More than a decade ago, I met this girl Jana*, a former cheerleader, who was out of my league. She worked for a major studio while I was an independent blogger. She had degrees from Harvard and Stanford while I failed to graduate from UCLA. She paid $2,500 a month for her Beverly Hills apartment while I paid about $600 a month for my Pico-Robertson hovel. She had a nice car while I had a bomb.
We met at Friday Night Live at Sinai Temple and immediately felt an attraction. Soon after, however, when she mentioned my name, her friends warned her against me.
Jana and I were friends for months and then one Friday night after dinner, we wandered into a bar. She ordered a cocktail. I ordered nothing. It was Shabbos.
When it came time to pay for her cocktail, she asked me if I had money. I didn’t. I didn’t carry money on Shabbos. Luckily, the bar took her credit card.
We wandered on to the beach and held hands as we strolled along the water. Finally, I pulled her on to a deck chair and we made out.
I asked her to come back to my room. She said no.
The next morning, we met at breakfast. There were a group of us. I was asked for my plans. “I’m going with her,” I said, pointing at Jana.
We went to the beach and slathered the sunscreen on each other.
I was concerned. I was already one-down in this relationship. I was following Jana around. I knew she moved on a higher plane than I did and I felt insecure. Could I pull this off?
I had a big problem. I earned my living blogging about the porn industry while Jana worked for Disney. She probably already knew this about me, but I had to tell her what I did for a living without using the word porn. So I told her I wrote about the entertainment industry and the sex industry and I’d published a book on sex in film.
I never learned whether or not she ever read my website. On there, I wrote deliriously about being in love without mentioning any details about her.
I think she took the attitude, “the less I know the better.”
I never said the word “porn” to her.
She liked that I was religious and we went to temple together. Once she even came to Beth Jacob with me. It was her first time in an Orthodox shul. She couldn’t stand to pray with a mechitza so she came late for the Shabbat dinner.
Afterward, we went back to my place for the first time. She was appalled at how small it was but she tried not to show her disapproval.
I attempted to make out with her but she stopped that, using the excuse, “It feels sacrilegious.” That was a new excuse. Women often had them for not getting close to me.
Jana beat a hasty retreat from my hovel that night. She wasn’t the first or the last girl to do that, though most of the women I dated made peace with its weird comforts. If they couldn’t, it would’ve been hard for us to spend time together. One girlfriend lived a few miles away and we spent most of our time at her place and virtually no time at my place. She absolutely refused to have sex there.
I didn’t have a bed. I slept on the floor, on top of a sheet and under a duve.
I regularly emailed my Advisory Committee (four male friends around the country) every detail of our ups and downs. I was besotted. All I talked about in therapy for weeks was my relationship with Jana.
I was always one down. I always felt like a shmuck but never wanted to blame Jana for this. In truth, the problem wasn’t so much things I was doing but who I was and where I was in life. I didn’t match up. I knew this and it made the pain worse.
We never did the ultimate deed, which exacerbated my insecurity. I’d hoped that I could hook her with the hot sex and that would enable us to coast for months.
Driving back from a party Saturday night, our first trip in my rusting old van, she said, “Next time we’ll take my car.”
We stopped by Jerry’s Deli. At the end of the meal, she opened up, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but after I met you at synagogue, I told two other women about you. They were happy until I said your name. They thought you were a loose cannon.”
“Yeah, it’s true,” I sighed. “I’m in therapy. I’m working on it.”
“This is something that concerns me,” she said. I’d like to bring you to my uncle’s barbeque this afternoon, but I’m concerned about your sense of propriety. You have a tendency to say really inappropriate things.”
I nodded and paid the bill. As we walked, I heard a familiar voice calling my name. I turned around and saw porn star Ron Jeremy at a booth with four sluts. I paused and then stepped forward to my Uncle Ron, leaving Jana behind. She waited for me to introduce her, but when I didn’t, she skipped off to the bathroom.
Ron regaled me for a few minutes with his latest accomplishments, including a public introduction at a Chris Rock performance.
After a few minutes, I said goobye and found Jana outside.
“Who was your friend?” she asked.
“A B actor,” I said.
“Why didn’t you introduce me?”
“He’s kinda sleazy.”
I tried to keep my life neatly separated. There was a compartment for work, a compartment for love, a compartment for religion. When I hit a bump in the road the contents of my life spilled together, I felt uneasy.
I never did get an invite to her uncle’s barbeque.
One Sunday evening a week or two later, we bought dinner at the market and then ate it at her place. Afterward, she said we should talk about the relationship. “We just want different things,” she said.
I nodded. I knew I wasn’t in her league. I couldn’t keep up with her. She spoke so fast, lived so fast, spent so much.
We kept seeing each other intermittently. Jana moved to San Francisco.
One day about a month later, I called her and when she didn’t get back to me within 48 hours, I sent her an email breaking up.
An hour later, she called me. She hadn’t seen my email. She invited me to come to a wedding with her the next weekend. “This will be the first time we’ll spend the night together,” she noted.
I was dying on the other end of the phone. What I wanted had arrived but it was too late. “Umm, I sent you an email,” I said. “I think you should read it first.”
“Oh, OK,” she said.
I hoped she’d read my email and then ask if that was really what I wanted to do and we’d just talk everything out and go on better than ever.
However, she read my email and agreed it was best that we broke up.
So I never did get to spend the night with her.
I often date women out of my league. I can’t afford to keep up with them. I don’t have the energy and I don’t have the money.
While we go out, however, I love the borrowed functioning. I love moving on a higher plane. I meet great people and imagine I can leverage the connections into a better life.
The end always comes quickly and it’s usually in the form of “We just want different things.” Women are nice. They rarely tell me directly, “You can’t keep up.” I appreciate their kindness.
So do we really want different things? I want money and prestige as much as they do. So I don’t think our differences are so much a result of wanting different things but of rather attaining different things at this point in life.
Am I not capable of keeping up? I’m not sure. I have a lifelong habit of only doing what I want and that has never made for monetary success (I’ve never earned over $50,000 in a year). I’ve always chosen time and space to write over more lucrative endeavors, hoping that my dedication to my craft will one day pay off financially.
And how have things turned out for these high-powered women I’ve loved? None of them have married. I sometimes think that with their guidance, I could’ve kicked things up a notch and everything could’ve worked out.
A few years ago, Sandra Tsing Lo had a garden party for some fabulous women around 40 years of age. These ladies appeared to have it all. They were well put together. They were successful in their careers. They had gorgeous lives. And they learned over the course of the afternoon that they had something else in common — they had all dated Luke Ford. He had seemed like such a catch. A good looking erudite man with a charming accent. And then they Googled him. Oy!
A therapist comments on my FB: “Even better, be the person you want to find. That doesn’t mean become a black Jewish New York woman, it means be your own boss. Look after your own interests. Tell yourself what to do, and don’t let yourself get away with anything.”
