Archive for October, 2011

I have finally decided that I have exhausted all options and have run out of women to date/marry/mother a child for me in the metropolitan area in and around Houston, TX. Though it is (arguably) the fourth largest city in America and has potentially (kinetically) millions of women, I have met all of them, and they all hate me. Granted, the hookup population is considerably less populous. However, I have broadened my options because I am in survival mode.

Because of this horrible realization, I am officially holding the first official (this is not official) Operation: Procreation. Of course, the goal here is not to procreate per se, it just sounded like a funny title. If you read this, and that’s a bit of a stretch, let me know by sending a message to me (member name: JeremySpoke). Let me know if you would be willing to come visit Houston to see me/pay for my flight to your city. This does not exclude international participants. However, the logistics are inherently more difficult and an international plane ticket is obviously more money. If, however, you are normal and would never fly across the country to see someone based on a joke blog post, just say, “Hi”. I love getting messages, in any format. I never cancel spam or take myself off of mailing lists I don’t belong to anymore just because I love getting messages. You can send me a message that just reads, “I hate you.” On second thought, please do not send me a message that says, “I hate you.”

If you can not message me because you are not a member of 100hookup, it shouldn’t be too difficult to reach me. I am one of only three ‘Jeremy Balkin’s in the world. One is a young man in Australia, and the other is a movie producer in Los Angeles. Sending a message to any one of us should be sufficient.

Every single time I would meet someone I would tell everyone about it. I would talk about how happy I was, how amazing the new guy was, what we were doing, when and where we were going on dates, how much we had in common, the future I imagined us sharing and so on and so forth. The simple fact is that I was excited and hoped time and again that this was the one. Of course, until recently, it never was. And each time there was a break-up I was left having to answer questions and inquiries about the relationship from people who only had good intentions but didn’t know any better.

Another perk to keeping a new love interest to yourself is to keep out the naysayers. Friends of yours who are single and saw the same person on 100hookup or at a singles event may be jealous. These so-called friends may show support to your face, but they may not be sending as positive of vibes behind your back. When you’re single and putting yourself out there, you don’t need anything to get in your way, and that includes any negativity put out into the universe with your name on it. Until it gets serious, keep it to yourself. It will be more special and more authentic that way.

Guys seem to understand this better than women. Most women like to immediately introduce their newest flame to all their friends, whether to show him off or to see how he meshes with your friends or for a plethora of other reasons. Guys, on the other hand, wait as long as humanly possible before introducing a new girl to their friends. Whether they’re worried about the girl seeing them in their element or not wanting to risk their friends outing them as a player or for whatever the reason, guys tend to wait and it would behoove more women to do the same. Keep it to yourself for as long as possible and you will reap the rewards. And if it doesn’t pan out, there will be fewer people to (unintentionally, of course) rub it in your face and remind you of yet another failed relationship on the road to finding your Beshert.

Is online dating turning more into Twitter than ever before?

These days we can access all of our online dating applications through our mobile devices.   What does this mean?  More and more people are no longer taking the time to sit down and actually write well, thought out emails.  Responses are being sent by women while on the go as if they are Twitter updates or responding to text messages.

With each day that passes, I see more emails coming in that are two sentences or fewer.  Many of them barely acknowledge a lot of the information that was written in the previous response, and are just casual, “Twitter-like” responses.

They still show interest.  They still want to talk.  But the effort is not there and they are coming in more brief than ever.

In the fast paced world we live in, is this the future of the way we communicate.  Simple, shallow, rushed responses.  Are we devolving even more than ever?  Will people eventually no longer sit down and write emails? 

I see this as a strong possibility!

This weekend, I’m going to be the first person on the planet (there’s no way that’s true) to Tweet my date. Everything from the awkward first greet to the awkwarder inevitable silence that accompanies any nervous conversation to the awkwardest goodbye-should-I-go-in-for-a-kiss hug will accompany clever lines written for the world to see.

First, I will start a new Twitter account, because my current one, which was supposed to accompany my oh so original blog, is as unread and unused as that blog is today. I will try my best to use a clever moniker like ‘ThisiswhyIwilldiealone’ or ‘Mymotherneedsagrandchild’.

I will begin Tweeting two hours before the date starts. This is the exact time I freak out and ponder spending the evening in my room by myself. I start obsessing over how I will present myself until all I’m left to present myself with is a shaky, sweaty ball that used to compose the pieces of a man. Every twenty minutes, I will muster the courage to concentrate and say something that will fully illustrate just how miserable I feel.

During the date, I will comment on everything both she and I say. Every sentence will be deconstructed until the point when the dinner conversation will consist of me laughing awkwardly while trying to hide the fact that I’m typing things into my cell phone after every sentence she mutters. I will also be sure to cover the moment she storms out of the restaurant because I refuse to talk to her and instead hide under the table with my phone. I will Tweet about eating the rest of the dinner by myself and will be sure to cover my driving home by myself and the following week of loneliness and despair.

Of course, I’m not actually doing this. Although, if you really want to read a minute-by-minute deterioration of a man’s soul, let me know. You will have to pay me a considerable amount of money to cover all of the therapy and drugs that will be needed afterwards.

The adjectives you use to describe yourself in your profile can be more harmful than you may know. The worst word a female can use to describe herself is “cute.” It simply doesn’t illicit a positive response. “Cute” is translated into meaning unattractive, just as “curvy” is translated into overweight. Babies, puppies and stuffed animals are cute. A personality can be cute, but you should find other words to describe your looks. Use a thesaurus if you must.

My friend Mike started chatting with a girl on 100hookup® who didn’t have a photo but described herself as “cute.” Mike made the rookie mistake accepting “cute” as a description from the girl herself! Now, as I mentioned earlier, attractiveness is subjective, but when Mike asked her to send him a photo, she made up excuse after excuse which should have alerted him. Instead, he made plans with her on the basis that she send him a photo before the date. Again, she had an excuse, but again, he ignored his suspicions and drove thirty minutes to meet her anyway. Lo and behold, she wasn’t exactly Mike’s version of attractive, and he learned a lesson the hard way.

Luckily your 100hookup profile includes photos, so your own descriptions of your looks doesn’t totally matter.

Have you ever tried to meet someone outside of 100hookup? It ain’t easy. You have to utilize your J-Dar and even then it’s not always accurate. 100hookup is the only place you can securely go to find only Jews (although the rare goy joins sometimes) but the reality is you are going to meet people in public. You don’t want to begin a conversation with a guy and possibly start to like him before you know if he’s hookup. But you also can’t exactly come right out and ask him, because let’s face it, that’s a bit odd. So, you have to use your instinct and resort to asking subtle questions or making sly comments that will hopefully solve the mystery.

Years ago a girlfriend and I went a new sports bar to watch football’s biggest game of the year. A tall, hot guy with warm brown eyes looked my way and then sent over drinks before joining us. His name was Jason and my J-Dar thought there could be a possibility he was hookup, but Julie was adamant he was anything but. Out of the blue, Julie asks him if he prayed for a Patriots win that morning. His answer: he had gone to Mass the night before. Score one for Julie. Not only was this guy not a Yid, he was Irish Catholic.

My girlfriends and I have placed bets on a guy’s Jew probabilities. The odds are, nine times out of ten he isn’t, but sometimes that one guy sneaks in under the J-Dar without any of us noticing.

On Valentine’s Day a few years ago, my girlfriend Miryam and I were both single so we decided to go out and get our flirt on. We ended up at a new lounge where I immediately saw another tall, attractive man with deep brown eyes (yes, I have a type). Miryam’s J-Dar didn’t even flicker, and I actually agreed with her, but it being Valentine’s Day and me being single, I decided to throw caution to the wind and flirt my heart out. His name was Stephen and in a shocking turn of events, he actually asked me if I was hookup. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I answered yes and a huge smile spread across his face while he exclaimed that he too was hookup. He told me he was really excited because he never meets attractive hookup girls out on the town. I asked him if he ’s ever gone to any hookup events and of course his answer was no. Gotta admit that was a huge turn-off: if he wanted to meet a hookup girl so badly, then why was he wasting his time bar-hopping?

If your J-Dar’s not working, try using Hebrew and Yiddish phrases during normal conversation and see if he picks up on it. This is both a subtle and entertaining way to find out if a guy is hookup.

My friend Sara and I were once at a bar when two good looking guys approached. My J-Dar was all over the place and Sara didn’t seem to have much of a clue either. That’s when I slipped in an “oy vey” as two waitresses nearly collided. Sara picked up on my plan and added a “la’breut” when one of the guys sneezed. But it was when the guys bought us drinks and we toasted with a “l’chaim” that we knew we had our answer: the two guys looked so helpless and confused Sara and I started giggling. The goys must have thought we were totally mishegas with our shtick. Feh!

If you really want to go to a “normal” bar to meet someone hookup, then try going to a bar in Tel Aviv. No guessing involved. And it’s not technically a hookup organized event, it just happens to be a bar in the hookup State of Israel. If you’re able to find out where the “Anglo” bar is, you may even meet yourself an American Jew about to graduate from Medical School at Tel Aviv University who’s applied for an internship at a nearby hospital. Every mother’s dream!

Keep being active on 100hookup, but if you’re caught meeting someone in public and you’re questioning their religion, remember the tips above. But you never know… that guy wearing a cross may have some cute, single hookup friends that he would be happy to introduce you to.

So I had two dates scheduled for last weekend. That’s two dates. To put this enormous number of dates into perspective, the amount of dates I was supposed to go on last weekend outnumbered both the amount of dates I’ve gone on in the last year and the amount of times I shower consecutively before I go out on one date.

I was nervous but extremely excited going into last weekend. I had ideas for what I was going to wear on both evenings. I meticulously planned both dates. I received a text on Thursday that my date for Saturday had to reschedule. It was a little upsetting, but I was more excited about the Friday date, anyway. I couldn’t sleep Thursday night, and woke up at roughly 3 am. I saw that I had missed a text from the night before that basically said that my Friday date also had to reschedule. I spun into a deep depression. I barely made it into work in the morning. My OCD was kicked into overdrive, and I imagined that I would never meet another girl again. I was sweating profusely and shaking violently.

After a bad several days, my first rescheduled date went off well. We went to dinner and I listened, talked slowly, and used good manners when eating a panini. Wow WordPress just told me that ‘panini’ is not a word. My delicious Monday night sandwich would not be pleased with this information.

Anyway the date went well. Since I had not managed to make it to a second date in a very long time, I was really anxious to hear if she wanted to go out again. I texted her a few days later. Wow, ‘texted’ is not a word, either? Anyway, she didn’t write back. I freaked out and convinced myself that no woman would ever love me. I quickly texted a girl whom I had gone on one date with six months ago and never called. Though she was somewhat friendly, I just had no desire to go out with her again. Basically, I was asking myself out on a date with a girl I didn’t like simply because another girl hadn’t answered my text yet. After the date with the girl I didn’t like was confirmed, I finally got a text from the other girl saying she’d like to go out with me again. At least my weekend is full this time.

Just got a new phone number online?  Haven’t met yet?  Haven’t even talked on the phone yet? Grab that smart phone and start texting! 

These days texting is an essential part of online dating.  It will help you get to know the person you are with for a long period of time.  While you spend days randomly texting here and there, the comfort levels will increase and go way up.

By the time you meet for a first date, comfort levels will be so high that it will not feel awkward or like a blind date at all.  Run your messages right and you may even feel like you have already been dating for a long period of time.

How often should you text?

Don’t overdo it.  Remember, you don’t know each other yet, so you don’t want to come across as creepy or stalkerish.  A random text here or there will get the job done. 

More on what to text in the next entry!

A few weeks ago I received what looked like a chain letter but was actually a very interesting email from a man looking for a wife. Like a chain letter, the email had been sent to me by a friend who was forwarding the email from another friend who had received it from another friend. The letter was from a single hookup man asking his friends and friends of his friends and their friend’s friends (you get the idea) to set him up. He said he was really serious about finding his soulmate and getting married, and he would reward whomever set him up with his future wife with a trip to anywhere in the world. I thought the letter was genius. What better way than to promote yourself and your pursuit of your Beshert than through good ol’ fashioned bribery?

Of course he included all of his amazing traits, but he also touched on a few of his shortcomings. His honesty was refreshing. He spoke about his hobbies, his likes and dislikes, and meanwhile kept his tone light and said it as a fact but not arrogantly. It was a great example of how an effective About Me paragraph should read.

So write a similar letter selling yourself and then tweak it to be your About Me paragraph. Maybe the prospects looking at you aren’t your type, but I bet they’ll be happy to send their follow JDating friends your way with the promise of a free trip!

With Steve Jobs’ recent passing, we have lost one of the great icons in American history.  As far as I am concerned, no man has ever been a more efficient CEO or built a more prestigous, pristine company in American history.

With that said, perhaps we can take away a few of the qualities that made him so successful and apply them to the online dating world.

1.  Be selective.

Steve Jobs was never afraid to be extremely selective in the way he built his empire.  His strongest ability was the ability to say no and just focus on a few select products and services.  The same should go for you.  You don’t have to meet every woman or guy you talk to online.  Be selective!

2.  Say a lot in a little.

Steve Jobs coined the phrase, “1,000 songs in your pocket” when introducing the IPod®.  This was a genius slogan that said everything in a sweet, compressed phrase.  Apply this to your emails.  Saying a lot while saying a little can go a long way!  Same goes for your profiles.  Learning how to market yourself is a great skill.

When all is said and done, we can learn a lot from the great Steve Jobs in all walks of life.   Never forget the legend who was Steve Jobs and allow his legacy to live on.