Me, Love Me” type. Iron grip.
In retrospect, that may have scared men off.
For example, for a brief time while I was working for CNBC, I lived in London. On one trip back from New York, I was seated on what was then a Continental Airlines flight, deep in the heart of coach. The flight had just taken off and gotten to cruising altitude, and I had reclined my seat. Within seconds, the woman behind me (British and a tad weathered-looking) started slamming the back of my seat, calling me a fucking bitch over and over, hitting the seat so violently, I was bouncing back and forth like a slow-moving game of paddleball.
She caused such a stir that the flight attendants came by to investigate what was happening. I was a little shell-shocked, frankly. I moved my seat forward into the fully upright position to calm the conflict, but that didn’t help. She kept kicking and pushing, screaming obscenities. It became clear that she had hit the bottle before boarding and wasn’t just angry at my seat reclining, but basically at everything.
I have flown hundreds of thousands of miles. This had never happened before, and it has never happened since. This was the year 2000, by the way, so for what it’s worth; September 11 hadn’t yet occurred, and bad behavior on airplanes was perhaps tolerated. I’m not sure Crazy Crammed Weathered Lady’s actions would have warranted the plane turning around and landing, but she might have had her wrists put into plastic shackles or been spoken to by an air marshal, at the very least.
Fortunately, the flight attendants just moved me. All of economy was sold out, but there was one empty seat in the front of the plane. That also wouldn’t happen today, with computerized upgrades for frequent fliers and all of that. Still, pre-innovation, seat 7L was mine.
The seat was not the only lucky part of this. Beside me was a scruffy and rumpled but super cute young guy with messy light brown hair, who worked in banking in London. Uh, this was the Universe, pre-me-knowing-what-the-Universe-was, putting me in the right place for a reason. I learned through conversation (or a journalistic grilling) that this interesting guy I was suddenly seated next to had been to a conference in Las Vegas.
During my conversation, err…interrogation, I was able to get from him the name of the conference, the name of the hotel he’d stayed at, and the name of the bank he worked for, but not his last name. We had a great talk, and one of us had a car waiting at the airport in London, which we shared into the city. I don’t remember whose company paid for the car, but I got out first at my flat in Chelsea. I recall that much.
The next day at work, I shared the details of my plane adventure and meeting of aforementioned cute banking guy with a colleague or two. The consensus following our top-level confab regarding my trans-Atlantic plane experience was that I needed to track him down.
To say that I love a good challenge is putting it mildly.
I immediately got down to business, sort of the way I might have tried to line up interview subjects for a story. Armed with limited information and my ability to impersonate a personal assistant, I called the hotel in Vegas and (believe it or not) successfully got a last name. Then, by calling the bank’s main number, I got their standard email address ([email protected])—bingo, I had this guy’s email. I am not sure that would happen today (pretty sure it would not) either. But I was impressed with my stalker keen detective skills then and frankly still am to this day.
I sent him a simple note. Subject: Drink? Body of email: Stephanie, Seat 7L.
His response: Sure.
Holy shit! It had worked.
We made a plan. At the time, it didn’t really strike me that my behavior was offensively aggressive. When we finally did get together, it became clear it had freaked him out and that he was only there to find out how I had tracked him down. Unfortunately, the entire conversation focused on that topic. Clearly, one of us was a better detective.
I didn’t tell him anything, just laughed at each inquiry like a dumb girl (though damn I would have liked to have shared my brilliant tactics), but his assumption was that I was part of the “American Mafia” (he said that with a straight face, like he believed it) or that I’d gone to the trouble of hiring a detective. (Uh, I was hard up, but not desperate. Not quite.)
Okay, so looking back, that sort of assertive behavior might be exceptional for chasing news stories, but also might be frowned upon, invasive, and a little cuckoo-slash-I’m-not-going-to-be-ignored-Dan Fatal Attraction-esque when chasing guys.
So that was that. He never called. Scared of me having a hit put out on him by Uncle Sal, or just disinterested, I’ll never know.
In fairness, the Universe had teed me up. It gave me the potential to find a partner. Having said that, there was some operator error wiping out the Universe’s good work.
Shiny Hair, Shiny Ovaries
Looking back on that London episode as a standard measure and perfect articulation of my Meadow Soprano-esque dating skills, I knew that eventually I would have to call in the professionals to help me develop a multi-pronged approach to finding a date so that, if the Universe provided for me once again, I wouldn’t muck it up. I’d be more ready.
My first stop was enrolling in a seminar aptly offering a lesson in why I must suck at dating, titled Why You’re Single. There was a promise in the literature, but I can’t remember what it was. Obviously fixing the being-single part of one’s life was the main nugget.
My friend Sarah and I went together. We were both hopeful that we would learn something about ourselves and the skills needed to find a husband before our eggs dried up for good, but as we entered a banquet-type room at a hotel in New York, looking around at all the hopeful and yet equally slightly embarrassed-to-be-there women, we grew skeptical.
There were hundreds of women eager to fix the flaw of not yet having found a mate. It was a sea of sad-sack singles. Surely Sarah and I were better than this. That was my first thought. My second was: This is going to be a waste of my time.
The woman leading the seminar opened by saying that, if we were showing up with the attitude that we knew better and that this seminar was dumb, but we grudgingly came with a friend, then we were not going to learn anything.
Hmm. Okay, so she was a mind reader.
I made my best I’m listening face and tried to control the number of times I rolled my eyes.
Initially, two things struck me as semi-interesting. First, she explained that men sometimes want to get our attention by giving us a gift. That lets us know they have noticed us and lets them snoop around a bit to see if we have noticed them too, or if they could inspire us to notice them with a tiny gesture. For example, the teacher said, should a guy at work drop off a pen at your desk just because he had been to the supply closet, accept it. That’s a gift. Don’t say, “I don’t need a pen.”
Like I probably would have or had often done.
And then, be open-minded. Maybe the pen giver wasn’t on your radar, but maybe he should be.
Both seemed to me like sound pieces of advice. Later, the former transcended dating for me. I started to try to be gracious when anybody did something small but nice for me, or accept what they offered up for whatever reason, because perhaps that was what they had to give. Over time, I started to notice more closely the tiny gestures that people made and to receive them all with the same amount of gratitude. Perhaps it made them feel good to do a little something for someone else, and perhaps saying thanks and accepting a gesture was just the right thing to do.
My attitude, as I sat in my seminar, slightly adjusted. Not fully, but slightly.
But then she lost me.
Her next piece of advice: Keep your hair shiny. Why? If you have shiny hair, a man will definitely think you’re fertile, and subconsciously think you are wife material.
Think about that.
The only way to land a husband was to demonstrate that my ovaries were pumping out prime