New York is a city of singles: one third of all apartments are occupied by one person who turns on the coffeemaker in the morning and turns off the lights at night. Anyone hoping to meet someone here has to observe a few rules. They’re simple and tough – and don’t always end in success.
Dating rules in New York are as simple as they are brutal. Three very serious Asian women explained them to us: if you don’t get kissed on the first date, something’s wrong; after the third date the couple has to sleep together, otherwise it’s all over; if you don’t date several people at the same time, you’re a failure; after a couple of months it’s understood that you’re going steady, but you’re still not officially a couple. Mind you, the three Asian women explaining all this weren’t teenagers, but mature lawyers.
The rules are simple, but they force emotions into such a tight fitting corset that you’re bound to be unhappy in love. The only thing you can turn to is the self-help book area at Barnes and Noble in Brooklyn, where the advice to the lovelorn section is almost as big as the “do-it-yourself home repairs” and “American Civil War” departments combined. There you’ll find “The Five Love Languages,” “Why Men Marry Bitches,” or “When God Writes Your Love Story.” But the standard work in singles literature is a book as efficient as it is romantic entitled “How to Make Someone Love You Forever In 90 Minutes or Less.” After “Minutes” there’s an asterisk to a footnote that advises, “maybe even less!”
Yes, New York is the city of singles. One-third of the inhabitants live alone, turning the coffee machine on in the morning and turning the lights off at night. The city has held the title “city of lonely hearts” for over a century. Mark Twain called New York “a splendid desert—a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.” In one of J.D. Salinger’s stories, the hero prays to be left alone and notes that wishing to be alone “is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all, everything I touched turned to solid loneliness.”
Singles and Speed-Dating
As you rush through New York’s streets, you seldom see couples and if you do, they’re usually tourists. Are these lost souls, Starbucks cups in hand, all single? And if so, are they single because they want to be or because they have to be?
The “Madame X” bar is just a few minutes from one of Manhattan’s main shopping streets. The interior: red plush with pictures of naked women on the walls. There’s an upper floor with a private room where singles meet for “speed- dating.” This method of getting to know each other isn’t new. Every city has places where people can quickly become acquainted. You have to think of speed-dating as a mass communications exercise. The women sit around low tables and the men wander from table to table. After four minutes, a gong sounds and the conversations are interrupted; the men move on to the next table. The conversations usually go something like this:
“Nice to meet you, what do you do, this is what I do, do you like cats/putt-putt golf/bondage, have you ever come here before?” GONG!
Kristin sits at table number seven. She’s a paralegal and, “like everybody else in New York” is writing a novel in her spare time. She openly admits she’s lonely. She’s over forty and feels the clock ticking for her if she wants children. Love, she says, takes up a lot of time. She works long hours, and then there’s the novel so there’s not much time left over for other people. She doesn’t use words like “friend” or “love” but talks of “partners” and “relationships.” Steve tells a completely different story. He could have a girlfriend now if he wanted one but he’s very picky. The only reason he’s roaming around here at speed-dating is because it’s the Christmas season. In his mid-forties, he feels like an outsider if he shows up at family celebrations without an escort. “My brother’s married, my sister’s married and my parents think my social behavior is abnormal.” Francoise forced herself to come here this evening. She actually doesn’t want to meet men. She’s shy and the American dating ritual is foreign to her – her parents come from France. Tonight she’s brave and actually gets through the 4-minute conversations with strangers just so she doesn’t have to sit alone at home.
“It’s completely OK to be single here.”
Hearing all this makes one want to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, but the despair isn’t shared by the natives. New York is home to the most singles, but the state has the third lowest suicide rate in the nation. Apparently, the hell of loneliness isn’t so bad. Take a look at Times Square. At first glance, you see only loners who neither notice nor speak to one another. Look again and you see tourists asking passers-by to take pictures of them, traffic cops flirting with shop girls, friends going to the movies together. There may not be many strong social contacts, not many couples or large families, but there’s a lot of casual social contact in New York.
John has a neighbor, a Sicilian who often has him over for breakfast, and with whom he discusses Mussolini for hours on end. He also belongs to a church congregation where sings Gregorian chants every Sunday and a neighborhood tavern where the staff greets him like an old friend. Erika has been in New York for six months and already knows a doorman who lets her into the club for free. She goes skating with a neighbor and she visits the Metropolitan Opera with a gay office colleague. She says, “I used to live in New Jersey. There were only families there who lived in their own houses and I mostly felt alone like some exotic animal. There are a lot of singles in New York. It’s completely OK to be single here.”
Eric Klingenberg teaches sociology at New York University. He’s currently writing a book titled “Alone in America.” He and his research team have interviewed over 200 single people about their experiences, 160 of whom were native New Yorkers. He says, “I worry about the poor and the elderly who live alone. I worry about sick people who live alone. But we have to ask ourselves the question why there are people who somewhere in the past made a conscious decision to live alone.” Solitude can be a transition from youth to maturity or it can be a sign of economic success. Or it simply can be a sign of quirkiness. New York, in actuality, isn’t just a city of singles but also a city of eccentricity. You can be anything you want to be in New York City, except fat or Republican.
Almost all New Yorkers are looking for fun
It’s no wonder that New York is also the city of the pick-up artist. “You’re everything I ever wanted for Christmas,” swore one speed-dater at Madame X’s club. If you look at the contact ads on Craigslist, America’s favorite internet marketplace, you’ll see that nearly every New Yorker is looking for fun and practically none are looking for a serious love relationship. There’s just too many to choose from. And that’s exactly where the problem lies: you can’t see the forest for the trees. Thousands of unchecked possibilities end up as not a single opportunity. Singles go hand over hand from one dream to the next and in their haste they miss real life.
Right after the last gong, Kristin leaves the speed-dating group in frustration. “Nothing but idiots and nut cases here,” she says, and adds, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”
Singles in New York may be experiencing the same thing as the youth in Josef Freiherr von Eichendorff’s poem when he heard thousands of voices singing to him from the abyss:
“And as he arose from the chasm,
He stood there exhausted and old,
His ship in the depths of the sound,
Nothing was heard all around,
But above him the wind and the cold.”
Good work on the smooth translation Ron.