Untethering

In Buddhist thought, the difficulties of life all boil down to four Noble Truths. The second of which, “samudaya,” basically posits that the the source of our suffering is craving or attachment; wanting things we don’t have, or not wanting to lose things that we do.

That may indeed be part of the path to enlightenment. But it also explains why new year’s resolutions make us so miserable. We set out with a clear sense of how we want to be different in the year ahead. And then, because real change often feels glacially slow, we slog ahead for a month or so, realize things aren’t yet different, and give up entirely.

Which is why, research suggest, only about 9% of people each year feel like they successfully keep their resolutions. (Indeed, more than 40% expect to fail even before they hit February.)

So, rather than implore you to cling even harder to those earnestly-desired but rarely-reached outcome goals, let me suggest that, this year, you take an entirely different approach. Instead of resolving to reach new outcomes in the year ahead, resolve to follow new routines instead.

Put another way, untether from the outcome, and put all of your focus on the process. Figure out the things you want to do every day and every week over the next year. Then stop paying attention to progress, and stop keeping an eye on the prize. The only wins you need to celebrate are process wins: “I made a weekly grocery run to stock up on vegetables!” “I stuck to my pre-bedtime wind-down alarm last night!” “I made it to the gym the three times I was gunning for this week!”

One of my own process resolutions is to start posting regularly on both Twitter and LinkedIn. Over the course of January, I’ll be aiming to post actionable ideas related to this same concept. Stuff like:

Why we should ditch SMART goals and focus on DUMB habits.
The value of never missing twice.
How to create consistency by shifting your identity.
And ways to become addicted to the process, so that the outcomes take care of themselves.

Until then, let me share a similar thought recently tweeted by entrepreneur Ankur Warikoo. I think it’s so good that I’ve actually printed it out, tacked it over my desk, and will be looking at it all day long over the year ahead:

“Remind yourself that it is the boring that makes shit happen.
When people ask me, ‘What’s next?’
I do not have an answer.
There is no next.
There is just repeat.
Repeat what works.
And give it time.
It is the biggest thing I have learnt in life.”

Happy new year. May it be an incredibly repetitive one!

December 25, 2022

Unmasked

There’s an older woman who comes to the gym regularly—I think she’s about 70, and she’s in working out five mornings a week, like clockwork. Literally, like clockwork, in that she does the same exercises, at the same weights, on the same machines, in the same order, every single day. (From what I hear, she’s been doing so for about the past five years.)

Anyway, the first day the gym reopened in the fall, she was back to her morning loop, albeit heavily layered up with PPE. And even as the general understanding of COVID evolved (e.g., the low risk of fomite transmission), even as more and more people were vaccinated (I know she was back in February, and by now almost 100% of the members and staff are), she kept her precautions at full tilt. Beyond double-masking, she still wore latex gloves throughout her workout, still wiped down every piece of equipment she touched, before and after, with disinfectant wipes.

Then, last week, the CDC changed its indoor mask recommendations. This week, New York State policy followed suit. Today, the gym dropped its mask requirement. And all morning long, I was jarred by the sight of people squatting and jogging and generally walking around the floor with faces bared.

So when the regular lady showed up this morning (not surprisingly, in full protective regalia), I assumed there was inevitable conflict ahead. Another member, seeing her on the leg extension machine, went over to let her know that she was now allowed to work out without a mask if she wanted. And I literally cringed as he did, braving myself for her searing, ‘what an irresponsible abdication of safety precautions and collective responsibility’ response.

Instead, she just said, “oh, really?” And then, like it was the most natural thing in the world, peeled off the gloves, took off both masks, and headed over to the next machine in her daily circuit.

So, basically, that’s NYC in a nutshell at the moment. It’s nice to see all your faces again?

May 19, 2021

Truth in Advertising

When I was about ten years old, my family headed to Arizona for a cousin’s wedding. And though, at home, my parents strictly limited my and my brother’s TV time, when we were on vacation, all bets were off. So I spent hours at a clip planted in front of the tube, watching whatever I could find on the hotel’s station lineup.

At the time, the Radisson chain was ascendant, and their ads seemed to appear at every commercial break. The spots panned across one lavish hotel room after another, intercut with sparkling pools and polished lobbies, all filled with elated guests. Over which, the jingle crooned: “Why get a room, when you can get a Radisson?”

And, frankly, I was sold. With each repeated viewing, I’d pan around our own fairly shabby and cramped hotel room, before returning my gaze enviously to the screen.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it any more, and headed over to interrupt my mother, reading on the bed.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why are we staying here, when we could be staying at a Radisson?”

My mother stared at me blankly for a moment, then replied, “this is a Radisson.”

It’s a lesson I’ve thought about a lot in the years since.

January 30, 2020

Cartio

Despite my crazy work schedule, Jess and I have been trying to cook more. And, living on the Upper West Side, we’re lucky to have a slew of good grocery stores – Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Fairway, etc. – nearby. Or, at least, sort of nearby. While a seven to ten block walk seems relatively quick on the way over, hoofing back ladened with armfuls of heavy bags feels decidedly less so.

At one point a year or two back, Jess did the sensible thing, and purchased a rolling grocery cart. But, in New York, the ability to stagger along with a half-dozen full bags in your hands is an unspoken point of pride. For the most part, you just don’t see anyone below the age of 80 rolling their groceries home.

So, each shopping trip, I’ve let pride get the best of me. I do head out with an empty Go Ruck GR1 backpack, which makes it far easier to handle a case or two of seltzer and other particularly weighty items. And, having switched entirely to reusable bags for the sake of the environment (we’re now even using reusable produce bags, to avoid the piles of plastic we otherwise return home with and quickly discard), I’ve been pleased to discover that totes both hold more (reducing total bag count) and have handles long enough to carry (only semi-painfully) over your shoulders. All of which has made even large, food-for-the-entire-week shops substantially more feasible.

Still, those walks home are inevitably some of my toughest workouts each week. I’ve found I count down the blocks remaining each time I cross a street along the way, so I can will myself the full distance one small chunk at a time.

Which is why, this week, I finally sucked it up, suppressed my ego, and rolled the cart along when we headed to Whole Foods on Sunday. And, frankly, I’m glad I did. Even with its large capacity, we still completely filled two additional totes. And though the cart itself was heavy to drag behind me, and navigating foot traffic, street construction, and winter puddles was a bit of a challenge, it still made for a wildly easier trip.

So, going forward, the cart it is. I’d always heard one advantage of advancing age is caring increasingly little about what everyone else thinks of you. Turns out, for me at least, that’s true. For better or worse, it seems I’m ready to roll.

January 28, 2020

Word Up

My whole life, I’ve loved words. Enough so that, when I was just four or five, whenever I learned a new one, I’d walk around for the subsequent week trying to wedge it into as many sentences as I possibly could. A voracious reader from even that age, I stumbled across most of my new words in books. And, each time I did, I was assiduous about looking it up.

But, over the decades, I ran into fewer and fewer words that I didn’t know. Until, eventually, I had fallen out of the definition-hunting habit. When I did find something new, stopping my reading, even just to make note of the word, seemed an undue hassle. And I could almost always roughly grasp the word from context. So, instead of pausing to Google, I’d just plow ahead.

Back in November, however, I came across a surprising use of ‘salient’ in an Economist article. And, as I happened to be sitting next to a physical dictionary, I paused to look the word up, discovering a second definition I had never known: an outwardly projecting part of a fortification or line of defense.

I have a longstanding weakness for secondary meanings – ‘pedestrian,’ in the sense of ‘commonplace,’ being a favorite – so I wrote the new definition of salient down in my journal. And then, a few weeks later, I stumbled across ‘anatine’ in a short story, looked it up, and wrote that down, too.

From there, a new habit was born – or, more accurately, an old one rebirthed. In the few months since, I’ve already picked up otiose, rachitic, oneiric, diluents, vitrine. And I’ve reminded myself of words I knew, but that were parked too far in the recesses of my brain to be called up for conversational use: parvenu, febrile, palimpsest.

Much like my five year old self, I am now truly smitten with those discoveries and re-discoveries. Though, unlike the words I was excited about 35 years back, these I’m sadly forced to largely keep to myself. Use ‘anatine’ or ‘oneiric’ in conversation with all but the nerdiest and wordiest of fellow readers, and I’d likely get nothing but a confused stare in response.

Even so, I’ll be back to looking up new words as I discover them, and will continue to expand my list. If nothing else, it makes me awfully happy just to read them over, to roll them around in my head, to see how they feel coming to life on my tongue.

February 12, 2019

Picture This

As I’ve mentioned previously, for the past year or two, I’ve been trying to learn the very basics of a new skill each quarter – stuff like playing the piano, or chess, or pool. Three months of chipping away daily seems to be enough to get off to a pretty good start on most skills. And for some (like with pool, where I went from horrific to merely pretty bad), a good start turns out be all I really want. Whereas others (like with playing the piano, which I realized I actually love), I end up keeping as a permanent part of my routine.

One reason I started doing these quarterly projects was that I had a laundry list of random skills I’d always wanted to at least try to acquire. But another reason, one that I think has actually become the primary driver as I’ve continued to do this, is that I wanted to regularly suck at something.

Looking back on my younger self, I see that I was lucky to excel quickly at a bunch of things, and that I wisely and diligently invested a bunch of time and effort on developing those areas over the years. But, conversely, I also see that I was probably far too quick to jettison anything I didn’t crush right away. I’d just assume that, if I didn’t stand out immediately, I probably never would, so what was even the use of trying? And, as a result, I never really spent as much time as I should have in the hard and embarrassing and frustrating early stages of being terrible at something new.

So, I guess, I’m making up for lost time, and trying to find things now where I can practice sucking, day in and day out. Which makes this quarter’s project—drawing—particularly good. Because I really, really can’t draw. Like, you know how, when you’re six, you draw stick figures, and then you move on? Well, I never moved on.

Still, at the start of October, I set to work. Per the instructions in one of my drawing books, I memorialized my starting point with three pictures: one of my hand, another a self-portrait drawn from mirror reflection, the third a portrait drawn from memory. For that third, I drew Jess. Or rather, I tried to draw Jess. I really did. I spent a good thirty minutes drawing an eyebrow, and then erasing it because it wasn’t quite right, and then trying again. And, at the end of a half hour, I had a cartoonish face that looked nothing even vaguely like Jess. Though it did sort of look like a picture a kindergartener would draw of their kindergarten teacher and then bring home for their parents to post on the fridge.

Yet from that rough start, I’ve been putting in the work. And though I’m still pretty terrible, every so often, I’m starting to surprise myself. This evening, I drew another attempt at a hand – this one with the palm up, and the fingers curled in, a position that required foreshortening the fingers to make them appear correct in perspective. And, holy crap, my picture came out kind of looking like my hand!

At this point, I’m still a good ways off from becoming the next Van Gogh. Though, fortuitously, I also recently discovered, and was heartened and fascinated by, the story of how Van Gogh himself became Van Gogh. Apparently, Vincent had never even really tried drawing for most of his life. And then, when he was 27 years old, his brother Theo talked him into it.

As Vincent later wrote to Theo:

“At the time you spoke of my becoming a painter, I thought it very impractical, and would not hear of it. What made me stop doubting was reading a clear book on perspective, Cassange’s Guide to the ABC of Drawing, and a week later I drew the interior of a kitchen with stove, chair, table and window – in their places and on their legs – whereas before it had seemed to me that getting depth and the right perspective into a drawing was witchcraft or pure chance.”

Vincent Van Gogh, who sadly died young at 37, spent the last ten years of his life, 1880-1890, becoming an artist. The first two years of which he spent just teaching himself how to draw. Drawings from the start of that stretch, like his 1880 Carpenter, are plagued with proportion problems, and a slew of other issues. But by two years in, he’s making drawings like his 1882 Old Man Reading, has figured out how to make pictures at least technically work. Five years of practice, and he’s drawing stuff like the 1885 Digger, is painting in earnest, and has really become Van Gogh, is putting out the masterpieces we all know and love.

Which is pretty inspiring. And I was further encouraged in my hand attempts by Van Gogh’s own working and re-working of that same challenge. In 1885, when he had already hit his stride, he was still doing sketches like Three Hands, Two Holding Forks, trying to figure out how to make hands look just right. Even at the very end of his short life, as he was sketching drafts of some of his most famous works, like his 1890 Sower, his sketches for the painting are surrounded with a slew of carefully drawn hands in all kinds of positions.

So perhaps I shouldn’t completely write myself off, despite the slow and late start. And even if drawing turns out to be one of those quarterly projects that largely ends once the quarter does, too, it has already given me a much greater appreciation of real artist’s work, and is (at least slightly) changing the way I look at the world around me. But, most of all, it’s reminded me that, even for something that really, really isn’t in my wheelhouse, diligent practice actually can make a difference. It’s been truly excellent practice at sucking at something, bad, yet sticking with it nonetheless.

October 30, 2018

Everything is Scoliosis

As is inevitable over the years of athletic life, I’ve had my share of back, or hip, or even knee, shoulder, and ankle tweaks. And, if I were looking at myself from a rational, outside perspective, I would probably think that the unaddressed scoliosis might at least conceivably be part of the underlying cause of any of those. But, as ever, I simply ignored the possibility, working on all kinds of other stretches and mobility drills and pre-hab exercises, skipping anything that dealt specifically with the slight spinal curve.

In the last month or two, however, I finally realized that’s kind of ridiculous. So I started thinking and researching and self-programming to address the scoliosis head on. It’s early, still, but even in that short amount of time, I’ve made a real impact. Which leads to a reasonable question: why hadn’t I done this before?

I’ve thought about that a bunch, and I think the answer is simple: I just didn’t like the idea that I had an inherent structural flaw. So, instead of facing up to the problem and trying to solve it, it was psychologically easier to ignore it and to route around it and just to try to power ahead.

Maybe it’s age or wisdom, or a year-early onset of a 40-year-old midlife crisis. But, for the past few months, I seem to be having a ton of similarly obvious ‘revelations.’ Because it turns out there are all kinds of things I do, all kinds of behaviors and beliefs and patterns and habits that haven’t served me particularly well, that I’ve similarly spent decades studiously ignoring. Most, similarly, aren’t even that big. But by not addressing them, by trying to just plow past them, I’ve tripped over them repeatedly, in ways big and small over the course of my life. And it’s only in the last little bit that I’ve been willing to say: if I have flaws or shortcomings, certainly it’s better for me to own them and try to face them head on, rather than pushing them into the back of my mental closet, shutting the door, and trying to pretend that not seeing them means they don’t exist.

Anyway, I realize this sounds so patently obvious when I put it down in words. Which makes me further wonder how I managed to make myself willfully blind to so many issues for so long, rather than simply sucking it up and trying to solve them. I definitely feel like the guy who’s walked for miles with rocks in his shoe, ignoring the pain, taking aspirin, coming up with different ways to walk that don’t hurt. When, instead, it would be so much more effective to just stop for a minute, to take off the shoe, and to dump out the rocks.

October 19, 2018

Mouse & Bunny

A couple of years back, Jess bought a box of Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies – basically, organic goldfish crackers shaped like rabbits – one afternoon while we were shopping at Whole Foods. Later that evening, we sat down on the couch to watch a movie, and she brought out the Cheddar Bunnies, to snack on while we watched.

Halfway through the movie, I asked her to hand me a few. At which point, she looked into the box, then over to me with a guilty smile; she’d unintentionally eaten the entire box. I told her she’d probably turned into a Cheddar Bunny herself after eating that many of them. And, from then on, the nickname stuck.

Shortly after, in response, she tagged me Mighty Mouse, I assume due to the trifecta of small size, big ears, and super(-ish) strength. And ever since, in texts, emails, and notes, we usually address and sign off as Cheddar Bunny and Mighty Mouse.

Jess has a talent for finding awesome greeting cards. In the past she’s given me great ones for even minor holidays. (For Halloween, one with a ghost on the cover that read, “You’re my boo!”; another with two skeletons – one in a tux, one in a wedding gown – holding hands: “Till death do us part is for quitters.”) But inspired by the nickname, she’s also managed to somehow find, and give to me even on random, non-holiday days, dozens and dozens of mouse and bunny-themed cards. (“You’re wonderful,” with a bunny dressed as Wonder Woman; “You’re somebunny special”; or, for my birthday, a grey bunny holding a slice of birthday cake: “Oh no, another grey hare!”)

As I realized I could never keep up with finding equally excellent cards in response, I decided to go an alternate route, one requiring just raw time spent rather than card-sourcing skill: I started drawing cards for her myself.

Lest that sound overly impressive, I should first caveat with a note about my artistic abilities: you know how, when you’re in kindergarten, you start by drawing stick figures, and then you move on? Well, I didn’t. I’d like to think of my style as sort of “outsider art”, though in truth it looks more like something you might buy at a local fair to support an after-school program for severely mentally-disabled children.

Nonetheless, I have enough enthusiasm to trump my lack of talent. So, after doing a handful of mouse and bunny cards for our anniversary, and Christmas / Chanukah, I went all out for Jess’ 30th birthday, doing 30 cards for the 30 days leading up to it: Mouse and Bunny out for a run, at dinner together, strolling hand in hand through Central Park, etc. And they were a hit.

So, since then, I’ve been sending hand-made cards to the rest of my family. Some, like my Father’s Day card to my dad, stand alone. (That one illustrated all the generic ‘dad gifts’ my brother and I have managed to skip over the years, whether ties, golf clubs, or bottles of Scotch.) But other cards extended the world of Mouse and Bunny to include the rest of my family.

That was aided by the fact/weird coincidence that my brother calls his wife “goat” as a term of endearment. (I have no idea about the origin, but it predates the bunny/mouse thing by several years.) Therefore, I already knew how to draw my sister-in-law as an animal. And, since my brother and parents are related to me, I obviously could just draw them as mice, too (just with different hairstyles, etc.). Then there’s my niece and nephew, though that was also pretty easy to solve: goat parent plus mouse parent equals goat-colored mouse, or mouse-colored goat. Thus, for my parents’ birthdays, I was able to draw them cards with the whole family (everyone at the beach for my father, at the ballet for my mom), which were also a hit.

Inspired by those successes, a month or two back, I started working on a next-level attempt: a Mouse & Bunny children’s book for Jess. Though there’s obviously a series waiting to happen here, I started with Mouse & Bunny Go for a Hike. I loaded it up with inside jokes, small visual gags, and details I knew she’d appreciate. And though it took me waaaaaay longer than expected to complete, I think the time definitely paid off.

Not, admittedly, in the quality of the drawing itself, which is as bad as ever. (And given Dan Ariely’s research on the so-called Ikea Effect – “people who have created something themselves come to see their amateurish creations as similar in value to expert creations” – it must be even worse than I’m self-assessing.) But, at least, it paid off in terms of what I hope it communicated to Jess.

As I’d otherwise have trouble putting into words how mind-blowingly, heart-overflowingly wonderful and awesome and amazing she is, or what a perfect match she is for me, those 20-some terribly illustrated pages at least show how far I’m willing to go to try and communicate that love to her nonetheless.

Best Of
Jess

August 26, 2018

How to Make Lemonade

Over the past couple of years, I’ve faced a handful of major personal disasters. And, in response, I’ve floundered through a wide array of coping mechanisms. Some worked well; others, not so much. In the hope that I can save you some pain, here’s what I learned through that experience, the things that were actually helpful in carrying me through difficult (and sometimes exceedingly difficult) stretches of life.

But, first, let me start with what doesn’t work: numbness, rage, and despair. That said, at least in my own case, when shit hits the fan, they’re my inevitable first response. For some initial period of time – hours or even days – I’m completely numb. Then I alternate like clockwork between feeling wildly angry and wallowing in misery. Neuroscience research suggest it takes at least an hour for your brain to recover from even minor slights and setbacks. And, at the other end of the spectrum, Judaism “shiva” – the period of intense mourning after the death of an immediate family member – at seven days. So, based on the severity of your disaster, find somewhere in that range: no less than an hour, no more than a week. During that time, cycle through raging / despairing / feeling numb (or whatever else you personally default to) without chastising yourself. Just let it rip. Then stop, because it isn’t actually helping, and do this instead:

Envision the Future.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust as a prisoner in several concentration camps, losing his entire family along the way (so, in short, he had it worse than whatever you’re dealing with) said, “with the right why, a man can survive any how.” In his case, the ‘why’ was the drive to write a book about his experience, to share the psychological insights he’d gained with world. (And if you haven’t read the resultant Man’s Search for Meaning, go do that now.) But the specific why doesn’t matter, so long as it’s extremely compelling to you, and at least a year or two (and possibly ten or twenty) in the future. I recommend strongly that you commit your why to paper, whether it’s a (to use Jim Collins’ famous phrase) Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal that you’re excited to pursue, or just a detailed description of a better future – where you’ll be, with whom, what you’ll be doing, what you’ll have done. Whatever it is, write it down, and then re-read it frequently. At least daily at first, if not more. Tell yourself that’s what you’re gunning for, that’s what on the far side of this current, seemingly unsurvivable mess. Use that ‘why’ as your north star, and let it carry you through.

Then Focus on Today

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “there’s no burden so heavy it can’t be carried until nightfall.” So, as Sir William Osler advised, “live your life in day-tight compartments.” Thinking about that distant-future ‘why’ will buoy you up. But thinking about any future short of that – how you’re going to make it through tomorrow, or the next two weeks, or the next year and a half – will drive you into the ground. You project your current misery forward, multiply its weight by all those future days, and are sure there’s no way that you can possibly deal with all the unhappiness you see stretched out ahead. But as the Zen Buddhists say, thinking you can’t survive another second of a pain you’re feeling is a lie; you survived this second, so you can survive the next, too. So make that your focus: surviving one more day. Make it into bed, this evening, in one piece, and call that victory. Worry about today today, and deal with tomorrow once it arrives.

Get Moving

First, literally. Especially right after something terrible happens, I’ve found that walking is the very best thing I can do. My mind may be reeling, but just taking step after step after step seems to slowly dissipate some of the overwhelm. Similarly, going to the gym, and working out hard does more for my mood than almost anything else. But after that, get your brain moving. When things go wrong, I usually feel like I’m facing an endless number of problems, all piled up on top of one another. But, in fact, while your problems may be terrible, they’re also finite. So when everything is crap, I start by making a ‘cloud list’ – an inventory of everything that’s a problem in my life at that moment. In my own experience, and for the people who I’ve helped do this during their own crises, just making a concrete list, seeing it down on paper, helps a surprising amount by itself. Then, for each problem, figure out a first thing or two that you can do in response. Some problems can’t be ‘fixed,’ but for all of them there’s still some concrete, positive action you can take. You have terminal cancer with three months to live? Fine; draft a plan for how you’re going to make the most of those three months. Similarly, for some problems, the action might be a long-shot Hail Mary, unlikely to even work. Which is also fine. You’ll still feel hugely better knowing you’re at least going down swinging. But, in short, find something you can do, and start doing it. In my experience, forward motion helps more than anything else.

See the Moon

One of my favorite poems is a Haiku by Basho:

Barn’s burned down.
Now,
I can see the moon.

Or as an old cowboy couplet has it

Two men looked out from prison bars;
one saw the mud, the other saw stars.

Sometimes, life sucks. And I wouldn’t suggest pretending otherwise, becoming a mindless Polyanna. But eventually, after you let yourself rage and despair, after you find your future ‘why,’ focus on today, and get moving, the only other thing you can do is to start looking for what good there still is in the world. Sitting surrounded by the ashes and embers of your burned-down barn of a life, at some point, you have to look for the moon. To be honest, I’m still puzzling out the best way to do that, the best way to snap myself back to seeing the glass as half-full. Often, just reading that Basho haiku does it for me. And when that doesn’t work, I’ve also had success with giving myself a daily journaling assignment: for a week (or even a month), starting with the prompt, “[Disaster x] is the best thing that ever happened to me, because…” and forcing myself to complete the page. But, at the end of the day, it comes down to making a choice: deciding that you’d rather focus on whatever is positive in your life, rather than the negative that’s been weighing you down.

That’s the four-step plan that works for me. So now, when things go wrong, I may still be launched into a first stretch of numbness and rage and despair. But even then, I know there’s a reliable path out the other side.

May 3, 2018

TWO

Back in the summer of 2015, after eight years of marriage, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly single. Friends and family argued it was for the best, but it still felt like a gut punch. So I wallowed for a few months. And then, I got up, shook myself off, and decided to head out on some dates.

The last time I had been single, online dating was still very much in its infancy. But by 2015, there were more dating sites than I could count. Over the years, however, I had always loved OK Trends, the great data science / dating psychology blog penned by the founders of OK Cupid. So, that seeming as good a choice as any, I signed up.

Like other dating sites, OK Cupid allowed users to post pictures, profiles, and personal specifics (age, location, etc.). But, uniquely, it also presented a huge battery of multiple choice questions. The queries (like “how often do you make your bed?” or “in a certain light, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting?”) ran the gamut of relationship-relevant topics, from values and lifestyle, to spirituality and sex. To sign up for the site, you needed to answer a first 25 or so questions. Then, as you browsed the site, you could see the full list of questions that any other user had answered. But – and here was the brilliant stroke – if you wanted to see how someone had *answered* any of those questions, you needed to answer (or have already answered) the same question yourself. Pretty quickly, just by browsing through others’ profiles, most users amassed hundreds of answers.

For each question, OKC also asked which responses you’d accept from a partner, and how important the question was to you in choosing a partner. From which information the site could use a Bayesian algorithm, and kick out a ‘match score’ between any two users. In my experience, the algorithm was impressively spot-on. Anyone with whom I matched at 80% or up would make for a totally pleasant date; above 90%, and it seemed like there might be relationship potential.

So I was particularly intrigued to discover a very cute redhead with whom I was a ‘perfect’ 99% match (the site’s highest possible score).

I spent far too much time crafting an effortlessly casual first message to her. And, miraculously (even more so once I eventually saw the daily deluge of messages she received, and to how few of those she responded), she quickly wrote back. After a couple of email exchanges, we set a date for the next week: drinks at a wine bar in the West Village.

I have to admit, I had a crush on her before we even met live – enough so that I spent much of the week nervous that she would cancel. But, she showed up. Even prettier in person, she also turned out to be funny, articulate, smart, and well-read. She had recently moved to NYC after finishing a masters degree in classical vocal performance, so we overlapped on a love of music, and of art of all kinds. But she was also sporty and outdoorsy, read existentialist philosophy for fun, was a foodie and a dog-lover, dreamed of both adventurous international travel and weekend afternoons on NYC beaches just a subway ride away. She kept up with my drinking, and my mile-a-minute talking style, matching both in spades. I was pretty much smitten right away.

On our third or fourth date, we headed to a rock concert at Bowery Ballroom, stopping for dinner before at Freeman’s, a great semi-secret restaurant nearby. According to her OKC profile, she was “mostly vegetarian,” so I started suggesting veggie-based dishes that we might share. What looked good to her? “The filet mignon.” But didn’t her profile say she was a vegetarian? “Well,” she smiled, “it does say mostly.”

After a month or two, we were spending more and more time together. One evening, sitting together on the couch, I tried to ask, basically, if she would be my girlfriend. Except I liked her so much that my brain sort of melted down in the process, and I became a completely inarticulate, babbling moron. I’m pretty sure she had absolutely no idea what I was asking, but she stuck around nonetheless. We started seeing each other even more frequently. We headed off to Atlantic City for a long weekend; though the city was terrible (as my brother accurately describes it, “Vegas in a trash can”), we had a truly excellent time together, and I was sad to drop her off at her own apartment at the end, even after dozens and dozens of hours straight in each other’s company. For Valentine’s day, based on her long-standing love of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we headed to Montauk. She found a Clementine-colored hoodie, and, true to the film, even managed to get a mug custom-printed with her photo as a Valentine’s gift.

We started knocking off hikes and climbs of the tallest peaks within driving / training distance of NYC. We ate our way around NYC, dining in holes-in-the-wall (hole-in-the-walls?) and fine establishments (like a birthday dinner at Contra; along with the truly excellent wine flight, perhaps the finest meal of my life). We ran the Hudson River trail, cooked brunch, went to jazz shows and art museums, got lost in the stacks of the Strand (like any bookstore, a dangerous place to bring her, as she invariably refuses to leave).

Somewhere along the way, she apparently agreed to my inarticulate ‘let’s go steady’ request, as we moved in together. My brother (who loves her, as does my whole family), still calls her Jess 99 at times, in honor of that original 99% OK Cupid score. And, indeed, she’s as perfect a match for me as I could ever hope to find. Smart, funny, literate, thoughtful, beautiful, articulate, kind.

As of today (or maybe yesterday? it’s a matter of some record-keeping dispute), Jess and I are now two years in, and going strong. I am, in short, exceedingly in love, and unbelievably lucky to have found her. Further special thanks go to the fine folks at OKC for the assist; without a doubt, she remains the best online shopping I’ve ever done.

November 2, 2017

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