dating Archives | The ManifestStation

The Book Exchange

March 26, 2024

“He stole my book,” I moaned to my friends and co-workers, my bodega guy, my bodega cat. Anyone who would listen. “He stole my book. I love that book.”

They responded patiently.

“I’ll buy you a new one.”

“He probably lost it.”

“Don’t you have one of his too?”

All valid statements. But I wasn’t ready to let it go.

After work one night I sat at the kitchen counter, hunched over my phone, willing a text to come from this book thief I went on six dates with. Six. Then, without so much as an abracadabra, he disappeared like a white rabbit in a magic trick.

My roommate at the time told me to forget him.

“He’s a butterfly,” she said. “He flits from one thing to the next.”

I nodded. I knew she was right, but I was still stuck in that place where every word, every text, every kiss seems to hold the great unknowable answer to what went wrong. If I could just remember exactly what he said on that last Sunday date when we aimlessly traipsed around Greenpoint, surely I would be able to figure this out, I thought. But a close reading didn’t help. There was no subtext. No hidden meaning. His disappearing act said it all.

On the subway soon after it ended, I winced as the train stopped at Delancey Street. A few days earlier I almost crashed into him as I rushed out of this station. I was running late for what would become our final date. He was standing on the corner, leather jacket unzipped, bass guitar strapped to his back, and that look. That look that I swear he must practice in the mirror—a mixture of sheepishness and amusement and something else that I could only describe to my friends as fearlessness.

“It’s weird,” I said to my friend on the phone after date number three. “When you start to see someone there’s a level of fear isn’t there? That you’re not going to fall or the other person isn’t going to fall with you. He doesn’t seem to have that fear.”

“Maybe he’s just braver with his emotions?” she offered.

“Maybe,” I replied, but I caught my voice trailing off the way it does when I want something to be true, but know it’s not.

Still, I held out hope. We went to dinner and the movies, his neighborhood and mine, a cute park date mixed in, several craft beers, and an impromptu bar crawl. And finally, The Book Exchange. After drinks in Bushwick, we were back at this place. I gravitated toward his bookshelf as I always do. I work in publishing. We sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor, perusing his collection. My eyes landed on a few Ishirugo books.

“One of his is my favorite,” I said.

And that’s how it happened. He gave me When We Were Orphans, and the next time we met, I gave him Never Let Me Go. The irony is not lost on me.

Soon after that, the texts started trickling out. The staring contest with my phone began. He was fading. I grasped a bit at the empty space he left until I didn’t anymore and left his last noncommittal message unanswered.

What he didn’t know—when he was ignoring my texts for days, when he was lending me a book and taking one of mine, when he was pulling me in only to push me back—is that I’ve had only one serious relationship. That all that’s been in between is a smattering of dating. He didn’t know he had been the first person in years I actually liked. He didn’t consider what was between the lines. It wasn’t bravery in his eyes; it was indifference. And only six dates or not, it still stung.

Weeks after I let that last text hang, deleted the message thread, and un-followed him on Instagram, I heard through the grapevine of our mutual friends that my story followed a very particular pattern. A friend’s friend had been down this very road: a handful of dates. He seemed to like her a lot. He totally flaked.

My mind flashed to the bookcase in his living room. I remembered the collection appeared to be growing. Books were stacked haphazardly on top of others and shoved in tight like misplaced puzzle pieces. Many of them were yellowed, with faded spines and dog-eared pages. They looked awfully well-loved.

I hope, at least, he reads them.

Jess Harriton is an editor and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared on HelloGiggles.com and in Concrete Literary Magazine.

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Guest Posts, Humor, Relationships

Better Questions for OK Cupid

April 19, 2022

Compatibility Guaranteed!

1. How do you feel about sex during a woman’s period?

a) It works for me.
b) Natural birth control. Except for that once.
c) Anyone but Harvey.

2. With whom do you empathize?

a) Super models, because they are always aware of their own minute by minute obsolescence.
b) The dust bowl victims in the thirties, because John Steinbeck is such a classic writer.
c) Yourself, of course.

3. What do you admire most about bedbugs?

a) Their lack of creepy rodent tails.
b) Their ability to survive dormant for decades before they freak you out.
c) That their presence says nothing about any deficiency of housekeeping skills, since even the laziest housekeeper doesn’t toss human blood around and that’s what bedbugs eat.

4. Which body part of your own do you consider irresistible?

a) The vein at the crook of your left elbow.
b) The cartilage between your nostrils.
c) The second three inches of your sternum, starting from the top.

5. What does your cat think about you?

a) How stupid you are.
b) How brilliant you are.
c)Who are you again?

6. What is your favorite sound?

a) The other person’s head exploding after you’ve won the argument.
b) Your own head exploding after you’ve won the argument.
c) The whole yoga class’s heads exploding at the third “om.”

7. What one trait do you dislike about your dog?

a) His inexplicable refusal to flush the toilet.
b) That he’s lying. No one could possibly adore you that much.
c) What a stupid question.

8. Why do we die?

a) God, who doesn’t exist, hates us.
b) Oh, you know, why not.
c) We don’t.

If all answers match, guaranteed lifelong devotion.

If 80 – 90% match, guaranteed five years three months of on the whole a sound relationship.

If 70% or less match, upgrade your OkCupid membership. Send the annual $150 directly to me.

Susan Anmuth lives with her son Ethan, Yorkie Xena the Warrior Princess, and cat, Jelly (short for Jealous) in Newark, New Jersey. She works as a cashier at Walmart, which offers plenty of writing material.

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Writing prompts
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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Relationships

Woman Seeking Man, Age to be Determined

January 24, 2022

It was three years since my husband died. I sold the house, found an apartment in New York City and decided to try on-line dating, signing on to JDate, Match, and Plenty-of-Fish. My oldest son, the arbiter of all things popular, told me to never post my real age. He said nobody does. Everybody lies.

I agonized for a week. I’m a pretty straight shooter but sixty-seven was kind of up there and so I wrote down sixty. My son was upset. “Put fifty-nine,” he said. Have you ever seen a dress priced at $600? It’s always $599. And if it’s on sale it’s $399 not $400. It’s psychological.”

I knew from the psychological. I was a psychologist with a doctorate; he knew he was speaking my language, but I told him I wasn’t a dress, and I wasn’t ready to be discounted. I stuck with sixty and hoped that my picture would pull it off. If I met someone viable, I would tell him the truth.

Sophisticated 60-year-old woman looking for a sophisticated man. I’ve climbed to see the mountain gorillas in Uganda and barged down the Amazon to meet the Yagua Indians. I’ve done research in Africa, live in NYC, have a practice in Princeton, and a writing cabin in Woodstock. I have a long story to tell a good man over a slow dinner.

I read it over. Even I was impressed. I clicked send and waited.

It didn’t take long. I was the new kid on the block. It was great but all the guys were under forty-five. I responded to an eager 35-year-old, suggesting he reread my profile; I was sixty-years old. I gulped at the lie but couldn’t imagine that the extra seven years mattered in this case. He said he had seen my age; it was fine; he liked older women. I said it wasn’t fine with me.

This went on for several weeks. None of the age-appropriate men were knocking on my door. I decided to get aggressive, remembering the younger Linda—the one with chutzpa—who’d been married at nineteen, had three kids by age twenty-seven, started college at thirty and got divorced at thirty-one. The Linda that signed on for assertiveness training, consciousness raising and masturbation workshops. The masturbation workshops—taught by a bald woman in a mini skirt with very high black boots—were particularly intriguing. She had a carousel filled with slides of female genitalia. The diversity was fascinating. She flashed them on a screen side-by-side with slides of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings. It made me consider taking an elective in contemporary art.

Sadly, I had completely missed the sixties. Instead of doing drugs and making love, I was changing diapers and stitching needlepoints. It was 1970 when I divorced my first husband—a heady time for women. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem were leading the march for equality while Gloria Gaynor sang the anthem, I Will Survive. Fortified by the women’s movement, and with no time to waste, I headed for the singles bar.

I walked in, scoped the scene, picked out the best-looking guy and started a conversation. The following month I went on a singles vacation to the Club Med in Martinique where the help, hired for their looks, were paid extra to fraternize with the guests. I was having a great time but then my friend Sally called and said her best friends had recently split and did I want to meet the husband?

“He’s fifteen years older than you,” she said, “but he’s a great looking guy. Think Omar Sharif or Sean Connery.”

The fifteen years worried me, but Sean Connery? Friday night he came to pick me up and by Saturday morning my single days were over.

Now thirty-seven years later, my husband gone, it was time to be proactive again. Thinking about the age difference between my second husband and me, I decided to flip the coin and reconsider the interest of the younger man. According to Ron, the cutie from Queens: younger men preferred older women because they’re more interesting, don’t play games, do drugs, or want kids and, he added, they’re great in bed.

Great in bed was going to be a stretch. These guys were physically fit. I hadn’t been to a gym since I’d had back surgery the previous year. Pictures from the Kama Sutra flashed in my head. My back started to ache like a phantom limb.

I got a hit from an African American man. His handle was Bodybuilder. He was forty years old. He said I was beautiful and asked if I would like to chat. “Beautiful” was always a hook. I thanked him for the compliment and confessed that I didn’t take a shine to buffed men. He said he wasn’t buffed, he was chiseled. I told him to post a picture and I’d decide. The picture looked like a guy out of Sports Illustrated: naked from the waist up, elbows out, fingers gripped, gleaming pecs. He wasn’t chiseled. He was buffed. I said I’d like to see him in a suit.

“What would you like me to wear?” he asked.

I suggested for formal attire he consider a well-tailored suit, probably black, with a French blue shirt and a good pair of shoes.

“And for casual?”

I suggested pleated linen slacks, draped nicely over his hips, a white shirt open at the neck and good shoes.

“What about you?” he asked.

I told him for casual I’d wear a pair of tight-fitting jeans, black boots with a good shine, a white man-tailored shirt and a straw Stetson hat.

“And for formal?”

“The same outfit but I’d ditch the hat.”

“LOL,” he said.

I told him I was looking for a man who had as much confidence in his brains as he had in his body. He said he would send more pictures.

The next week he posted another photo. The only thing between him and pornography was the steering wheel of a boat. I told him to contact me when he got dressed.

This was fun. The Internet lent itself to snappy repartee and vapid conversation. I was pretty good at both. It became my entertainment after a long day at the office.

There was the forty-three-year-old writer from Plenty of Fish. His first email asked, “Why haven’t you invited me over yet?” I thought that was a little presumptuous. I wrote back something brilliant like “We haven’t met yet.”

He wrote, “Let’s meet. We’ll have a drink and we’ll go back to your apartment.”

I told him no one comes back to my apartment on a first date.

He said I was closed-minded.

“How about a ninety percent chance we’ll go back to your apartment?”

I said, “No way.”

“What about eighty/twenty?”

I wouldn’t budge.

Negotiations went on for two weeks. It was Friday night and I told him I was going to the Café Luxembourg for a martini and some oysters. He was welcome to come. He said fifty-fifty was his final offer. He didn’t show. That was fine with me. The oysters were superb.

A week later he agreed to meet, no strings. He was waiting when I walked into the cafe. He was nice looking—young, but young was beginning to look older. He said he’d written four novels and taught creative writing at City College. Okay, this had possibilities. Ten minutes into the date he took my chin in his hand, turned my head to him, held up two fingers, pointed at his eyes and said very seriously, “Look at me. You really want to take me home, don’t you?”

I began to laugh. He had to be kidding. He let go of my chin, turned back to his drink, and said, “Whatever.”

Two minutes later he turned around and did it again. After the fourth time, I was rolling on the floor.

“What’s so funny?” he asked in exasperation. I said I wanted to know how he wrote four novels when he only knew ten words?

“Whatever,” he shrugged, turned around and walked out of the bar.

That was my best night out since I’d signed on to the dating sites. I laughed all the way home.

In January I got an email from an attractive fifty-four-year-old, 6’5” Israeli. His picture showed him standing at a stove, a bandana on his head, apron around his waist concentrating on whatever it was he was stirring in a pan.

His profile read: “Good man/bad boy/ whiz in the kitchen…blah…blah…blah.” I liked the “blah…blah…blah,” at least he wasn’t into platitudes. “Looking for a woman,” it continued, “thirty-five to ninety-nine.”

Ninety-nine. I figured I’d made the cut with room to spare. I gave him my number. He called five minutes later and invited me over for dinner on Thursday.

“You’re in Israel,” I exclaimed.

He said, “So, you’ll take a plane. You’ll come to Israel. What you like? Chicken? Fish? What you like, I’ll make. Come. You won’t be sorry.”

He was serious. I laughed. We said we’d talk the next night. He was a fantasy without a face.

The on-line thing was beginning to get tired. I was thinking about going off. The coup-de-gras came a few days later. Each day Match sends you your perfect match. I logged on one morning to find I was staring into the face of my first husband. Your perfect match, it said. I screamed, as though a large beetle had crawled out of my computer. His profile read; “…likes to travel but hasn’t really gone anywhere. Likes to do crossword puzzles but not the New York Times. Likes to go to the movies but rarely has the time.” Last book read, “The Da Vinci Code- waited for it to come out in paperback. Wanted a woman 45-65.” Seriously? I was too old even for him!

That was it. I’d had it. I got off all the sites. It didn’t matter if I was sixty or sixty-seven; if my ex-husband was supposed to be my perfect match then I’d rather live the fantasy. I picked up the phone and called Israel.

“What’s for dinner?”

Linda I. Meyers is a clinical psychologist in private practice in NYC. She is also a writer and author of the memoir, The Tell.

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

Guest Posts, Relationships

When Spicing Things Up Cools Everything Down

August 8, 2021

by Joelle Hann

I knew the box was coming but expected it to be small. The size of a shoebox, or maybe a jewelry case. So when I was handed a box big enough to house a couple of Queen-sized duvets, my heart stopped. I didn’t have enough space in my Brooklyn apartment for whatever was inside. It suddenly felt less like a gift and more like a headache.

“I’m getting you a present!” David had said, several weeks earlier. We’d been having long phone calls for a couple of months, him in Chicago, me in Brooklyn. We’d met on a weekly Zoom cocktail hour, organized by mutual friends, during the first weeks of shutdown, then started flirting in private texts. The phone calls followed. Illinois’ high COVID levels had prevented us from meeting in person so far. The word “relationship” was not yet on the table.

But a gift, that was significant. That was a step. Blood had rushed to my face.

“So, I’ll need your address. And also, what spices do you like?”

Spices?

“I just love this spice store I discovered and I want to buy everything. But that’s crazy, so I’m buying them for friends instead.”

My blush had subsided. “So, actually this is a present for me,” he’d said, as if reading my mind.

I had thinned out my spice cupboard earlier in the pandemic, chucking whatever was expired or unrecognizable, leftovers from some long-gone roommate, or a dinner party I’d once had. I didn’t want more clutter.

“Please! Pretty please, let me buy them. You’re going to love them.”

I loved that he wanted to give me something. I also knew that he could get lost in worlds of his own making. On the phone, he tended towards monologues rather than conversations. I could put him on speaker phone and walk into another room without him noticing. But, then again, why crush his enthusiasm?

I let him make a list. I could always use more turmeric and cardamom, I reasoned. “But no cinnamon. I’m the one person on earth who does not like cinnamon.”

Several weeks later the shipment had not arrived. That wasn’t a bad thing except that it added to my doubt. I wondered if David was someone who made grandiose gestures without following through, like proposing marriage without offering a ring.

He copped to it before I could bring it up. “I lost the list,” he offered on one of our phone calls. “It must be here somewhere under all these other piles of papers.”

I tried to reframe his fumble. David was brainy and tech obsessed. He didn’t so much fall down rabbit holes on YouTube, TikTok and Twitter as run down them. Of course he’d lost that list! His cluelessness was almost endearing. His love for gadgets and his new efforts to learn to cook produced some interesting purchases. The excess of spices was one. A self-contained grow box of salad greens was another. It had an embedded light to help sprout basil and lettuce from plastic soil pods — all on his bookshelf.

My friend Max, who, long before I’d met her, had been a popstar in Australia, was staying with me when the oversized box finally did arrive. I hauled it upstairs into my sun-streaked kitchen pausing on the landing to catch my breath.

“We have to film this!” Max exclaimed, pulling out her iPhone. She moved the table from against the wall into the full sun. “This is incredible! The light is fantastic!”

I squinted into the blazing sun, stripping the tape off the box. She brought the phone in for a close-up, then pulled away for dramatic effect. I dug toward the bottom, tossing out wads of crumpled brown paper, looking for an end to the packets inside — 20, 25, 30, 50? Seven kinds of dried chilies; countless spice jars; a boxed set of pre-sweetened hot chocolates and chai, a Chicago-themed trio of spicy garnishes, one called Chicago Deep Dish, containing shelf-stabilized cheese. A lot of cinnamon.

“My god, this guy must really like you,” Max swooped around me as I unspooled each item, reading its label out loud into the camera. “That’s gotta feel good.”

“These can’t all be for me.” I said, showing Max the labels trimmed in scarlet, embossed in gold. Who was I supposed to be, to relish all of these things?

There was no chance I would use the hot chocolate or the chai mix. I made chai at home, brewing the ginger, cardamom, saffron and black tea on my stove. I had Dutch-processed cocoa in my cupboard already, but if I wanted hot cocoa, I’d go to my favorite coffee shop where they made it better than I ever could. What to do with seven kinds of chilies? There was no turmeric.

To my surprise, in Max’s unboxing video, I don’t look disappointed. I look like I’m enjoying myself. I posted the clip to Instagram where it got a lot of comments. “I’m jealous — and also loving this!” said one friend. “I watched this all the way through!” said another. “Who is this admirer? How do I get one?”

I sent a copy to David. I felt queasy about all the excess; the shipping label cited $230 spent. I could not gush so the video stood in as my thank you. He seemed satisfied, admitting that he’d sent my Instagram video to the spice company. They’d wished him luck in his courtship, a word that now made me wince. If he was going to spend so much on me, why not buy AirPods, something I wanted?

I remembered years ago when a boyfriend had taken me out for my birthday at the Gramercy Tavern, an upscale restaurant in Manhattan. I’d been ambivalent about him and I think he’d known that. But I couldn’t deny that the amuse bouche romanced me, especially with the wine pairing, and the duck confit that followed, served from the left, and the creme brulee with the hard, burnt-sugar crust we had to crack before spooning out the buttery insides. I hadn’t broken up with him just then.

And who hasn’t given gifts that were more about themselves than the recipient? For my part, these included second-hand novels with strong feminist plots that I’d given to my mother when I was in college, in a desperate wish that she’d liberate herself from my controlling father. I’d made healthy meals for my sister-in-law who avoided vegetables, preferring pizza and Doritos. When I was 22, I’d given a high-school friend the wedding present of a bird cage, an unsubtle metaphor for the way I felt she was trapping herself in a loveless marriage.

I realized that the very best gifts sometimes knew the receiver better than they knew themselves. The Gramercy Tavern boyfriend had once bought me an incomparable ring. One friend regularly sent me eye-opening books that I would have otherwise passed by. Max had an instinct about the clothes I should try.

The night I received the oversized box from David, Max invited her Aussie friend Matthew and his boyfriend Scott over for dinner.

“They’re fine — they’re careful,” Max said, justifying the invitation of strangers into my home during COVID. “Matt loves to cook. He’ll cook for us. Show him the box.”

Dinner was splayed chicken rubbed with cacao and chilis dug up from the depths of the box, plus vegan pudding and wine. After, I gave the boys a tour of the rest of the spices, taking a closer look myself, now that the shock had worn off. They oohed and aahed over the varieties of chilies — mulatto, ancho, guajillo, chipotle, New Mexico, chile de arbol — the cinnamon, the hot chocolates.

“Take whatever you want!” I plied Matt and Scott with packets. I slid the cinnamon sticks into small plastic snack bags, labelling each with a black Sharpie. I made a bag for Max, too, who exclaimed, “It’s antiviral!”

Matt passed on the hot chocolates and chai mix. Like me, he didn’t want the added sugar or dehydrated milk powders. But Scott was curious. For a moment, I got caught up in his fascination with the chilies, their odd, flattened shapes that ranged from plump to skinny, matte to shiny, the evocative descriptions typed up on the pretty labels. We googled “guajillo” and “korintje,” and admired the many rolls and folds of cinnamon. I wondered what made the Ceylon cinnamon “quills” and the korintje “sticks,” and why one was a fat roll while others were slivers and shavings. It did seem like if I learned to cook with seven kinds of chilies from around the world my life might be more interesting. I might even find a compatible boyfriend in my own city.

Scott asked repeatedly if I didn’t want to keep more for myself. I wavered, drawn in by the suggestion of faraway places and cultures: Turkey, Ceylon, Madagascar, New Mexico, even Chicago. Places I wouldn’t have the opportunity to visit for a long time under pandemic travel rules. But then I remembered how I hated clutter and I swallowed my fantasies. I insisted that they take what I foisted on them. “Please, you’re doing me a favor.”

What spices were left after our dinner, I shut into the box and put under my desk, unable to either move them into my cupboard or throw them out.

I did not text David in the week that followed, and he wasn’t in touch much, either, except for a quick note about the fun of courting.

But the budding romance now seemed as artificial as that plastic box of red-leaf lettuce sprouts growing in David’s 57th floor apartment in downtown Chicago. It was cute and kind of a miracle. But it was also unlikely to produce much satisfaction before becoming a lot more work than either of us had signed up for.

Maybe we both had needed a pie-in-the sky fantasy, a sparkle of connection at a safe distance. Some light flirtation to get us through a difficult period of isolation.

Max stayed with me for several more days. After my morning walks, as I sat down to a day of work, she’d call down to ask if I wanted a coffee. Later, she’d bring me a cup, with milk she’d frothed by hand. “I made it strong. I know that’s how you like it.”

She’d walked out of her way to find organic coffee beans so that I wasn’t ingesting pesticides, and she insisted that the milk be organic. She brought the hot drink downstairs and across the living room and put it in my hands. It was a simple gesture that cost her nothing but gave me a lot. “Sometimes all you need is a good cup of tea!”

A few weeks later I gave away the rest of the spices. The hot-chocolate set went to a friend on her 50th birthday, and the remaining chilies and cinnamon went to two chef friends who’d driven up from North Carolina for haircuts and facials in Manhattan.

For myself, I ordered a half-pound each of organic turmeric, cardamom, and ginger and dispensed them into clean glass jars that I had on hand. There was still room in my cupboard for the right kind of spice.

Joelle Hann has published essays, journalism and poetry on NPR, in The New York Times, Yoga Journal, Poets & Writers, McSweeney’s and in many other print and online outlets. She was a writing fellow at CUNY’s Writer’s Institute from 2015 – 2016 and a poetry fellow at NYU before that. Joelle lives in Brooklyn, NY. You can read her clips at www.joellehann.com and find her on Twitter: @joellehann

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Margaret Attwood swooned over The Child Finder and The Butterfly Girl, but Enchanted is the novel that we keep going back to. The world of Enchanted is magical, mysterious, and perilous. The place itself is an old stone prison and the story is raw and beautiful. We are big fans of Rene Denfeld. Her advocacy and her creativity are inspiring. Check out our Rene Denfeld Archive.

Order the book from Amazon or Bookshop.org

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Guest Posts, love

COULD I LOVE YOU?

December 5, 2016

By Mary McLaurine

Is that pet hair on your coat sleeve? There’s enough there to make me wonder whether you’re an animal lover or perhaps you live alone with a cat and just don’t care enough to pick up a lint roller and remove it before you leave home.

On the one hand, if you’re an animal lover, this would be terrific because as fate would have it, so am I. However, if you just don’t give a damn about your appearance and the very obvious presence of animal hair on a fairly nice overcoat, I’m afraid I probably can’t love you.

These are the thoughts that run through my single-at-60 mind. The left side of my brain is way too judgmental while the right side is willing to entertain myriad reasons as to why that pet hair is there. Both have their place when it comes to love or the possibility of it. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Relationships

Independent Woman Still Wants the Right Man

October 19, 2016

By Chelsey Drysdale

“From a simple supply and demand point of view, women do have something to worry about,” Stanford economist Paul Oyer said earlier this year during an interview with the Dear Sugar Radio podcast. Based on his research, scarcity in the straight world is real; there’s an imbalance when it comes to women seeking men vs. men seeking women.

Oyer’s data supporting the notion “all the good ones are taken” confirmed what I’d been thinking for years. I found it oddly reassuring, as if a doctor had finally diagnosed unique symptoms of which there appeared to be no real origin.

“…and it gets much worse as [women] age,” Oyer said. “The numbers change dramatically starting really at age 30, but once you hit 40, it’s just pretty dramatic.”

I nodded as I drove near my tiny studio apartment in Long Beach, where I worked and lived alone.

Finally, I thought. Proof of what I already know. I’ve often thought, I’ve aged out of the market.

Maybe this information serves to reinforce my fear of “getting back out there,” providing me with an excuse to hide in an impenetrable bubble. The pain of loss is excruciating; the pain of loss multiple times is unbearable. But loneliness is debilitating too, and I don’t want to be alone forever. It’s not in my nature. Continue Reading…

Girl Power: You Are Enough, Guest Posts, Letter to myself, Self Love, Young Voices

Dear Younger Me

January 6, 2016

By Angela Kirchner

Dear Younger Me,

If you were reading this now you would probably be staring at it wondering when you got so serious. It probably barely has your attention as you think about some boy. Is it Dylan? Or have you not met him yet? That is what I am here to talk to you about. Whoever that boy in your head is, and I know there is one, he does not matter. The next five won’t matter either. I know that sounds crazy because you are supposed to date as you grow up and it is supposed to be fun and it is. It is fun until you realize you did not do it out of love. You dated to say you could have.

The funny thing is, through all this I broke hearts more often than I had my heart broken so the fact that I want you to change almost does not make sense. But the thing is, when you break someone else’s heart it hurts you too. Date the boy you like, but do not date the boy who just likes you. Someday you will come across someone who is both of those things and I know because I did and I am you and when you break up you will have a real reason. It will not be because you got bored. It will not be because talking to him annoyed you more than it made you happy. Do not date the boy that you can walk away from and not think about how much it hurts afterwards. That boy does not matter.

I know you only dated him because his friend said you were not enough and you just want to prove that you are. I know because I did that and I took someone’s time just to prove my worth to another boy. In the end none of the boys ever mattered. Not a single one. The only one who really matters is you. And you will be happy and laugh at your own jokes. You will sit in a dorm room next to your makeshift sister and laugh about things you saw online while you try and write that paper that is so easy but will take so much time. These are all things I have done without a boy by my side. The only difference is, I can feel in my heart all the boys I hurt and all the ones who hurt me.

So, younger Angela, you are beautiful. And you are worth it. And no matter how many times you are told by family members that your sister is so pretty and no matter how many times you think that means you are not it will not change anything. Breaking the heart of a boy will not change anything either. The boys do not matter, and until you are much older, they never will.

Love, Me.

Angela Kirchner is an undergraduate student at Emmanuel College in Boston, MA. An English major, she is working on progressing her writing and hopes to publish her own works someday. A former cheerleader, she is often upbeat and optimistic with a competitive drive. She comes from the small town of Billerica, MA with three siblings. She holds a love of books and speaks her mind on social issues.

Join Jen for a weekend retreat at Kripalu Center in Western Massachusetts Feb 19-21, 2016.
Get ready to connect to your joy, manifest the life of your dreams, and tell the truth about who you are. This program is an excavation of the self, a deep and fun journey into questions such as: If I wasn’t afraid, what would I do? Who would I be if no one told me who I was?
Jennifer Pastiloff, creator of Manifestation Yoga and author of the forthcoming Girl Power: You Are Enough, invites you beyond your comfort zone to explore what it means to be creative, human, and free—through writing, asana, and maybe a dance party or two! Jennifer’s focus is less on yoga postures and more on diving into life in all its unpredictable, messy beauty.
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Binders, Guest Posts, Sex, Sexuality

The Near Miss

July 19, 2015

By Lindsay Miller

When I was in high school, I dated an appalling-in-retrospect string of men five years or more my senior. I met most of them at the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was where my friends and I spent our adolescent Saturday nights. The twentysomething men who hung out there treated us like adults, or what we imagined that to mean at fifteen: they smiled and nodded thoughtfully when we spoke, leaned in as though our every stray thought was fascinating. They made us feel respected, intelligent, mature.

I knew, abstractly, that older men who dated younger women – not women but girls, high school girls, girls not even old enough to drive – were creepy and better avoided. But for some reason it never occurred to me that that applied to my own life. The guys my friends and I dated made it seem like there was nothing strange about men in their twenties sexually pursuing teenage girls – after all, we were so old for our age. We were so wise. They had never met girls like us, girls who knew so much, girls who understood them so well. They told us this over and over, every one of them, like reading from a script: You’re so cool. You’re so different from all the others. When I was young, I didn’t understand that as an insult, lifting girls up in the singular while putting us down in the plural. I was dying to feel older, which I accomplished by wearing impossibly short skirts and sky-high platform shoes, carrying a tiny knife disguised as a tube of lipstick in my purse and feeling sly and dangerous. I wanted to feel desired, and the men I met were more than happy to comply – to tell me I was beautiful in my Hot Topic bustiers, breasts hiked to the collarbone, boots laced up to the knee.

On Saturday nights in high school, my curfew was five a.m. I told my parents that I spent those early morning hours hanging out in a diner with my friends, girls a year or two older than me who would drive me home. Some nights that was true. Some nights, though, I caught rides with men I’d never met before, circled the city endlessly or found places to park where the streetlights didn’t reach. Or my friends and I ended up back at someone’s house, one of those horrible shared houses that all men in their twenties seemed to live in: broken furniture, cigarette butts in beer bottles, nothing in the refrigerator. We sat awkwardly on lopsided couches making tense small talk while one girl or another disappeared into a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, giggling, hand in hand with a man five, seven, ten years her senior.

When I was fifteen, I dated a man named Michael. He was twenty-three and already divorced, had fled the state of Texas to get away from his ex-wife, who he said had broken his heart so badly he didn’t know if he could go on living. I found this tragically romantic, imagining I might be the one to heal his wounded soul. On Valentine’s Day, he gave me a rose, already wilting. He offered to buy me a cell phone so that he would be able to hear my voice whenever he wanted.

Later that year there was Steven. I don’t remember exactly how old he was, but he must have been at least twenty. The night we met, he pulled me away from my friends, around the dark side of a building into an alley where he pushed me up against a wall and kissed me so hard it made my teeth hurt. In the gray early morning hours, he took my friend Jocelyn and me back to his apartment, where we sat on the edge of a filthy couch watching Steven and his roommates smoke cigarettes and complain about their jobs. I can see now that their lives were small and grimy, with little joy besides driving fast and listening to loud music, playing pool in bars where the very air felt gritty and making out with girls too young to know better. But to me, back then, it seemed glamorous and important. Continue Reading…

Abuse, Binders, Guest Posts, Relationships

Finding Love After Trauma.

May 13, 2015

By Alana Saltz

Everything terrible he did to me was supposed to be a joke. The first time I made a self-deprecating comment, he slapped me hard in the face. When I was being indecisive, he put his hands around my throat. During a phone conversation, he said that he would lock me in a box and throw me in the ocean if I ever cheated on him. I told him that his comment bothered me, and he said, “Don’t cheat on me then.”

Whenever I managed to gather my courage and confront him about the things he did, he told me he was just joking. He didn’t seem to understand that I didn’t like the way he was joking. It really wasn’t funny.

Several times during the course of our relationship, I ended up going home from his apartment and throwing up. The first time it happened was after he slapped me. I felt the nausea coming on and rushed out of his place so he wouldn’t see what I knew was about to happen. He was a smoker, so I blamed it on the cigarette smoke. And maybe it was. But the fear and anxiety that rose up in me when he slapped me, or put his hands on my neck, or made threats that weren’t enough like jokes, made my stomach turn even harder.

I found myself throwing up several more times, something that rarely happened to me, despite having a history of anxiety disorder and anxiety-related nausea. This was something new.

We were only together for six weeks. I couldn’t handle the nausea and the fear I felt around him anymore. He didn’t make me feel safe. When I broke up with him, he yelled at me. He told me he never should have trusted me or opened up to me. I kept saying I was sorry. I couldn’t make the real reason why I was leaving him come out.

You scare me.

– – –

I’d never been in any sort of abusive relationship before. I wasn’t sure this even counted as one. I felt shaken but was afraid of overreacting. After a few months, I took steps to move on. I went to a “Geeks and Nerds” singles mixer held by a Meetup group in Culver City. There, I met a very chatty, very eager guy who latched onto me for the entire night.

He decided we were meant for each other because we were both in our mid-20s, had Jewish backgrounds, loved music, and grew up on the east coast. At the end of the night, he kissed me and told me he wanted to see me again the next day. When I got home from the mixer, I spent the night curled up in my bed clutching my stomach, waves of nausea hitting me hard.

I didn’t see him again. For the next six months, at the end of every date I went on with someone I met online, I came home with a bad stomachache. It got to the point where just the thought of dating was enough to bring queasiness.

I began to see a new therapist who specialized in anxiety disorder and cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT was something that had helped me in the past. It focused on fixing distorted thought patterns and the behaviors caused by them. Anxiety had made me nauseated many times, but it had never made me throw up before. Obviously something was very wrong.

My therapist assured me that, although it would take time to recover from the trauma I’d experienced, I would eventually be able to be with someone again. She taught me meditation and breathing techniques. She trained me to think of the situation in new ways. Still, the stomachaches came. I felt like I’d resolved things in my mind, but my body wouldn’t let me date.

“Will I ever get better?” I asked her, over and over again.

“Yes,” she told me. “When you find someone you feel safe with, this will go away. But you have to work on it too. You have to retrain your mind and body not to associate men with danger.”

But I couldn’t make it stop.

– – –

Almost a year after the breakup, I went on a first date with a man named PJ. We had been in touch online for almost two years but hadn’t met in person yet. We talked now and then, each time never quite connecting, never taking it to that next step of actually meeting.

But there was something about PJ. I liked his round glasses and funny beard, the fact that he was an artist and creative, and the things he said in his profile about how he tried to always be there for people. I had a feeling that he might be someone I could trust, someone who could really care about me. I still had my worries about the anxiety and nausea, but I didn’t think he would make me feel nervous or pressured. He seemed safe.

PJ and I met up at a café halfway between his place in Redondo Beach and mine in Pasadena. We chatted for a few hours about art, writing, and Doctor Who while sipping boba teas. He was intelligent but not arrogant, laid back but energetic, interested but respectful of my boundaries. We spent the week before our second date talking online and on Skype. I shared some of my short stories and essays, and in return, he showed me his art and sent me a poem. His poem, “a wake,” was about wanting someone to see him. He wanted someone to see who he really was and then tell him not to wake up.

It was his dream, and it was my dream too. That was when I knew that we might be onto something. Continue Reading…

Dear Life., Guest Posts, Relationships

Dear Life: Help! Dating Is Hard.

January 20, 2015

Welcome to Dear Life: An Unconventional Advice Column.*

Your questions get sent to various authors from around the world to answer (and please keep sending because I have like 567 writers that want to answer your burning questions. Click here to submit a letter or email dearlife@jenniferpastiloff.com.) Different writers offer their input when it comes to navigating through life’s messiness. We are “making messy okay.” Today’s letter is answered by A. Wolfe!

Send us your questions because there loads of crazy authors waiting to answer ‘em. Just kidding, they aren’t crazy.

Well okay, maybe a little. Aren’t we all? xo, Jen Pastiloff, Crazy Beauty Hunter. ps, I will see you in London Feb 14th!! Only 5 spots left!

Dear Life,

I don’t mean to brag, but I’m a pretty cool person. Well, maybe not “cool,” I’ve never been cool (other than for a few inexplicable months in second grade), but I have a lot to offer the world, as a worker, as a thinker, as a friend, as a girlfriend.

The girlfriend part is hypothetical; I’ve never really had a boyfriend. I think I could be a pretty good girlfriend, accounting for a learning curve. And I’ll admit, I don’t come across this brashly in real life, there’s just something about writing that gives me confidence. The point is, I’m a good person, and I think I’d be a good girlfriend. But I’m just terrible at meeting guys! I find myself accidentally leading more and more towards a monastic lifestyle. I work from home, and when I go out for dinner or whatever, I’m usually catching up with a friend and focusing on them, not on trying to flirt with boys. I’ve tried online dating, but I’m not really in an online dating “mood” right now (and I definitely need to be in the right mood for it).

I’m at peace with being single, don’t get me wrong, but I’d like to try having a boyfriend for a bit. In my 23 years on this planet, I’ve occasionally gotten close to a relationship, but never quite reached that point. But please, life, give me the kick in the butt I need to get out there and meet some boys! And some how-to tips would be most appreciated.

Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being.

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