Post 4: How many dates should you wait?

originally created as column 4, September, 2000

Despite our supposedly modern society, and even those enough intelligent enough to use condoms and get periodic HIV tests, many of us still agree that one does not go to bed on the first date. So the question is, on what date is it ok to go to bed? There seems to be some consensus that the fourth date is passable but that the fifth or sixth is more respectable, and others say waiting for 20 dates is a real test of spiritual awareness and restraint.

So is it ok to kiss? To walk hand in hand, to put one’s arm around his/her partner in the movies. And by sex are they talking about intercourse or any type of physical contact? And what’s a date anyway. If phone conversations don’t count as dates, what happens if you have phone sex? And how often do you have dates. If a new potential partner sees you every day or twice a week, or only once a week, it will take anywhere from 20 days to 20 weeks to sleep with him? Sure, you will get to know each other better, but in the meantime he is probably sleeping with someone else, or you are masturbating like crazy and starting to worry whether reality will match your fantasy. Yes, there are some relationships that actually develop after going to bed on the first or second date, but they are far and few in this Israeli dating world, unless it is a relationship that is mainly sexually oriented, and then why do we care if they like pets, children, are bachelors or divorced. I recently fell for an intelligent non-smoking divorced man who has one child and he only wanted a sexual relationship. I thought, what a waste. If I want only a sexual relationship, that’s what bachelors are for? What a waste of a divorced man with a child.

I am looking for a partner and potential father figure for my son, as well as a friend and a lover. For lover, I would prefer an old friend, a “yeziz”. (Combination of the Hebrew word ‘yedid’ (friend) and ziyun (fuck). (In the tv program they call them “Fuck Buddies”). Good friends that sleep together are much safer than new ones. For the yezizim, I know where things stand. I know we can’t ever really be a couple and then I don’t have to worry about emotional attachment and can have “sex netto”, as I’ve heard this type of relationship being referred to.

This writer has yet to wait 20 dates. She hasn’t even had a third date in months.

Post 3: Working on our relationship

originally created as column 3, September, 2000

Child educators say to call a spade a spade. That means a penis a penis, a vagina a vagina, etc. etc. Yet some people still have a problem or are embarrassed to call body parts by their rightful name or even having sex by its name. Having sex, making love, screwing, fucking, fornication, sleeping together, “knowing in the Biblical sense” “were intimate” “were romantic”.

The intimacy one I love. I mean you can have sex without being intimate at all, without knowing your partner’s last name, or how many sugars he takes in his coffee. Does he drink coffee? Does he offer you coffee? Ok – but we’ll leave that for “how many dates to wait” chapter. My friend, married about a year, found a solution to talk about sex without giving it away completely. When she has sex with her husband, she refers to it to “working on her relationship”. So if I’ve called late at night and her answering machine is on, yet I had spoken to her only a half-hour earlier and I didn’t think she was going out anywhere, chances are she is working on her relationship. Or when I ask couples how their weekends are or what they did on Saturday and they say “nothing”, then I know that they are also “working on their relationship”.

This writer wouldn’t mind an entire weekend to work on her relationship, if she had one to work on.