disagree?
5. When talking to me, do I often ask questions to clarify what you are saying?
6. In a conversation, do I sometimes overreact to information?
7. Do I ever jump in and finish what you are saying?
8. Do I often change my opinion after talking something over with you?
9. When you are trying to communicate something to me, do I often do too much of the talking?
10. When you are talking to me, do I often play with a pen, pencil, my keys, or something else on my desk?

Sorry I’m not giving credit to anyone for this. A few sites published it so it’s hard to tell which is the source.

And now what?

Well, if you’re a great listener, then good on you and here is my phone number. :)

If you aren’t… Well, I’d just like to take this opportunity to warn you that it’ll take a really concerted effort to improve because, as a pretty damn good listener myself, I can tell you that really listening to someone so that they feel listened to, takes quite a lot of effort. Among other things, you’ll need to think about yourself less, feel comfortable just letting someone else talk, use some serious power of concentration and be patient.

But I believe in you.

And really the bottom line is that it’s all worth it because the benefits of being a good listener are that you get to make other people feel good and you’ll get the opportunity to really get to know some awesome people (who will remain nameless) who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to communicate with you beyond a first date.

Image by Brett Jordan on flickr.

Interesting… Most of you either were excited or were wondering what the heck you were doing there. What does it all mean?! (God? Hello?)

Anyway, I’m putting a new poll up in the sidebar now. Be sure to answer it!

Shidduch Net is free. Jdate is far from cheap.

And now both of these Jewish dating sites are implementing some changes to their sites. Curious what changes?

I had a glimmer of hope that Jdate would announce their new site. But now, Jdate is just tightening their grip of the members, allowing you to see less if you aren’t paying.

Shidduch Net, on the other hand, has updated their site in order to improve the user experience.

The fact that Jdate is very old fashioned, has major glitches and still charges so much, boggles the mind. I mean, OK fine. Charge what you want. But why do we continue to pay them?  Jdate is stuck in the olden days and we still love to give them our money. It’s unbelievable.

Read more of my Jdate rants here, here and here. (I still can’t believe that most of the guys who want to see my profile won’t be able to see the written part.)

Here is the message from Jdate about their changes:

Tu B’Av events in Jerusalem

I wrote a guest post on The Big Felafel about the main events happening in Jerusalem for Tu B’Av, the Jewish holiday of love. (This year Tu B’Av starts on Sunday night, August 14.)

OKCupid’s new mobile app

While you’re at one of these Tu B’Av events, maybe you could use OKCupid‘s newly announced mobile app. It helps you find out if there are potential matches for you, in your vicinity, in real time.

Really cool or really creepy?

“Don’t get married, please.”

But, of course, whether or not you search for love at these events, just make sure not to actually tie the knot, OK?

Dr. Neil Warren, a Christian psychologist and founder of eHarmony.com has advised that of the 2 million couples who planned to get married this year [in the USA], “several hundred thousand…should reconsider, postpone their weddings, or not get married” at all. So true!

Read the full article in the Christian Post.

The most unmarried group of people

Well then, I guess that makes black women very lucky people. Seems they are the most unmarried group of people in America. (Full article here.)

Which is the most unmarried group of people in Israel or in the Jewish community, I wonder? (Maybe white Canadian-Israeli women in their 30s? :)

The (j)date from hell

Hmmm… Could it be that the most single group of people in the Jewish community is people using Jdate? :)

Ilana Angel writes in JewishJournal.com about her date from hell… through Jdate.

Thing is, although I am not one to laud the praises of Jdate, it’s hard for me to relate to her conclusion that Jdate is the devil. I’ve met some totally decent guys on the site. Not sure why this discrepancy exists.

TheJMom.com is launched in Israel

Maybe the problem is that Ilana should be asking her mom to help her find a date! Marketwire.com announced the imminent launching of TheJMom.com in Israel. This is the site where our moms try to set us up.

But if so many people are uncomfortable admitting they met their significant others on dating sites, how much more difficult will it be to say: “Our moms met on a dating site”???

Friends set up friends

Does friends setting us up seem more palatable? TheJMom reminds me of shoshvinim, the Israeli site where friends set up friends.

Double date online dating site

Or maybe, instead of trying to set your friends up, you could just go on their date with them! DuoDate is a site based on double dating.

Which means, that if people get really confused between these three sites, they could totally end up on a date with their mothers and their best friends. Or maybe they could end up left at home with their friends dating their mothers.

Awkward? Still better than Ilana’s date, I’m sure!

The end

I’m sure it’s now obvious what work you have set out for you this week:

Get your moms on thejmom, your friends on shoshvinim, help your black female friends find love, talk to an Israeli (or Anglo, depending who you are) and, whatever you do, don’t get married. Oh, and, of course, go to a Tu B’Av event Sunday night (or Monday) and let me know how it goes. (Maybe if you’re nice I’ll tell you which event I went to.)

Have a wonderful week!

Deena

Trying to pronounce that? It is from the English word lite, pronounced in Hebrew – לייט – and then rewritten in English with the Israeli accent and in plural… in Hebrew. Got it?

Whatever. Point is, it is the new dating site for Israelis who are datlash (dati leshe’avar – formerly religious) and dati lite (lightly religious).

Well, I’m very excited about it. I find I am constantly struggling with the fact that my religiosity is neither here nor there. I go out with secular people and I feel like I frummy and I go out with religious people and I feel like an apikores.

Now, people like me, have one place where we can meet each other.

Also, in the short amount of time I’ve been using the site (it hasn’t been around for longer than a couple of months), I must say I am enjoying the simplicity of it. I guess at some point this could be annoying, but right now I love that there are no bells and whistles. You go, you look at profiles if you want, you write people, they write you… The questionnaire you answer when filling out your profile is simple and there is one space where you can write a bit about yourself.

And that’s it.

And it’s free.

Are you going to try it?

P.S. Here are videos they made. They went to Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv University and asked people about who they’re willing to date, religiously. Just so you know, one of the guys interviewed in Tel Aviv was very upset at how they did the editing. He told me he said he’d be happy to date a religious girl and they cut that out of the video.

Is it higher risk for a woman to have a baby at an older age because of her biological clock? Or might it be because of her partner’s ticking clock?

I think it’s going to take a loooong time before a majority of men – who often prefer dating younger women anyhow – will admit that their biology has an expiration date just as much as women, only in a different way.

This is a very interesting article about the male biological clock: The Ticking Male Biological Clock – WSJ.com.

But I’ll tell you what is a crisis (well, besides what I mentioned in that post).

I have a very neat life. Besides when I’m at work, I can lie down almost any time I feel like it. I can cook when I want, not cook when I don’t want. Yes, I have strains in my life but it’s nothing like couplehood and parenthood push people to grow (or not, I suppose).

You can have the most difficult job in the world – I’m not convinced it’ll show you who you really are the same way having a family does.

I am often so aware of the difference between mine and my siblings lives. They are exhausted and then go home to give their kids baths. I’m tired and so I end my day.

I am very blessed because they see my life as totally legitimate in its own right even though they could bombard me with requests 24/7 because I’m the single and so available one. But they don’t. And I thank them for that and believe it’s the best way they could be with me. Because my life has its difficulties on its own. My life is a full life. I am busy, I am productive… I’m doing things with my life.

But as much as I don’t wish for their lives (it often looks so unbelievably challenging), I do feel like there are some huge things I’m missing out on and that makes me sad.

So I guess that a loss in being single is not being pushed and pulled in the most meaningful way possible: in a family unit that you build for yourself. Then you get to see really what you’re capable of.

Check out this article about the fight against bachelorhood. Could you get more hysterical? Actually, hysterical in all meanings of the word. My God! The “matchmaking commandos” who are going to “storm every neighborhood in Israel.” The parents with insomnia, rabbis in a state of shock by this “urgent problem.” It really is quite appalling!

I have actually taken to the street as I eagerly wait to see us all die simultaneously of singlehood and, while we’re at it, global warming, too.

Needless to say, I am absolutely sick of being called a crisis. Yes, there is a “bachelorhood phenomenon,” and there are crises within the phenomenon (which I’ll expand on in a second) but the phenomenon itself seems more like a healthy reaction to certain changes in our society than anything else.

What type of changes? Well, for example, a very obvious one is unhappy marriages!

Worried we're contagious?

I actually think that people waiting to get married to the “right one,” even if it’s at a relatively much older age than was once accepted, is a healthy reaction to seeing close up and personally how miserable marriage can be with the wrong person (and attitude, of course).

I’m quite sure that it is much lonelier to be in an unhappy marriage than to be single. To pressure anyone into marriage is totally irresponsible. Pressure me to try a piece of the cake you just baked? Fine. But pressure me to get married? I really don’t see how anyone could pressure anyone else into such a serious constitution.

But I thought we do want to get married!

So, you might ask, what about the fact that many of us singles do want to get married? Does that not make it a “crisis,” the fact that we’re not succeeding in this task?

First of all, no, it doesn’t necessarily make it a crisis. People want all kinds of things and the lack of that thing, even for a large number of people, doesn’t mean it’s a crisis.

And what about the fact that so many people are honestly unhappy being single? They are sad and lonely being alone. And they yearn to be part of a couple, part of a family unit, sharing intimacy with someone, poppin’ out the babies, staying up all night, being exhausted…

Oh, I digress.

Both those points are totally legitimate. They are more legitimate than anything any “professional” or parent will say about the situation. A person’s preference to something, a person’s personal happiness – these are important things.

But I really wonder how much of a single person’s misery is their own and how much of it is based on the belief that their lives are just plain wrong and they don’t really deserve to be happy until they are responsible and right enough to get hitched. How much of singles’ misery is based on the fact that instead of living life to the fullest, as much as is ever possible (and it’s never totally possible so don’t idealize marriage too much), they are putting their lives on hold because they’re single?

I think it is a sin – a plain ol’ sin – to put your life on hold because you’re single. We do not know when things will happen (including death, btw, in case you didn’t think about that) and the fact that we all expect something to happen within a certain time frame when it isn’t something we totally control, is most probably slightly insane (to put it lightly).

We should be living our lives! Doing fun things. Studying, if we want. Travelling, if we want. Doing things that make us happy. Not feeling pressured to do things that make us miserable just to prove we’re being “responsible, one-track-minded singles.”

And that brings me to the true crises.

#1 People not being nice

Like anything in life, bachelorhood and specifically dating, are great opportunities to work on ourselves. The fact that there are so many stories of people not treating each other properly is absolutely terrible. Forget trying to get us married, dear professionals. How about focusing on something we all need – hitched and unhitched alike – and that is some good beatings for not treating each other kindly and respectfully. This is crisis #1 and I only wish that people would pay more attention to it.

#2 Unhappy marriages

Without a doubt, unhappy marriages is a much bigger, more devastating problem, than singlehood. The poor unhappy, lonely and trapped souls. I cannot imagine the anguish of being in an unhappy, or teetering marriage. Not to mention the heart-break and deep pain surrounding divorce. And, with so many unhappy marriages happening as we speak, you prefer to try to push more people into marriage (yes, push, by using fear tactics, among other things)?

As I said before, I think that hesitating before marrying is a pretty smart thing. And only in quite a few more years will we see really how many people never ended up getting married. Meanwhile, I will mention that I am surrounded by “older singles” getting engaged. They waited till they met someone with whom it feels right. And, as one groom-to-be said to me, “I think our generation is incapable of compromising on who we choose to marry.”

Why is that a bad thing?

#3 Unhappy people

All the shoulds in people’s lives are leading to so much unhappiness! I should date. I should get married. I should feel badly about not being married. I should worry about my biological clock. I should go to the singles event. I should go on that date. I shouldn’t buy a couch because I’m single….

It is a sickness. I know so many people who broke away from the shoulds of religion and then returned to religion in a much happier and healthier way. I wish people would do that with their singlehood. Ask themselves what is true about their shoulds and leave behind whatever isn’t (no matter what their rabbi says).

Put them all together and you’ve got…

I truly believe that if focus were given towards #1 working on ourselves as humans, #2 working on ourselves as couples and #3 trying to feel fulfilled and happy with whatever we have right now, more singles would find their besherts and be able to move onto the next stage of their lives with a much higher percentage of happiness after tying the knot.

It is not that I’m saying we shouldn’t be trying to get married. I myself don’t cease to make an effort to meet my beloved. Because that is what I want. But I don’t believe that wanting something very badly needs to make me feel like there is something wrong with me just because I don’t have it.

I don’t feel like a crisis and I wish people would stop freaking out about me and find something else to freak out about (global warming is all the rave, maybe you could check it out).

Look, as always when I rant, I feel badly to seem unappreciative of all these people’s efforts. But I think I have a right to be sick of being called a crisis and I think it’s OK that I can’t somehow find it in my heart to appreciate those who are pointing their crisis fingers straight at me. If you’re worried about the community, miserable marriages (and, God forbid miserable children) are way more detrimental than any happy or unhappy single. You might want to take a good look at that problem before you tackle me.

P.S. The name of this post is inspired by Benji Lovitt whose blog about Israel is called “What War Zone?“

Photo by ralphrepo on flickr.