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Taking a potential partner home can be a giant step on the road to romance. But a budding love can be uprooted by seemingly trivial details like cartoon sheets, a Klimt poster -- or overhead lighting.
Dating is fraught with disappointments, so you can imagine how delighted a single woman might be to find someone like Albert Podell -- particularly after she Googles him and learns how rich he is. Last year, Podell, a 70-year-old lawyer, gave NYU Law School $2.9 million. He goes out four nights a week, to the opera, symphony or theatre. He is well read. He says he has travelled to 162 countries.
Then comes that magic evening when the woman is ready to go back to his place.
"It's totally unchanged, like it was when I went to law school in 1973, a time warp," Podell says of his small one-bedroom in SoHo, a description that seems plausible, given the hot pink living room with the futon seating and the fraying contact paper on the kitchen cabinets.
The place is also dimly lighted, which, once you examine the kitchen nook in daylight, is probably not such a bad thing. The cabinets hold nothing but a six-month supply of powdered milk for Podell's cereal, so that he can keep his trips to the supermarket to a minimum; the Formica countertop is peeling; the stove has been disconnected from the gas feed. (Podell, who usually eats out, sees no reason to waste fuel.)
All these things have proved detriments to love, but none so effectively as his sheets. Podell likes the ones from the '60s and '70s that tell a story: sheets with intergalactic battles or pink hippopotamuses or the Beatles. Since these are no longer available in adult-bed sizes, Podell's sheets are now 30 to 40 years old. The fading is such that a person who saw one in a Salvation Army bin, having lost everything she owned in a fire, would remind herself that there was no reason to be desperate. The fading, however, was apparently not the reason that the sheets became a deal breaker.
"I was dating this very nice woman, I thought," says Podell. "I was ready and she was ready to do the big deed. I take her to my apartment, go into the bedroom, and fling back the sheets, and she said, 'My husband had these sheets, and he was a mean-hearted SOB, and you must be like him, and I'm leaving.'"
Spring is here and the restaurants will soon be filled with anxious and hopeful couples, ordering wine, dusting off their most luminous lies, thinking they might finally have found love. Then they will see their dates' homes for the first time. And suddenly some of them will realize that they cannot be with this person a moment longer -- or at the very latest, because that wine was not cheap, beyond the next morning.
A few whose homes have been romantic deal breakers may, like Podell, know what went wrong and choose to ignore it, seeing their apartments as a reflection of their brave refusal to bow to conventional taste.
"There have been at least 40 women who've said, 'Why do you live here?'" he says.
Make that 41. Why does he live here?
"Ever hear the words 'rent stabilized'?" says Podell, who's paying $702 for a one bedroom in SoHo. "What do I need a fancy place for? A lot of people want to show off their wealth. It ain't me, baby."
Then there is Bob Strauss, 46, who writes dating advice for match.com and has a real stuffed baby seal in his apartment. He didn't whack the seal on its silky little head, it's a family piece inherited from a rich aunt and uncle in Miami.
It is displayed along with Strauss's South Park and Sonic the Hedgehog figurines and Lego collection.
"It's provocative," he adds. "I like going out with tough, smart, aggressive, challenging- type people. It's fine with me if they want to argue about it; I don't want to blandify my apartment to make myself generically acceptable."
Most people, however, will never know how their homes sabotaged their romance.
They operate under the assumption that if the garbage has been discarded and the dog hair removed, the house is romance-ready. They are unaware that such seemingly insignificant details as a Klimt poster or harsh overhead lighting are proof to some that they are not dateworthy.
For these poor innocents, a guide.
No stuffed animals, even if you are dying
Alison Forbes, a founder of The Art of Everyday Living, a consulting service in Los Angeles, is often called upon to help make homes relationship-ready. It was her sorry duty to inform us that the stuffed animal pandemic continues. She believes it may show a reluctance to grow up -- or, in cases where the stuffed animals cover the bed, a reluctance to make space for another person.
Jason Bunin, the 36-year-old bad-boy chef at the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill in Greenwich Village, echoed her disapproval.
"You see it more in younger girls, like between 21 and 25," Bunin says. "Pink, purple, teddy bears, unicorns, all over the bed. I'd just whack 'em off with my arm."
Nice buildings are not named for Norman Bates
Sure, you can save money by moving into your mother's house, but as always in matters of romance, you must first ask yourself, Would James Bond do it?
If you are still thinking about the answer, consider the experience of Adria Armbrister, a 30-year-old program co-ordinator at Columbia University's School of Public Health. Armbrister met a man online through Yahoo and after a month and a half of e-mailing they had dinner. It went well. The man, who was 29, owned a business, he did not ask Armbrister to pay for her own meal or try to borrow money. On the second date, they stopped by his house to pick up an umbrella. The house had belonged to his mother, who had died five years earlier. The plastic-covered gold sofas and the heavy gold tasselled lamps suggested to Armbrister that her date had not redecorated -- never a sign of an enterprising personality. But the deal breaker came when she saw his room.
"We walked up three flights of stairs to the attic," she says. "It looked like a teenager's room. The computer was up there and the twin bed, his clothes were all over the floor. I was like, Uuuuuh-huuuuh. He didn't even seem sorry that he lived in a 12-year-old boy's room, this was like normal behaviour. It said to me, This person is not grown up yet. It was frightening. He's lived his whole life in the attic."
What did her date do for a living?
"He was in the real estate business."
Although the Stasi were said to love it
"I can't sit in a room with overhead lighting," says Michelle Slung, a freelance book editor in Woodstock, N.Y. "It makes me feel like I'm in a police interrogation room. I believe in lamps that are casting warm glows, and anyone that doesn't understand that, I can't be in their house, men or women. It's a matter of warmth; it makes people happy."
Slung insists on pink light bulbs, her preferred shade being Dawn Pink. She also uses amber lampshades.
"I don't think I could ever like somebody who got their lighting wrong," she says. "What this probably means is that I'm not in the market for a guy. If I ever found a guy with a beautifully lit house I would propose -- although probably his wife would have done the lighting."
In the afterglow of love, nobody ever reaches for a hammer
Michael Longacre is a New York graphic designer. He believes that design people are aesthetically demanding, but in the case of one brief affair, the problem was a more basic sort. "This was a great-looking guy who worked on Wall Street," Longacre says. "He wore $2,000 suits, but his great pride was really, really expensive shoes. He told me he had 50 or 60 pairs of these Italian shoes that are $750 a pair. I go to his apartment, there was no framing on the doors, there were like test colours on the walls. He'd started work on it several years earlier. I said, 'You've spent $30,000 on shoes, but you're gonna renovate your own apartment when you get around to it?'"
We aren't kidding about the Klimt
Adam Handler, who is 35, lives in Atlanta, where he does grassroots organizing for CARE. He is now married. But five or six years ago, when he was single and living in Washington, D.C., a nascent relationship was destroyed when a woman he'd been dating invited him back to her apartment.
"On her walls she had my two most despised pieces of art," Handler says. One was The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. "I happen to hate Klimt, but The Kiss is the most trite and overdone and what made it worse, it was in her bedroom. Then there was the Robert Doisneau photograph of this couple kissing."
That black-and-white photo taken on a Paris street in the '50s? That's kind of romantic.
"It's romantic when you're 16," Handler says. "At some point you need to outgrow it."
The romance, while it did not end that evening, ended soon after.
"She was attractive, she was smart, she was all the things I thought I would have liked in a woman, but I decided I didn't trust her judgment," Handler says.
What was his wife's place like when they met?
It was a studio in Manhattan, Handler says, with a few really nice antiques. She also had a very impressive set of Le Creuset cookware. He had just about the same amount of All-Clad. It worked.
A touch of raffia might have helped, but we doubt it
Evan Lobel knows how to put together a welcoming apartment -- in addition to being the owner of Lobel Modern, a vintage furniture store in lower Manhattan, he's a designer. But even that doesn't guarantee success.
"I was dating somebody very seriously," says Lobel, who is 42. "He went away for a year to work in the Peace Corps. The two of us were in love. I said, I'm gonna wait, I'm not gonna be with anyone else, and I lived up to that. When he came back, we were supposed to live together. I thought, wouldn't it be a nice surprise, after a year of living in huts, to live in a nice big, beautiful apartment."
While his boyfriend was in Swaziland, Lobel sold his 1,200-square-foot apartment and bought a 2,500-square-foot loft, with a fireplace and stone bathrooms. It was a frightening financial leap. He brought in beautiful pieces: a cabinet by the mid-century designer Tommi Parzinger, a Karl Springer chandelier with an estimated value of $25,000.
Then his boyfriend returned.
"He said: 'What is this? I can't live in a place like this. I was just around people who were hungry and dying,'" Lobel says. "In the end we were breaking up. For a while I regretted even buying that apartment."
It's not my place, it's you
Matt Heindl, who is 34 and does Internet marketing, remembers two terrible dating experiences. The first involved a woman who was a nail biter -- he discovered this in the cold light of morning when he found bits of her nails on the bedside stand. He also has a vivid memory of the mildewed towel she offered when he took a shower.
"It kind of smelled like dog," he says with a tone of disgust. "I can smell it now."
The second experience involved an artist who lived in an East Village tenement. As he entered her apartment, a free-flying parrot relieved itself on his head. Then a large rabbit darted out from somewhere and licked his feet. A baby gate separated a second rabbit from the first -- there had been a nasty penis-biting episode, his date explained. Also, the kitchen wall was covered with antique egg beaters, which looked to Heindl like weird tools.
Heindl and his date, Breck Hostetter, have now been married two years, and have a nine-month-old daughter. Hostetter operates Sesame Letterpress out of their home in Carroll Gardens. It is named, she says, after a parakeet who passed away at age 12.
Can Heindl explain how a deal breaker turned into marriage?
"I seriously thought: 'Shall I run? No, I like her, I like her, I'll check it out,'" he says.
"I decided it showed she can really nurture, because one was like a really old rabbit, a geriatric rabbit. And she baked, obviously."
So there it is -- if your date doesn't get your rabbit or your seal or your light bulb, he or she is not the person for you. Handler, the Klimt hater, now believes he was probably looking for a reason to break up with the woman he was seeing because she wasn't right for him.
Podell, of the cartoon animal sheets, proudly fills a page with the household complaints of his dates. They include the size of his apartment, the lack of a coffee pot, the nonexistent stove connection, the lack of closet space.
His love life, however, is great. He has a 22-year-old Russian girlfriend, whom he met in Malta. They have taken vacations to Asia, Europe and India, with Podell footing the bill.
Podell's girlfriend lives in Moscow.
She has never seen his apartment
By Joyce Wadler
New York Times News Service
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