This may be an odd title for this article because Groundhog Day passed a month ago and I’m not discussing the movie of the same name, so why did I pick the title? According to my friend Google, who seems to know everything, she said that referring to something as a Groundhog Day means a situation feels like it’s repeating endlessly, stuck in a loop of the same monotonous, frustrating, or boring events, referencing the movie where the character relives the same day repeatedly. What am I repeating? What are the monotonous events I’ve been living through? It’s not that; it’s the fact that for the past few weeks I have received many letters that have discussed the same issue.
Last week, I wrote “Feeling the Pressure,” where a young woman wrote that it seemed that the last few men she has dated seem to be pressuring her to make up her mind early on in the “relationship,” date 3 or 4. They’re asking for a commitment or professing their feelings, and she felt that these sorts of feelings take time to develop. She’s not wrong. I have read at least six letters in the past few weeks where the phrase “love bombing” has appeared. I had to look up the phrase love bombing because if I took it at face value then I would think that someone is falling in love and doing all they can to sweep the other person off their feet into a romance out of nowhere. Last week the two never met, and this week he’s saying, “I can’t live without you,” which is going from one extreme to the other. So again, I asked my bestie Google what love bombing is, and I wasn’t too far off the mark. Google explains love bombing as, “the action or practice of lavishing someone with attention or affection, especially in order to influence or manipulate them.” I’m not saying that anyone is trying to manipulate someone into something bad or doing the wrong thing, but you get the picture.
I take this column seriously, so I called my single niece in the parshah and discussed this with her. She told me it happens all the time and it isn’t attractive to her in any way. It’s pressuring her to make a decision—and if she isn’t ready to decide, then off he goes to the next girl by making her feel like the guilty one: “Well since you can’t say that you have feelings for me or can’t live without me after we’ve been on three dates, it tells me that you aren’t serious about this and you could be stringing me along. Are you going to break my heart? If so, just tell me now so we can both move on.” What? You either commit or the guy’s outta here? Yes. My niece said that if the situation were reversed and the girl wouldn’t stop bothering the “guy,” saying, “I can’t live without you,” after the third date, it would be a Single White Female situation, and the woman would be seen as a loony tune. So why are the men doing this? I don’t know.
I spoke with one friend who lives a few states away and she started laughing because this is currently happening to her. She was paired up with a man on a dating site. They emailed a few times, they called a few times and then the night of the blizzard he called her and said, “I hopped in my truck and I’m driving to you. Then we’ll have a couple of days together.” What? My friend said she hardly knew this guy. She thought he was nice and charming and they had similar personalities, but she didn’t want a first date to be a couple of days long because he got stuck in her town and couldn’t dig his car out for days. He had called her as he was driving. This was the plan he had thought about. She had no say in it. All she was able to do was “be ready.” He had made reservations in a local motel and that was it. He was going to take it all as it came. She said he’s nice and all that, but to spend three days with someone that she really hardly knew to begin with was hard. Eventually they did reach a comfortable rhythm and fell into step with each other, but when he was leaving, he told her it was going to be hard being hundreds of miles away from her now. “What am I going to do?” She told me that she liked him, but wasn’t head over heels in love. They were thrown into a situation where they were literally stuck with each other for a few days—not the perfect ideal way to get to know someone. He was waiting for her to respond and wasn’t impressed when she said they could always FaceTime. My friend doesn’t have any vacation time coming up and if she did, she’s been saying that she wants to go to Miami where it’s hot and nice. If she’s lucky to get a long weekend off from work, she doesn’t want to come to New York or for him to visit her. She wants beach weather. He suggested they meet in Miami if possible.
Remember they just met each other and he’s doing all the sweet stuff: driving through a blizzard for her, bringing her flowers, taking long walks in the snow which was like a world of their own. He was saying all the right things and my friend was enjoying herself. But now let’s get back to real life. Did she want this guy to meet her in Miami, where she was planning to hopefully meet up with some girlfriends? They just met and now he was “love bombing me,” she said. I asked what happened when she called him on it. Because my friend would call him on it. She’s been in the game too long to let this go without saying something. She told me almost the same thing my niece said: “He said if we don’t see each other and do things together all the time, how do I know that you’re not just having fun and then going to break my heart.” She said that she turned the question on him saying that he was coming on too fast and strong and how does she know he won’t disappear one day. And don’t forget, she added, I have responsibilities, friends, family... even if you lived in the same town as me, I wouldn’t see you every day or every other day until we were exclusive. He asked when that would be and she asked him to stop asking questions like that. She said it showed he had a vulnerable side that he wasn’t afraid to show, but that he also had a side that could be a nudge that would wear on her very fast. So she did the only thing she could, told him that if it’s meant to be, it will be, but if he has to talk to her every day for hours and get together at every spare moment, then she wasn’t there yet and wondered how he was there when they still didn’t really know each other.
What’s the rush? Maybe some people think that if you have too much time to think about things, then you’ll realize there are other options, other fish in the sea? But that’s not my friend or my niece. Give them a chance to breathe. Let them make a lifetime decision. I mentioned before that if a woman did this, she would be seen as a psycho or too attached. I take that back because I’m sure that both men and women are doing this, but it’s not looking good on either end.
Maybe in today’s world of technology and we’re used to getting answers and what we want in seconds, we’ve perhaps forgotten how to wait and how to let nature take its course. Everything has to be now and forever and if I have to wait an extra second my head will explode!!!! AHHHH!!!
I don’t know. But what I do know is that if it’s right after date three, six and ten, chances are it may be right on date 18. Let things happen. Don’t think, “Well it’s going to happen anyway, so let’s speed it up.” No, good things take time. Wait a minute and then you can reap the rewards, which hopefully will be great.
Hatzlachah to you all!
Goldy Krantz is an LMSW and a lifelong Queens resident, guest lecturer, and author of the shidduch dating book “The Best of My Worst” and children’s book “Where Has Zaidy Gone?” She can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Goldy is an experienced dating coach offering private sessions. To inquire, contact her at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
