The Waiting Game

How’s this for a bummer of a realization?

I cannot, through sheer force of will, cause the heavens to send me a man.

Because when it comes to love, we are not in control. Which is especially problematic for someone like me, someone who might be classified as a “doer” by a glossy magazine personality test.

Which is another way of saying, I don’t exactly sit around and wait for things to happen.

When my life was stuck in Chicago, I picked up and moved to Israel - without a job or a circle of friends and guess what? In the scheme of things, nearly two years later I am pretty settled.

Or how about this column? It wasn’t like one day the editors of a well-respected Jewish paper sought me out and said, “Abigail Frances Pickus, you look very single! Why don’t you share your thoughts with our good readership on a regular basis!”

Ahem! No.

I have the column because I was so desperate for love, I went all the way to Paris for a date. And then once I got there my Parisian Romeo, who was actually from Brooklyn, blew me off. So after I cried, I decided, why not capitalize on this experience? I wrote it up and shopped it around. I kept knock, knocking, knocking on the door until someone said yes. And then once that someone said yes, but, please make it 800 words, why, I quickly took a hammer and chipped away. Voila! 800 words, at your service!

And with jobs it has been the same story. I hustle and hustle and hustle until I am invited in to show off my stuff and then I work even harder to impress upon them how worthy I would be as an employee.

The good news is this hard work often pays off.

But that same determination, persistence and refusal to give up that bodes me so well in all other aspects of my life, absolutely backfires when it comes to my love life.

I mean, I can write men letters reiterating all of my assets but the fact of the matter is, if they wanted me in the first place they would have just stuck around. Which is another way of saying, if a guy wants me, I don’t need to be writing no letters, pushing for my cause.

And I can log onto Jdate all I want, too, but that doesn’t mean that the right man will contact me. Or that any man at all will contact me.

Which is another way of saying, I cannot manufacture love out of thin air.

And so, I must wait. And I’ve never been very good at waiting.

Plus, this kind of waiting is so loaded. It is the kind of waiting whose hidden undercurrent says, “You might be alone forever.”

Which only makes me want to work even harder. But as I’ve learned the hard way, working hard on my dating life just leads to fatigue and burn-out. It makes my heart hurt with disappointment.

But the last thing it does is bring me any closer to love.