Free Love Sick by Frances Kuffel

thought I was,” I wrote carefully. “Maybe this is not the time for me to date. But you’re smart and have a great job—you’ll be a babe magnet!”
    My mother would have been proud.
    Moshe’s mother, however, would have thought I was being a shiksa basmalke. “If you lose more weight this summer, maybe you’ll be a guy magnet,” he responded.
    A huge shiver overtook me. That was an ego that would definitely have to be checked at the gate.
    • • •
    In the end, I was finding craigslist to be a fabulous source of insults, some obvious and others crafty in the way they led to sabotage. I deleted more liberally and my attention drifted to other things—photographing irises and trying to catalogue (and failing, alas, for another year) the scent of each kind, reading essays I could assign students whose first language ranged from Blanglish * to Nigerian to Danish, and trying to figure out the 1,800 dating websites that promised me true love.
    Which is, of course, when the last possible candidate responded on the last day of the ad.

Four
Wild moose are well known to attempt to have sex with domestic horses.
    He got me by using the word “adaptive” in his first email.
    In case you’re a wonderful man reading this and want to know how to seduce me, I’m a sucker for the slightly unusual, correctly used, succulently pronounced single word. My knees have literally gone weak at the words “apoplectic” and “Luddite.”
    I was so struck by “adaptive” that I didn’t notice the context: “I’m passionate, affectionate, adaptive, attentive.” If I had, I certainly would have asked what the hell all that added up to.
    My lack of questions with Paul has turned into the most heavily researched chapter of this book.
    He offered himself up in the subject line—“You’ve Got Male!”—and followed up with a résumé: Ivy League, on the staff of his undergraduate humor magazine and a stint as a stand-up, attorney for the city, memberships with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the city zoos. I’m always a little skeptical when Jewish men come knocking, but he was divorced and nearly my age. Maybe, I thought, the pressure to keep it kosher eases up after a marriage and fatherhood are checked off one’s list of things to do.
    Please give me back my naïveté, God. The start of my season of dating was already starting to age me unnaturally.
    • • •
    In the second round of emails on that mid-May afternoon, he joked that I looked like Betsy Gotbaum, the ten-year New York City Public Advocate who didn’t do a whole lot of anything from what I could tell. I didn’t mind the comparison physically but, once again, who the hell is reminded of minor politicos?
    Nerds, Frances. Very nerdy nerds.
    I was also somewhat troubled by his enthusiasm for good “logistics” with women, which translated, in my case, into being one stop on his way home from his office. My idea of logistics is whether we can spend a weekend together a couple of times a year.
    This is a point where age matters, although not so much as in how old we are but when we grew up. Paul’s photo showed smiling eyes, almost all of his hair and a copious beard. I didn’t think much about the beard, partly because it got lost in the dark suit in his head shot, but mostly because I graduated from a college-town high school in 1975. In those days I fell asleep to Cat Stevens singing “Wild World.” It didn’t matter that, in 2010, I didn’t want to dress up like Carole King anymore. I sneer at the hippie moms in the neighborhood for living in million-dollar co-ops but never getting a proper haircut. Somehow, though, I didn’t realize that none of the men I saw around my neighborhood looked like they’d stepped off the Abbey Road album cover (including the husbands of the hippie moms).
    I thought he was handsome enough. Maybe I thought if we went out that I’d encourage him to trim things a bit or maybe I was having an acid flashback to Emerson, Lake