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An unexpected rain starts to pelt the East Village, and I duck into a dimly lit wine bar, pretending to buy something, a highly processed, manufactured excuse to get out of surprise weather.
Well, I don’t exactly have to pretend to buy something here. I’m 20 minutes early to a first date, something which I’m coming to understand is a direct byproduct of my dad, who is exceptionally early no matter where need to go, for reasons both practical and spiritual. On my initial move to New York, the flight was at 4pm, and he suggested getting to the airport no later than 10:30 in the morning. “It is new adventure for you. Have to make sure not stuck in line.”
One of the nice parts about getting older is the sense that you can compromise on things with your parents. So we got to the airport at 11AM, and I read my book for 4 hours.
The leather booths at the wine bar make me feel at ease. Everyone in here is attractive, or at the very least, not ugly. That seems to be a common thread here in Lower Manhattan- I haven’t met a single unattractive person in this part of town. There are people with crooked smiles and bad haircuts, but no one here is ugly. And even if they’re close, they make up for it with some other gravitational pull, like a well put together outfit, or a job that pays hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, with a title like ‘creative director’, or as I hear so often down here, a ‘VP’ of something or other. The watches of the men glitter in the same way the necklaces of the women do, in a place like this. In a place like this, I always wonder if the man’s Submariner is fake. In a place like this, I never doubt that the woman’s Prada necklace is real.
I plop down into a booth with my date and hit the ground running. There is no talk of work and for that I am thankful. By the end of these 3 or 4 hours, I’ll still have no idea what she does, and for that, I am even more thankful. It’s almost become a litmus test for me- how long can we keep this up before we have to fall back on the thing that ensures our direct deposit? Like a Godard film, the conversation veered between the exceptionally high brow and deviously low brow. (Unlike a Godard film, I was a respectful king and did not try to start a socialist revolution at the bar.) She, a New Yorker of 8 years, was unravelling the experience I had, a Californian turned NYC transplant, of 4 months. I told her I was enamored by the Hasidic community here, a fascination that has grown over the years. As a fairly liberal reformed Jew, I told her it was like seeing a friend still pulling a horse and carriage, years after you came home with a Model T.
There’s a trick mirror between life as someone who is Hasidic and someone who is not, with a healthy amount of head scratching peppered in. I am profoundly confused on why their hats have to be made exclusively of the tails of either foxes or sables. I am sure they are profoundly confused on why I am just a few years away from 30 and single.
As I told my date my fascination with the Hasids, she retorted, citing the way the woman is valued for a very specific few things in their community. Sure, we must imagine that she is happy, or at least content, with her lifestyle, but the traditional ‘goals’ of a woman in a Hasidic community, my date continued, is that of someone who has children and keeps a home. I have no problem with that, but I’d like a little more, she said. And the man, Hasidic men, for me, she continued, their role is more control-oriented than other kinds of relationships, it seems. I don’t know if that’s what being a man looks like to me. What does it look like to you? She asked me this, and then took another sip of her mule.
I thought back to the (very early) ride my dad was giving me to the airport. I couldn’t sleep. I was incredibly excited, but of course, there were some nerves. I was about to fly 3,000 miles away from my family, my friends, and the small, tiny things that made my life so filling here. (Jokingly, at my going away party, a friend that I had only made last year sat down next to me and said ‘we’re really going to miss the mayor of San Francisco!’ That meant something to me. I still think about it, 4 months later. )
After a crazy swerve from the international departures lane into the domestic one, my Dad told me that it was healthy, even good, that I was nervous. He told me this new chapter was going to be about growth. He said it was time for me to be a man, maybe for the first time. If I was younger, I think I would’ve berated him for that last line, as if I wasn’t ever ‘a man’ anytime in my previous life. But now, I’m 27, and I just wanted to know what he meant. “You will have to be strong. That city is not like here. You are going to be by yourself, and you will have to make choices.” I listened to him intently. I fought so much with my dad when I was younger, so realizing in this moment that I wanted to be just like him hit me like nothing else has.
After we pulled into the dropoff for my gate, he looked at me and finished with “Remember. Real man does the hard thing.” We hugged, and I told him I would call him and Mom when I landed.
Back at the wine bar, I think about gurgling out some highly focus-grouped, Hinge approved bullshit like ‘well, you know, men these days are lonelier than ever, so what we really have to do is invest in our communities’ ass response, but I don’t want to. I want to be honest. I tell her I don’t really know what being a man looks like, but I try and be kind whenever I can. I try to not silo myself, I try to not see myself as beneath anyone. Yes, I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but in a clear-my-mind kind of way, not in a we-must-free-Andrew-Tate kind of way.
I tell her, most of all, I do the hard thing, even when I don’t want to. It’s a fairly new constant in my life, one that I’d like to keep.
The rain stops, and I walk her to the Q Train.