As someone who has been in the same city for the last fifteen years, meeting new people to date can be a little bit like a waiting game. Dallas is a city where a lot of people stay for a long time if they’re from here, but the new faces tend to come and go. When a new person comes into our “Young Adult Jewish Community,” it’s like a feeding frenzy. We go from calm, collected adults to hungry, overeager singles on the hunt for the next potential spouse.
I was extremely guilty of this for a while, but in the last year I’ve tried to fix my problem of familiar faces: I’ve started looking outside my city. Through the miracle of Skype, and a mother who was always meant to work as a private investigator (she has a PhD in late-night Googling), I have avoided being tricked by people into strange situations. I’ve also met some amazing people in some amazing places. Starting in April of this year, I widened my search parameters largely to include “relocation,” and occasionally to just people who are online anywhere in the U.S.
Though I worried (and almost secretly hoped, for the sake of a great story) that my first long-distance match would actually be a crazy cat lady, I was in safe hands after a short drive to Little Rock, Arkansas on July 4th. In fact, my four-day-long and three-state-wide first date weekend was one of the best dates I’ve ever been on. Though the relationship didn’t work, it gave me a lot of hope in the possibility of meeting wonderful women outside of Dallas. I even went on a date with a girl I met on JDate while on vacation in New York and have set up Skype dates with other girls in random places.
Is it the most physically-rewarding kind of relationship? Definitely not. But it’s the kind of thing that stops me from excusing my relationship situation by saying, “There’s no one left in this city!” My dating pool suddenly got a whole lot deeper.