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Date Machine: Dogs and Dating

Posted by airheadgenius

 

Last night, I stayed at my brother's house. He and his family had gone overnight to an amusement park and they needed someone to look after their dog.

Said dog and I took an early morning constitutional and it occurred to me that I hadn't walked a dog by myself for about 20 years – since the last time I owned one.

The day was bright and sunny and cold. The dog and I – a chocolate lab for those of you into that kind of thing – wandered along the country lanes and then I let her off her leash in an enormous field. She ran and ran until she was a speck in the distance. I whistled loud and, luckily for me, she came back. My brother wouldn't have been best pleased if I'd lost her.

As I was standing in this field, surrounded by Suffolk's beautiful countryside, I realized that I couldn't hear a sound. Well, at least I couldn't hear people. Or cars. Or machinery. Just birds chirping.

My house in Brooklyn is quiet, but when the calm is interrupted,  it's usually by a siren's wail.  Or, if I am in the garden, by the barking of a cooped up dog. Probably a rottweiler  or a pitbull.

"It's a dog's life". But what a world of difference between the life of a Brooklyn dog and a Suffolk dog.

And what of the humans?

I've written about this before – the differences between the dating life of the lesser spotted New Yorker versus the dating life of the greater spotted rural dweller.

In the countryside, you are surrounded by space. If a couple of other dog walkers had arrived at my field, it would have felt like a party. But of course, they didn't arrive because the next dog probably lived a field or two away.

The dog run at any park in the city is over populated and the dogs scurry around in circles because there isn't enough room to run in a straight line, sniffing as many arses as they can.

Not unlike dating really.

Dating in New York is frighteningly similar to the dog run at Union Square. The animals in question have a recognized pedigree, are groomed just so and have all the trappings of dogdom.  There is no particular allegiance to one dog in the run and it's a given that the sniffing will take place. With an abundance of arses to sniff, it's almost impossible for a red-blooded animal to limit themselves to just one and consequently long term commitments are never formed. How can one choose when the choice is endless?

I spent my first 20 years in the countryside. The most populated of my habitats was  the small market town of Bury St Edmunds. From then I went on to bigger places: Leicester and London, LA and New York and, on arriving in the big city, I felt like I"d been a city girl all along.

But even though the pace of city life agreed with me, I found the dating scene very odd. The juggling of several beaus never did sit well with me and, for the most part, I didn't do it. But with my latest escapades into the world of internet dating, it seems hard not to do the juggling thing. Unless one meets someone "perfect", the profile remains open and the emails continue to fly.

But I prefer the way dogs behave in the countryside. 

 

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Reynaldo Gianecchini. No extra info required. 

 


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Posted Oct 30 2008, 02:40 PM
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Comments

breathing_in said:

It’s just plain difficult to justify loneliness in the big city.  The irony weighs heavy.  I never needed a day-planner until I started internet dating, and juggling is exactly the word I used, and the more people I have met, for dates, the more disconnected I feel.  The best dates I’ve had so far were with people I had already been friends with, or met outside the internet and deliberately pursued because there was a connection.  Though I have met some really nice people online.  But I am a bastion of hope, which keeps me coming back for more.  (Yes, I know the idea of Glutton for Punishment also fits. . .)  I don’t mean to sound like Carrie Bradshaw (!) but isn't it possible to have the country dog values in the city dog life?  

October 30, 2008 9:21 PM

acamil said:

country side sucks! yes the dogs have room to run but the brain does not!

if only we were dogs!

October 30, 2008 10:09 PM

recycledbrooklyn said:

Ah yes... well, I've been sniffing behinds around NYC for quite some time now.  Perhaps it's time I ventured off to the farmlands... oh wait... I did that already... country butts smell pretty much the same as city butts.  

October 31, 2008 9:08 PM

recycledbrooklyn said:

Dating and romance aside...

I was born in a city but moved off to rural New York at a very young age.  I was not unlike many country kids who took a lot of the beauty of it for granted while I was growing up.  I never felt connected to it in any meaningful way and left for the city the day after my 18th birthday.  It was many years before I looked back (and looked at myself) and realized just how big a part of me the rural life became and remained.  That might be hard to explain to someone who grew up in any city or even the suburbs.  Despite that people in big cities seem to form small villages amongst themselves, there's simply a different mindset.  I won't go as far as to say the values are different in a qualitative sense.  There are differences though.  People in cities just don't seem as connected to one another, perhaps because it's so much easier to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining when everything is within arm's reach.  Perhaps there are too many distractions.

Like "breathing in" mentioned above, there is a loneliness in cities that is hard to justify.  I've often thought there might be an emotional disconnect we suffer due to being subconsciously overwhelmed by the weight of numbers.  At the end of the day there is only one way to recharge and that's to withdrawal into a cave apartment and shut it all down.

Everybody I've spoken to though, about online dating, says the same thing:  How could I meet anybody otherwise?  There's nobody on the job.  Bars and clubs are ludicrous scenes.  The schedule doesn't allow it.  If you strike up random conversations on the street (and I do regularly), people think you're either weird (which I may just be), or that you want something (I may or may not depending on the setting).  My sister who lives off in the desert in New Mexico laughs when I say it's hard to meet people.  She simply can't comprehend that it would be difficult, but she lives in a place where people talk to each other.  Then again, there are fewer people and they all know each other and each others' families and children.  

But back to dating:  I've been online dating off and on for a couple years, and I've probably carried into it the same approach I did at 17 living in the Hudson Valley.  Slow, reserved and one at a time, feeling my way forward and seeing how things shake out.  I process things glacially and the few times I've dated a few people at once there was just too much going on and it call became mashed up noise, like loud interference with the dial stuck between stations.  

Maybe that just happens to me, but I don't think so.  

November 1, 2008 4:43 AM

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