Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 152: Zach

Prompt: "A song that has a type or brand of candy in its title"

Selected by Zach

"Candy"

Mandy Moore

So Real, 1999

I can group music categories from my middle school / early high school years into categories, and list them in order of how big each act in each category was, in my mind. 

There were the Boy Bands: Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, 98 Degrees. There were the weird and slightly scary metal bands: Limp Bizkit, KoЯn, Orgy, Papa Roach. There were the fun rock bands: Sugar Ray, Smash Mouth, Third Eye Blind, Lit, No Doubt. There were the slightly darker rock bands: Lifehouse, Matchbox Twenty, Everclear, 3 Doors Down, Goo Goo Dolls, Creed. There were the rappers: Eminem, Dr. Dre, Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Lauryn Hill, DMX, Will Smith. There were the at times fast and at times slow sensitive people: TLC, Usher, Destiny's Child, Aaliyah, Tyrese, Brian McKnight. 

And then, of course, there were the female pop stars. To me these are the most easily ranked and delineated. It's a list of four, and everyone else was either part of a different genre or looking up at them from the bottom of the mountain. In order of importance/popularity: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore.

She might have been at the bottom of the list, but Mandy Moore was the one I had a crush on. My biggest crushes as a kid were probably Mandy Moore and Julia Stiles. Something about the video for "Candy" got me, as did watching Mandy Moore tearfully watch her then-boyfriend Andy Roddick win the US Open in 2003. Watching "Save the Last Dance" helped Julia win my heart. But I never watched Mandy Moore star in This Is Us, and I have no idea what Julia Stiles is up to now. The way they existed in my middle school / high school years is how I see them now.

Sometimes it feels like my adult life is just full of crushes. I feel like I fall in love with someone new every weekend, every new person that I meet that seems interesting who seems like they could be a match. 

One year ago, I waited at a bus stop after going to a music and art festival and a beautiful and interesting woman was also waiting to return to Tel Aviv. We talked, and she told me her first name and that she had just moved to Tel Aviv to start a PhD in political science. I assumed she'd ride the bus with me to the last stop, but she rushed off the bus quickly and earlier than I thought, before I had a chance to ask for her number. I frantically got off the bus at the next stop and ran back, hoping to catch her, but she was gone. No problem, I thought, I know her name and what she does day to day, I'll be able to find her on Facebook (or even on LinkedIn, that dating site masquerading as a professional networking website). I asked one of the leaders of the local synagogue if he knew her and he said he had just met her, too. But I couldn't find any trace of her, online or anywhere, even after a lot of searching. A few days later, October 7 happened, and a lot of people bolted the country. My friend said he also couldn't track her down, and I assumed she was gone. 

I mostly wrote off any possibility of meeting her again until a few weeks ago, when my friend hosted a small pre-Yom Kippur fast day meal. Someone named A (let's call her New A) walked in. I didn't make the connection at first. But then she said she was a PhD student and a light bulb went off—it was New A! I brought up the bus ride, and she remembered. But I couldn't ask for her number then with everyone around. My friend told me we were in different places religiously, and I felt kind of weird asking her female friend for her number, so I didn't do anything, until I ran into her a few days ago, at another gathering. It was a holiday, and we weren't using our phones. "I'll have to get your info," I said to her. "You can get it from [our mutual friend]," she said. "Tell me your number, I'll remember it," I said. And she told it to me, not believing I would remember. But I did, of course, and I texted her the next day, and asked her if she wanted to get a drink. She said yes—"sounds great," in her words. I told her I'd be in touch after Shabbat. Sunday (yesterday) I texted her to ask her if Tuesday worked for the drink. 

Now it's nearly 24 hours later and she hasn't responded. Did she even want to get a drink in the first place? Will she respond?

This is what experience has taught me: Pretty much any time that a woman flakes a bit in a dating context, it either means they're not actually interested and are avoiding the situation or are semi-interested because you're a "nice" and "good" guy but they aren't all the way in because the only thing that's holding them in is that promise that you might be a good husband and father. The real spark they're looking for isn't there for them.

I'm starting to see some kind of weird pattern emerging in my life: I'm experiencing much more flakiness in dating than I ever have. 

There's this stereotype about men that they're afraid of commitment. The stereotype has validity. There are lots of men who are afraid of commitment. Who are serial daters, who are just looking for some fun and will abandon a woman at a moment's notice. Who want to be "free."

I'm sure I fit some of these stereotypes. I wonder if I'm afraid of commitment, if that's some kind of explanation for why I'm single and dating. I do like to be free. I do like to have the ability to look up flights without having to answer to anyone, to go to an island in Greece and have no one really know where I am in the world. I like to get excited about dating, about who the next crush will be, about the endless possibilities. I think that addiction to the excitement of dating has been my downfall more than that deadly "fear of commitment." Because I have never been a fling person. Any time in my life I've tried to have a fling, it has failed miserably, and it either ended quickly or morphed into a long-term relationship that ended in heartbreak. I'm a relationship guy. I do better in relationships. I feel more myself when I have a partner in my life. 

Women don't have the same reputation as men. They're not typically labeled as being "afraid of commitment." I never thought they were, for the most part. And I realize that I've started to generalize here and there are so many exceptions to what I'm saying. But in the past two years, ever since this relationship ended, I've had so many experiences where a woman took forever to respond to texts, or basically didn't respond at all, or was avoidant or withdrawn in ways that, to me, showed a deeper fear. The older A story (not this A story in this blog post, but the other A, maybe I need to pick women whose name starts with a different letter?) is an illustration of that, but it's not the only one. I've mostly dated women in their 30s, and I wonder if all those years of pain and rejection and heartbreak have hardened their hearts, to the point where their brain is telling them to protect themselves. To not jump in, lest they get their heart broken again. 

What I'm trying to say is that I think women are also afraid of commitment, against popular opinion. And that's been a new realization for me. I can't blame the feeling. There's a natural pull to protect ourselves. What I have a much harder time with is the lack of communication.  

We live in a very fucked up dating generation. The Boomers mostly just got married—they didn't struggle the same way we do. The ability our parents gave us to do anything at all, to be whatever we wanted to be—it extended to dating, too. Now it's a cycle of looking for that spark and for perfection. Our parents were better at looking for a practical life partner, for better or for worse. As millennials, we don't settle, but that leads to all these other problems, some of which I'm talking about right now. There's a reason the word "ghosting" exists now, when it didn't before.

And by no means am I perfect, at all. I've been avoidant, too, and I've made my fair share of mistakes. But I always try to communicate, even if I sometimes lie to myself (and to them) and tell them I really want to continue dating them, even though my gut is telling me to stop. 

Of course, I wonder if I'm doing something that is causing people to flake. Am I coming on too strong? I really try to be aware of not doing that, of trying to not be needy. I don't know. Maybe I am putting out an energy that is making people run away. Maybe there's some spiritual flaw out there that needs rectification. Maybe there's an evil eye over me that I don't know about. I have no idea. Either way I could use a bit of wisdom. Or I could use a little more understanding about why the women I've been dating have been more flaky than ever recently. It really didn't used to be like this.

I don't know if New A from the bus ride will write back. If she doesn't, there's S, who I met three years ago on a camping trip. I crushed on her from the very beginning, but I was dating someone at the time. After that person and I broke up, I asked S out a few months after the trip, and she told me she was in the US, but would get back to me when she was back in Israel. She never wrote me back though (also a low-grade flake), and I started dating someone else. The day after I ran into New A again, I was in synagogue on Yom Kippur, and a face popped out at me from the crowd. I knew her from somewhere. It was... S! Of course, I hadn't seen her in three years. Someone had told me she had gotten engaged (that was two years ago), and then another friend had told me he had run into her at a Shabbat dinner in Denver one year ago, with no wedding or engagement ring on her finger and no man in sight. Now she told me she had just moved to Tel Aviv for an internship. I asked my friend about her, and he said the engagement had broken off. I ran into her again also a few days ago, at a small dinner. We chatted. And my crush rekindled, and I tried to gauge if I should ask her out. I told myself that I needed to see what would happen with New A.

But now New A hasn't written back and S has resurfaced in my imagination. Will she, too, flake?

I can't let that energy permeate my actions. I believe in the energy of self-fulfilling prophecies and I have to treat each romantic possibility as a hopeful, blank slate. In fact, that is how I should treat the new things in life. Without the baggage, without the inner scared child holding me back. Everything new. I can't understand the things that lead to less-than-communicative behavior from potential romantic partners or from anyone else in my life, and it's not my job to understand it right now. 

Let's see what the next day holds. If New A isn't meant to write back, then she won't. And whatever S does—whatever her life experiences have formed her to do—will be. I can only heal myself and withhold blame. Because it's hard to be human, and we're all trying our best.

Even if we flake. 

In conclusion: Mandy Moore rules.