A match made on JDate

I might have gone out with every man on JDate. At least, it felt that way. After my divorce in 2007, I wanted to pick up the pieces of my broken heart (to say nothing of ego) by going and reclaiming the dating life I’d never really had, since I’d gotten married straight out of graduate school.

As a newly-single mom driving my two little boys to nursery school, JDate was an essential tool for me to meet people who were both literate and toilet trained. It was, admittedly, a low threshold.

Jordana and Jon on their wedding day (photo credit: courtesy)

But even though I went on many dates, I didn’t meet my proverbial bashert. If anything, I was becoming more convinced that he might not even exist.

My editors at one Jewish publication were sufficiently amused by my recounting of my dating anecdotes, and thought that maybe I should become a dating columnist – single Jewish mom in the city?

Being a mother already seemed to be man-repellent to a certain set. Surely becoming Carrie Bradshawowitz would be a good way to never meet a man — EVER. Nonetheless, I rose to the challenge. I got movie tickets and then tried to find a man to go with me.

I hadn’t logged on to JDate for a while, and was not particularly excited to get back on and resume the needle-in-a-haystack hunt. But I logged on, and checked out the profiles of guys online.

I found one guy who seemed cute, smart and funny. His profile even reflected some fluency with the English language and a more-than-passing familiarity with its rules of punctuation and spelling. For a writer, it should be noted, this is a tremendous turn-on. He seemed like he had potential.

We emailed back and forth, and, on the phone, set up a date for the movie.

“And I’m taking you to dinner,” he said.

Well, go you!, I thought.

“I just have two questions for you,” he said.

Great, let the freak flag fly, I thought. “Okay,” I said.

“Would you be willing to live in Manhattan or Westchester? Because I don’t want to live in New Jersey,” he said.

“Hmmm,” I said. Freak, I thought. “Manhattan sounds good.”

“Great. Okay, now I know you have two kids,” he said. “Would you be willing to have more?”

I laughed. “Yes…but how about we have dinner first and see how it goes from there?”

He laughed and agreed. Fine, I thought. Not necessarily the man of my dreams, I thought as I hung up, but if it’s not a good date, it’s always a good story.

Well, we ended up having such a great time at dinner that we never ended up going to the movie. I somehow forgave him his lateness — SOMEONE, ahem, had shown up around 20 minutes late! — to the tune of kissing him for a very long time.

I didn’t take the columnist job. We got married less than a year after we met.  We bought a house in (horrors!) New Jersey. We had a daughter last July, and have another daughter on the way (pu pu pu) in October. And I couldn’t be happier.

If I may close, I’d like to quote Penthouse Magazine: “I never thought it could happen to me…”

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Read more Tu B’Av tales here.

Jordana Horn is a journalist, lawyer, contributing editor at Kveller.com and writer at work on her first novel. Sometimes, she sleeps. An older version of this article first appeared here on Jdate. 

Have you found your bashert? Please share your story with us at social@timesofisrael.com, and we may feature it in our Times of Israel Tu B’Av Special.