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He arrived at therapy at the age of 30. When I first met him, he was working at a high tech firm in a senior position, one he had achieved in a short time due to his extraordinary talent and extreme diligence.
Menashe (fictional name and identifying details) was the sixth child out of seven, born to farming parents on a moshav in the south of the country. Menashe, who always felt like the black sheep in his family, left his house after his army service and moved into the student dorms of his university, where he graduated with honors.
His studies were demanding. They required many long hours of effort and concentration in order to keep up and finish his degree. Obviously he did not have time for any social life, and today he describes those five years as his “winter years”.
When he “opened his eyes”, he was already 26, with a degree in engineering, a job offer in a small, successful company, a great apartment that he was renting in a nice city in the center of the country - and without a hint of relationship experience
It took Menashe many years to learn that he was alone and upset. This realization seeped in slowly, and every time he would immerse himself in work to avoid the questions “What now? What am I doing? Where am I going?”
Friends at work would try to set Menashe up with their girlfriend’s friends. Everyone saw in him husband material - he was a good guy, trustworthy, neat, and serious. However, Menashe was not able to make any connections with those girls, without knowing why. After a few dates, the connection would fade and dissipate.
The decision to begin therapy was not easy. He did not really believe in psychology, and did not know what he would get out of therapy. But he did know that he had been stuck for many years. He also felt that nothing would change, unless he made a serious change.
In our first meetings, he described his life story at length and in detail. When he began to describe his present situation, I incidentally asked him “What about online dating?”
“Are you crazy?” he answered, “who goes online? Quack guys and cheap girls. It’s a world for losers. If I do that it’s announcing to the world that I’m a failure.”
But finally, with much reluctance, he agreed to give it a chance.
Menashe’s first experience with the online dating site made him freeze. As soon as he entered the site, he received a message from a girl who was online: “Can we chat?” she asked. He turned off his computer in fear. Menashe felt that the site was a cruel and alien meat market. The girls all seemed experienced and sophisticated. Their activity scared him. “Why would they want someone like me?” he asked.
In our next sessions we began to understand the rules of the dating sites: If on the outside, men are hunters and women are gatherers, online the women are hunters as much as the men. They read the men’s profiles, check off which ones find favor, initiate the conversations and dates, and filter out who they do not like, just like the men.
Menashe gradually learned how to swim in this new genre. When he would receive someone’s telephone number at work, the phone call would be very different from a conversation with a girl whose profile he had just read online.
This medium, which in the beginning seemed alien and vulgar, seemed friendlier and was more enabling than the usual: In their profile the girls would describe themselves, their qualities, hobbies, a book or movie that influenced them, and many other details that could help in a first time conversation.
They would also describe what type of guy they were looking for, how they would describe a successful first date, and what they would not compromise in a relationship - a wealth of information.
In spite of all this, after long weeks of searching, there were no dates. Menashe quickly became discouraged. “It’s all up in the air. I don’t believe that people really meet this way”, he said with bitterness.
“Tell me, what does your profile look like?” I asked him one day.
“What do you mean? You know that I don’t have a picture.” In the past weeks we constantly spoke about the picture. Everyone knows the statistics: Profiles with pictures receive eight times the amount of replies. And yet, Menashe still did not want to do this and be exposed - “with a picture I would feel completely naked.”
“Are you ready to show me your profile?” I dared to ask him. Psychologists hear many secrets, but you will be surprised to hear that people do not like to reveal their online dating profiles - it feels too intimate for them.
Menashe agreed, and to my surprise I discovered, that even though we had been discussing this site for many months, he “forgot” to mention one very small important detail: He did not really fill out his profile. Excluding his physical description - height, weight, hair and eye color and age - the profile did not contain any information.
Every place where he was asked to give a detailed description - of himself, his fantasy relationship, his ideal first date, what he has learned from previous relationships - he wrote a long line of periods and commas.
It took us a while to figure out what was going on. Menashe was still roaming around the site, paying his subscription fee, and apparently looking for a relationship, but his profile was just ‘going through the motions’. An uninviting, non-obligating profile, which just illustrated how much Menashe was not ready for a relationship, even though he would not be able to say this about himself.
In the next few months we spoke about what it means to be ‘open to a relationship’. Menashe’s low self-image and his negative beliefs about the world led to a general skepticism that he was still part of an “electronic meat market” and torpedoed any efforts to find someone. But they did not prevent his fatigue, disappointment and frustration. According to him, he still spent hours searching the site, and was still trying to find some one, without any success.
After many persuasions, Menashe decided he was ready to go the next step and fill out his profile. The results were quick: A profile full of sophisticated and biting humor, that resulted in a few beginnings: “I am looking for someone who knows how to park in reverse, makes good shakshuka and knows how to assemble Ikea furniture” he wrote. The women responded with flirtatious wordplay and direct requests in the form of cell phone numbers.
This profile moved Menashe forward: He now arrived at the phone call level. Here we encountered a new problem, that the lightheartedness that flowed from Menashe’s profile took a lot of hard work to achieve, and was hard to replicate on the phone. Time after time, the conversations yielded nothing.
One of the big changes that next took place was Menashe’s willingness to put up a picture of himself. He first put it on a restricted site and after a few weeks he put it where anyone can see. Now he was “in the game”, ready for any experience, and knowing that there may be some disappointments. Immediately after he posted his picture, Menashe began to go on some dates.
Date after date did not work out; they did not connect, and were not successful. The first round of dates was cruel and painful. Every time Menashe would go out full of hope and excitement, and return frustrated, disappointed and defeated.
All the girls who he liked did not appeal to him for a variety of reasons; on the other hand, the few girls that he did like rejected him. The girls would give the same speech until it became a set mantra: “You’re a great guy, fun, smart and good. I would love to be friends but right now I’m going through a difficult period / just broke up with somebody / searching for myself…it’s not going to work.”
Menashe erased his profile. He cancelled his subscription and entered a dark and desperate period: “I don’t want to be great. I don’t want to be friends. I’m apparently not built for this thing called a relationship”.
In the next few months, he battled depression and despair. A few times it appeared to Menashe that we were defeated, that it was not going to work. He ridiculed my encouragement, the hope that I tried to instill in him, my optimism. Finally, something seeped in, because one day he decided to return and begin again. But this time differently.
This time, we spoke for a while about his profile before his final version was posted online. Menashe took the questions as a personal project and devoted much time and thought to them: What did he want his relationship to look like? What did he want from himself? From the girl? From the relationship?
Slowly, the tune in the room changed: Detailed descriptions of his “ideal woman”- height, hair color, weight, religious observance, education - were exchanged with descriptions of her inner self, her qualities, and how the relationship with her would affect him.
“I want a woman who would make me leave work in a hurry”, he fantasized. “Someone who would make me laugh, would understand me and want me more and more”.
The profile that he finally wrote was completely different from the previous one: “Your side of the bed is empty; the closet is missing your clothes. In the refrigerator there is space for your favorite foods. The house is missing your scent; the walls are missing your pictures. And me? I am missing you.” In another part of the profile, Menashe wrote “a relationship is the most important thing in my life” and thus summarized months of hard work in therapy. This profile led to many requests, and not by chance led him to approach many girls on his own.
In the following months, we dealt with this new and exciting chapter in his search for a partner. Dates led to other dates, short and long-term relationships, sex finally, and in the end… love. Two years to the day after he began therapy, Menashe is engaged to be married this coming summer.
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