Quirkyalone

Dear Quirkyalone: Send Us Your Questions and Concerns, Compliments and Complaints!

Sep 21, 2009 - Written by Onely  |  Filed under: Personal Growth, Quirkytogether, Single Life

Dear Quirkyalone: Advice for QuirkyLiving is a weekly guest column by Lisa and Christina at the singles’ advocacy blog Onely. Our column appears here every Monday — but we’re running low on questions!

So, dear readers: Do you have dilemmas, conundrums, burning (or mundane) questions about quirkyaloneness and quirkytogetherness? What questions do you have about optimum quirkyliving? What’s come up in your life recently where you could use some advice, a pep talk, or maybe even some tough love? When you’re making up your own road map for (quirky)living, you need thoughtful advice. We’re here for you — and more importantly, we want to HEAR from you!

Please send your questions and concerns, compliments and complaints to: onely AT onely.org

In the meantime, Happy National Singles’ Week! We’re celebrating with a blog crawl sponsored by Single Women Rule — check it out!

– Lisa and Christina

Radically Honest Online Dating

Sep 16, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Dating, Featured, Quirkytogether

Welcome to the online candy store of love, our dystopic world of disposable dating. Internet dating can become an exercise in ego stroking and gratification, getting emails and winks about how pretty and wonderful you are. It can be a perpetual dip into window shopping for love, rather than a means to an end of actually meeting someone and patiently getting to know them. Find a flaw, and it’s on to the next person.

In cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, where online dating has been destigmatized, it’s easy to meet someone new for drinks, much harder but to build a relationship that spans longer than four dates. So perhaps the answer is not to shy away from online dating, but to transform it.

Perhaps one solution is Radically Honest Online Dating (RHOD). The idea came to me, as most ideas do, from a conversation with a friend.

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Zeitgeist | Defending Marriage . . . and Singledom

Aug 13, 2009 - Written by Deborah Hymes  |  Filed under: Featured, Pop Culture, Quirkytogether, Relationships, Single Life

You’d think it was the first time anyone’s ever gotten a divorce.

Sandra Tsing Loh’s recent admission in The Atlantic that she’s divorcing her husband after 20 years (following her own extramarital affair) has ignited a firestorm of high-minded controversy debating the pros and cons of marriage. The story was picked up nationally, with nearly all the major news outlets chiming in online, on air and in print.

The particular point of contention is Ms. Loh’s theory that perhaps the reason we have a divorce culture is because we marry too often. Citing “all the abject and swallowed misery” she observes in modern marriage, she wonders, “Why do we still insist on marriage?”

Then she really gets down to it, ending her polemic with a

“final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.”

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The Truth About Me and Quirkyalone

Jun 21, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Quirkytogether, Relationships, Single Life

Transparency is a major buzzword in Internet circles these days. It’s about sharing who you are through YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, enough to make you seem more real and a little vulnerable. Transparency is said to bring us closer together. In business and government, transparency theoretically makes institutions more accountable.

It’s strange to be a nonfiction writer who has always specialized in writing about culture through the prism of my own life now that everyone is sharing tidbits of their lives online. I’m suspicious of the belief that we should all be transparent. I know how carefully I and other nonfiction writers and memoirists consider which stories and details to share. We don’t tell them in real-time. It’s impossible to predict how careless sharing will haunt us in the future, whether in the workplace or a relationship.

But now I feel blocked, I decided to give the whole transparency thing a try. What’s the worst thing that can happen?  If there’s anything I’m passionate about, it’s honest communication.

I have decided that it might be interesting to be more transparent at this moment about my tangle of ambivalence  regarding quirkyalone ten years after originally writing an essay defining the term (and five years after publishing my book).

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Time To Wake Up to the Male Biological Clock?

Apr 16, 2009 - Written by Elline Lipkin  |  Filed under: Featured, Parenting, Quirkytogether

Here’s a preview of what’s to come has Quirkyalone expands to become a group blog. This piece is written by my fantastic, quirkytogether poet friend Elline Lipkin. It’s cross-posted on girlwpen.com.

Lisa Belkin, ever on top of the nuances and foibles of dating, mating and family making in our time, points in a recent Sunday New York Times magazine piece to a new study that is sure to make (at least some) men squirm and women, as she puts it, “chortle” with delight; although the news is, for anyone who thinks about having kids, actually sobering.

Women often bear excruciating pressures around choosing when to have a child, from all angles, while men are told their biology is limitless, hence their chance at fatherhood is as well. Not so anymore. Throughout the past few years more and more evidence is coming to light linking a father’s age at conception to schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder, as she points out (while the mother’s age at conception shows no such correlation). Two years ago the New York Times also ran a piece entitled “It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too”. Now, Belkin highlights an Australian study that shows that children born to “older fathers have, on average, lower scores on tests of intelligence than those born to younger dads.

There are those who will take issue with the research, claim there’s no adjustment for environment, individual father’s IQ, parental involvement and more. But here are the two lines that made me want to sit up and shout “so there!”: “French researchers reported last year that the chance of a couple’s conceiving begins to fall when the man is older than 35 and falls sharply if he is older than 40.” Later in the article Belkin quotes Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center who says, “It turns out the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father.” Ha! I wanted to shout at the screen as I was reading.

Really, what I wanted was to do was shout this to all the 50something men who, when I was 35 and entering into the online dating world, contacted me, ignoring their agemates, specifically because they felt they were “finally ready” to get around to starting a family. Most were utterly unapologetic that part of what they were seeking was a woman they perceived to be still fertile enough to incubate their suddenly desired offspring. My response that being contacted in part so I could incubate a legacy child for them was insulting often fell on deaf ears.

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A Sweet Quirkytogether Vows Column in the New York Times

Apr 14, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Quirkytogether

Guilty as charged: Like many women, I sometimes read the New York Times Sunday Styles’ section wedding announcements. I’m not so much keeping score (I don’t really care about marriage-as-status), but I am looking for inspiration in the slog for committed romantic love; at the same time, I sometimes avoid this section. There are too many fresh-scrubbed, cookie-cutter smiling wedding pictures from perfect 29-year-old couples whose fathers are investment bankers and who both attended “most competitive” colleges. In any case, every so often, the Vows column features older kindred spirits whose love stories are simply too quirkytogether to not share. Here’s one of them, and why I loved it.

1) They met on a subway, she approached him (he was reading a philosophy book), and she shouted out her email address to keep the possibility of future communication alive as she exited the car (death to all books that say women shouldn’t make the first move!)
2) He hadn’t been in a serious relationship “since the first Gulf War”: love the honesty of just putting that out there
3) The final quote: “I see beyond the nerd in him, he sees beneath the gaudy in me,” the bride said. “For the first time in my life, Jeff makes me feel fully seen, fully accepted, fully loved.”