Where's the Dating Writer?

By Rachel Sarah

"When I get lonely these days, I think: So be lonely, Liz," Gilbert writes in Eat, Pray, Love. "Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled life."

Let's be honest here: it's not easy to sit with your loneliness. At least for me, it's not. After moving out of the Israeli's house, it was agonizing to sit with my loneliness day after day. That's when I found this 40-something Jewish vet -- or, I should say, he found me -- to be my scratching post. My sex life with the Israeli had been, well, sex-less for months and now my phone was ringing.

The first time we kissed, it was six hours after an earthquake -- a 4.2 which shook the bed and I dove for Mae. I was like fizzy soda the rest of the day, exposed and on edge. When I saw him that evening, he gave me a book of Neruda love poems. He held my hand as we took a sweaty walk through the fog.

He told me, "You're so sexy." And the sex, or little we had of it, made the floor below me and ceiling above me fuse together. In other words, I forgot about the fact that I was so fresh from this recent break-up that I let myself go. I was vulnerable. I forgot that this nice Jewish vet and I had only known each other for a few weeks.

So, after our little tryst (sorry, that word sounds so Jane Austen), I didn't hear from him again. Classic, right? I felt like I'd been used as his scratching post.

When I asked him on the phone to come clean, he told me, "My heart is not open to you."

Well, my heart felt like it had been left in the hot sand to burn. Clearly, I wasn't ready to date.

Of course, he asked me not to write about him. Actually, he didn't ask me. He told me. But I'm writing about me here -- and the fact that clearly, this girl is still healing.

Maybe I don't know what love is. A well-meaning therapist would probably say it's the little empty girl inside of me who lunges into these relationships -- not the satisfied, fulfilled grown-up. She looks outside herself to be loved, instead of looking inside. I know that being vulnerable isn't necessarily a bad thing. Unless you feel like a raw steak, like I sometimes do, as I play out a silent movie in my head called, "Heartbreak In My Office Chair."

You can catch me sitting here in my office chair a good part the day, working, and analyzing myself as I work. I wonder why my shell is so thin. I wonder why I turn to men to hold me, instead of holding myself.

In the meantime, online dating is just a click away. I've even started to revise my online profile. "If we come with heavy baggage, we'll help each other unpack," I write. I describe myself as "a single mom who takes the trash out." (I'm not sure what I mean by that, but I like the sound of it. Do you?)

A publicist for JDate wrote to me this week, offering me a complimentary six-month membership, because maybe I'll meet a hot Jewish lawyer who can show a bit more vulnerability than Arnold Schwarzenegger. And then I'll write something gushing about how this premiere Jewish dating site led me to love.

The only problem is, I know it's not going to happen.

At first, when my book came out, I was having a ball being The Dating Writer. But right now, I'm feeling a little stuck in this cubicle. I'm supposed to be dating. My column at LifetimeTV.com launched this summer and I've got to get back out there. But I don't want to.

Instead, I'm sitting here at my desk, writing a 5th grade textbook. My chair has a massager pad, a gift from a local single dad cop I had a massive crush on years ago. Unfortunately, I can't find the cable to make the massager work. How typical is that?

It's time for me to spin my chair around and gaze another direction -- within -- even when it hurts.