For the romantically challenged: ‘The Curse of the Singles Table’

This Week’s Winner

Clarissa Estuar, 29, is a four-time Palanca awardee who’s working as a scriptwriter for GMA-7. "I must admit, I’m joining because the bookworm in me can’t resist the idea of winning P5,000 worth of free books" – and a shot at the P50,000 grand prize.

The Curse of the Singles Table features whole sections culled from my life. What was this Suzanne Schlosberg person thinking when she declared those experiences as part of her own true story? They’re not just hers to tell. I, too, have crossed the threshold from "single to... still single," and I demand to be counted!

This phenomenon of being declared "still single" usually starts in one’s late 20s. The author points out that you know you’ve reached that point when people stop asking, is she still single? in a hopeful tone and instead deliver that same question "in a tone reserved for questions like, ‘Is it herpes?’"

Now this isn’t a book for someone who’s scrounging around for a cute rejoinder to that awful, awkward question: why are you still not married? Often, the answers found in these pages are too long, too complicated and too honest for the casual observer. Sure there’s a lot of humor sandwiched here and there, but if you’ve done some time in that limbo-esque state of being single when you already don’t want to be, you’ll detect that strong undercurrent made out of sighs and silent nights spent alone.

Suzanne Schlosberg was, at the time of the book’s writing, 30-ish, Jewish and unmarried. In many cases, as in hers, this basically means that things are going well in the job front and she’s content in other areas of her life, but she has started to feel the pressure to couple up. Most of this pressure comes from her close-knit family who likes to put their collective noses in her business under the guise of "being concerned." If they weren’t Caucasian and celebrated Hanukkah instead of Christmas, you’d think they were Filipino. At the forefront of this group is her grandma who’s come up with the ultimate guilt-inducing nag: "I hope you get married while I’m still alive."

It’s not as if Suzanne needs the extra push. She knows she wants to find someone, and for the right reasons, too. Suzanne is no romance novel-chomping dreamer. She has actually been out there and has had her share of relationships. Being in a relationship isn’t just an abstract ideal that seems to be an attractive escape from her reality. She tried it both ways and feels she has squeezed all that she can from singlehood. She knows it’s time.

What she didn’t anticipate was how hard it would be. The rules change when you’re of a certain age apparently, so although she’s not a shrinking violet and goes about trying to remedy her situation, she becomes stuck. There are blind dates from hell (one of which is so bad, she tells her date she has to hurry home to watch television, just to ditch him). A whole spell of attempts to harvest a half-decent man off the Internet. Try to top her stories with your own from the dating trenches, and chances are, you will fail. How many of us can claim to buy a fishless aquarium in the hope of fixing the feng shui in our bedrooms to attract love? At one point, she stops and realizes that she’s gone almost 1,000 days without sex. Yes, 1,000 days.

For the less liberated out there, it can work on any level: 1,000 days without a kiss/ holding hands/ having a pwede-na-looking man look at you with interest because that tambay sa kanto with a patch over one eye just won’t do.

Suzanne can’t understand it. So she asks the question we all have in our heads but are too scared to say out loud: is something wrong with me?

Her "inner cabinet," as she fondly calls her group of advisers on anything personal, offers a wide variety of opinions on this matter. She breaks these up into several schools of thought (and we’ve all heard them before): you’re too picky; you’re too quick to judge; you’re too aggressive, wait for the man to make the move; you’re looking for love in all the wrong places.

Of course, these come with recommended remedies, the best of the lot from her friend Cristina: "Go hang out at the dump! A woman can really get a lot of attention there! Whenever I go unload my old canvases, guys are always fighting to help."

Curiously enough, Suzanne realizes that most of her critics are her coupled-up friends. They’re genuinely stumped about why she has remained single. She theorizes: "When you’ve found another human being to stamp you with a seal of approval, all the insecurities that come with singleness quickly fade away. You become utterly convinced that if you could find somebody, then anybody can."

Perhaps this explains in part the roots behind that eternal battle – not between good and evil, but between singletons and the coupled. Legions of single women have been baffled by the changes that sprout up when a friend finds a significant other. Suzanne counts them down for us. Girls’ nights out are restricted to when the SO is out of town. The newly-coupled friend now refers to herself as part of a "we," as in We’re so burned out on California Pizza Kitchen or We love our new gym–the elliptical machine is our favorite! Suzanne echoes the thought we’ve all had when faced with this situation: "At what point did she stop having her own opinions?"

Of course, there’s also the inevitable get-togethers with couples. As Suzanne points out, it usually is uncomfortable and weird, "although not as weird as when you receive birthday cards that say, ‘Love, Cindy and Dan,’ even though you’ve met this Dan guy twice." In this situation, more than ever, you realize the chasm between you and your former companion in the dating front. Now, she and her SO "respond to your stories as if you were performing some sort of comedy routine. Granted, you may be going after the laughs, but still... it is your life."

And you see it all too clearly now. You’re on your own.

The good thing about reading Suzanne’s book is she puts herself in so many dating situations that you’re bound to see yourself in a few of them. Turning the pages almost makes up for the fact that you’ve lost many of your girl friends to the other side. It’s a chance to commiserate once again with someone who really knows how it’s like.

Going through this book also has the advantage of someone finally figuring out what one must do when you find yourself in a seemingly endless streak of singlehood: should you actively seek out a mate, or let the universe or destiny or kismet or whatnot take care of it? Most people offer a simplistic view: if you go out there, you risk looking too desperate, but if you stay put and wait like a lump, people berate you for not playing a more active part in actually making things happen. You can’t win. Suzanne chooses to be a modern woman and uses her energies to look for a man, damn what everybody says. She goes through bad spells, but remains unscathed for the most part, because heck, she has something going for her: an essential belief in herself despite the little annoyances and setbacks thrown her way. Single women everywhere have a lot to learn from her approach.

Suzanne confesses to having her share of bad days, too, when she starts to buy into her well-meaning inner cabinet’s occasional insinuations that maybe she’s the problem. For all she knows, there’s just something essentially un-matchable about her. As she says, "If a baseball player struck out 39 times in 40 at-bats, wouldn’t that suggest a flaw in his swing?"

But really, is there something wrong with looking for what you really want, and refusing to settle? Suzanne says, "I’ve never believed there is just one perfect match out there for me – there are probably dozens, if not hundreds. But why do they all seem to be in a witness protection program?"

Really, at the bare level, she’s looking for a guy who can say the phrase "I feel" in a context other than "I feel like eating at Burger King." Many female voices will tell you that even this is hard to find. Even with all the jokes my friends and I throw around of just wanting to find a guy na may pulso, we actually want to work with something more substantial.

If you factor in that level of "sparkness" that one wants in a relationship, it gets even harder to find a match. But to follow Suzanne’s lead, one mustn’t lose hope despite missteps and tongue-tied nights when you can’t get a word out in front of an interesting enough prospect. In the meantime, I’m sticking it out with my few remaining single friends. Who else can laugh with me during times such as when I find out that a married friend’s mother is demanding: "Si Clarissa, bakit hindi niyo ihanap ng pen pal o kaya phone pal?" Believe me, Tita, we’ve considered all the possibilities…to no avail. But then, who knows, there’s always Friendster.