Can Anybody Find Me...

In this computer era, JDate is at the apogee of all that is digitally Chosen, ahead of even apps that announce the onset of erev, mothers who complain that we never return their videochats, and live-streaming Klezmer available 24/6. But therein, I’m pretty sure that there’s something hugely wrong with JDate and all of us as we’re currently using it.

My Internet query for “Jewish online dating” yields more than 50 legitimate sites, including JewCanoodle.com, Isradate.com, SawYouatSinai.com, ShalomCity.com, Yenta911.com, JewGlueDating.com, and GefilteFishing.com (“We’ll hook you up!” this last one promises). There are such niche services as Frumster.com, JDivorced.com, JewishSeniorsDating.com, JewishLesbiansEverywhere.com, and SephardicDating.com; JDatersAnonymous.com invites all who are dating to come and kvetch; a book promoted at JewishDatingSuccess.com promises secrets to “Get Dates with the Hottest Jewish Women Automatically!” At results 231-240 of 3,390,000, I stop perusing, but you get the point: there’s a market for this.

In summer ‘08, I took a wrong cyberturn and found myself signing up, unprecedentedly, for a free profile. Woman seeking a Man… Boston… 24… enjoys fine dining, long walks on the beach, and bitching about the snow. Before I knew it, I was e-forking over $39.99 for a month of full Jmembership, and then everything went Jfuzzy.

I met Nate, the waifish bartender-turned-middle school teacher. And Zvi, the bespectacled Israeli who, when I refused to ride in his really nice car to post-drink pizza, let me drive it. And Sam, the dusky-complexioned, well-traveled resident at a big-name hospital. And Ben the law student, David the sushi connoisseur, Noah who’d never left Massachusetts, Ben the occupational therapist (Bens go for me, it seems, or maybe I for them), Justin, Ben, Rob, Marc, Ben.

I suspect I was on there per that same vague impulse whose rampancy through our ranks keeps all those sites in business: to meet and eventually marry a nice Jewish boy or girl and, ultimately, make nice Jewish babies. Reasonable enough. But nowadays, I go a little rosy in the punim at mention of this episode, and I think I’m not alone.

The stigma rises, I think, from our collective general sense that it mostly leads nowhere. Yes, there are plenty for whom it’s begotten love; I sent out a query text and found at least six JDate marriages within my greater mishpocha… but then there were the 30 or so others who replied with some menacing emoticon. Plus, JDate claims a monthly average of 881,000 unique visitors and 107 million page views – what’s that expression, the one about monkeys and typewriters and the complete works of Sholom Aleichem? In any case, we’ve come to regard JDate as something like a last resort for the romantic scoundrels and ne’er-do-wells in our midst, simply because it rarely works; if it did, it’d be more like a first resort.

I was soon going on several Jdates a week, often two a night, but it all felt for naught. Whatever I was looking for, I was surely not finding it, unless “it” was a repetitive motion injury to my vocal chords from making “mmmhmm, that’s fascinating”-type noises. At the eight-dates-a-week rate, I thought I ought to’ve hit Jpaydirt at least once… but therein lies the problem: these days, we’re all forced, by the sheer frenzy of our lives and the multitude of prospects, to seek mates on the basis of some very specific hyper-specialized qualities that don’t ultimately have any bearing on whether we’ll be able to create and sustain a loving relationship with that person. Remember, in Act II of “Fiddler,” Tevye singing to Golde, “the first time I met you was on our wedding day… But my father and my mother said we’d learn to love each other”? Well, they do! Nice for them, but nowadays, we’re afforded ample time in which to date around, hemming and hawing and trying to decide if it’s more important that our new boo be super at skeeball or that he like soup. But all the choices and corollary promise of finding the perfect permutation mostly just confound our thinking on the things we think we want, and thus we’ve all taken it upon ourselves to go out with people according to not much and then dump them according to not much more.

Like Nate, whom I found hilarious until he asked whether I wanted to go drag-racing for our next date. And Zvi, whose grannyish way of polishing his no-longer-so-adorable glasses had me wondering how he’d made it through the IDF. And Sam, who I could tell would get annoyed with my veganism. JDone for, all of them.

Image by J. Gershony-Geyer

JDate exacerbates this by helping us – literally – sort and rank so-called “matches” according to whatever preexisting criteria and prejudices we have, and then applying to whatever remains this strange additional set of manufactured on-screen criteria. By and large, the subsections of a JDate profile mostly serve to confuse all involved parties as to what it is that makes for a successful relationship. We start obsessing over qualities we hadn’t thought of before, and suddenly we’re convinced we can only go out with people between five-foot-ten and five-foot-ten-and-a-half who have athletic builds and like Cajun/Southern food but not Caribbean/Cuban and have personalities best described as Sensitive/Nurturing/Loving and were born under an astrological sign that jibes with ours and share our understanding of the eminent superiority of kite boarding to wake boarding and who know they can only go out with someone exactly like us. We forget that, in the long run, people experience bodily changes, acquire new culinary tastes, decide they think astrology is bunk, and see the light regarding water-and-wind sports. Moreover, that stuff cannot only change – it can be overcome.

But back then, unenlightened, I hadn’t time to sit around waiting to see if these Jproblems were flukes, or at least surmountable – I had to go out with Ben, and David, and Noah, and Ben, and Justin, Ben, Marc, Rob, and Ben so that I could find out if any of them was adequately absent such heinous qualities. I started confusing them, mistaking the details of one’s family history or college curriculum for those of another, and then with those of people I’d known for years. And then, around the time that something in me was likely about to break, my one month mercifully ran out.

Not long thereafter, I got suckered into some political activism, wherein I worked with and then fell in love with a man who was completely wrong for me in pretty much every way and who continues to awesomify my life every day, including the days when I kind of want to stab him in his sleep. That’s intended to be neither the smug punchline that it unavoidably is nor a suggestion that we all cancel our Jmemberships and rush off to the nearest shadchan or political campaign. It’s meant as a challenge to the stalwart among us to, please, employ online dating as the incredible tool that it can be for a people in Diaspora, adjusting your understanding of what it is that makes for a viable relationship, relinquishing your grip on some of the on-screen details and instead reaching, a little further and perhaps a little blindly, for an opportunity to carry Judaism through this Digital Age. 

Rachel Lieff Axelbank is an MFA candidate in the creative nonfiction writing program at Sarah Lawrence College. During the course of her work on this article, her JDate account was “suspended by an administrator”; she has reason to believe that this was the work of a certain ill-wishing Man seeking a Woman, but she harbors no pique and hopes he will one day find Jlove or at least (to paraphrase him) someone to Jbone.