J-Date: couple looking for a relationship

There are tons of advantages to meeting your sigificant other young. I met Jeff when I was 20, and we were only sophomores in college. For some people, this may be too young to commit yourself to one person, but we were ready.

There’s only one aspect of young adult Jewish dating I feel I might have missed out on: J-Date.

I’ve known about J-Date since high school, when my friends and I would giggle while we checked the listings to see the profiles of the Jewish single adults we knew.

Then we grew up and I had a boyfriend and my friends gained entry into the world of online dating that I’ll never know.

But it’s not the hundreds of eligible bachelors at your fingertips, the chatting or the excitement of someone new making contact that has me intrigued—it’s the long-term friendships that seem to come out of it more often than the romances.

After we graduated last spring, I watched friends of mine move to new cities and join J-Date looking for either the loves of their lives or just a fling to ease the transition.

What happened was my friends started going out. They met different kinds of people and were escorted to different kinds of places. Sometimes there were flings, sometimes there was nothing, and sometimes they vowed to just stay friends. And they did. They met friends of friends and soon their social lives were booming in a new city.

Back in Madison, Jeff and my friends are slowly dispersing. It’s cold, and there’s not much motivation to go out and meet people when the alternative is cozying up in the apartment together, not alone.

But we don’t want to look back and realize we turned 80 half a century prematurely. We’re under 25. We should be out and having fun with our friends, but how do we find friends in a world where dating post college seems to be a prerequisite for friendship?

Someone needs to make a J-Date for young couples looking to meet other couples. But in the mean time, I’ll get the tea, Jeff’ll set up the board games and the guinea pigs will squeal in delight at the prospect of another Saturday night with their parents.