As for the headline: I can't say now why I found it annoying. Perhaps the print headline was different?
I don't know if the dating experience is worse for black women, statistically. I know it's pretty bad, generally, and few of the issues she brings up are not unique to black women. The issue of what a bad dating city it is comes up regularly among my single close friends, and when I think about it, the ones with whom I've had the conversation most often are black, and they, too, believe that statistically it's worse for them. But my white single friends have an equally hard time of dating in this city, which is teeming with single, well-educated, stylish, attractive women of all races.
Maybe that's it: it's the implication that there's dissonance between being single and being worthy of a relationship. There are lots of assholes who are dating and married and lots of great people who are single. It's not an anomaly. It's not some mystery--how could this stylish, successful, woman be single? I mean, if it is a mystery, it's not because it's unusual. I'm put off by the implication that if you're single, it must be because there's something wrong with you--presented here by it's converse: there's nothing wrong with her, so why is she single?
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I don't really talk about my own dating on this blog. It ebbs and flows, and occasionally it's absurd enough that part of me wants to blog about it, but I find it too personal. Most of the time I don't miss dating; there's a correlation between my thinking about it and how much I have going on at work and otherwise, so this summer, when I had a couple of unusually slow weeks at work and everyone I knew was out of town, I felt lonely and wondered why I wasn't dating. So during those weeks, I cared, until things picked up and I truly stopped caring. It's not that I don't think I might be happier in a healthy relationship--it's more that I'm not sure I'm going to get there by dating, and I don't generally like dating. Did I ever share this analogy I came up with over the summer? Dating is like hummus: if you only come across mediocre supermarket hummus, you don't understand what the fuss is about and you'd just as soon do without. Then, you try some amazing hummus, and you get it. Unfortunately, this summer's hummus had a short shelf life, and how much hummus do I want to keep trying until I find one that's worth it? I'm open to the possibility of amazing hummus appearing in my life, but searching for it just isn't appetizing, especially because I have such a great network of stupendous bean dips, er, friends, in my life.
Getting back to the point, though, and pushing my analogy past the edge of reason: there are more women in this city than there is hummus, and we're picky, and the hummus is picky. Race is another layer in an already complicated dynamic, and I don't critique the writer for considering it. I'm just saying, there are lots of successful, single white women in the city, too.
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It's interesting, b/c I, too, think of it as being in a bad dating city. The 5-college area was a bad dating situation, b/c women outnumbered men. And Pittsburgh was just terrible, for reasons that have been well-documented, since they appear at the very bottom of the worst cities to date in America list every single year. Now I live in a city that usually makes the Top 10 Dating list every year, and of course this is where I met my husband. I didn't date at Smith, but I dated in Pittsburgh, and I dated in Japan, and of all the places I've lived, I would say that LA is hands down the best place to date -- despite it's shallow reputation. I'm not considered classically attractive, but I never had a problem getting dates.
But I think this writer isn't really talking about dating in DC per se. I think she's talking about dating as a women of color with DC as a back drop. The problems she's talking about are not one's of geography, but ones of perception and perhaps attitude. Basically this woman would have probably have problems finding a suitable mate no matter what city she lived in, and she's looking the explore the whys of that.
I don't like to speak to it too much IRL (though my next book will be about dating while black in LA) b/c married women come off as know-it-alls when they try to give single women advice. But I think the issue for single black women is that they feel that they're not only fighting against perceptions of what people think we're like (aggressive, dramatic), but also the baggage we carry, b/c so many of us grow up in either fatherless or poverty-stricken or combative homes. Also, so many times black women are told that they don't deserve the kind of mate that they desire and that they're too picky. Seriously, when was the last time you were told by a family member or friend that you should date someone w/o a degree and/or a child b/c he was nice and you were just too picky? This literally happens to successful black women with ALL THE TIME.
So I don't think it's a situation that can really be compared, and I wonder if it should be if we're talking about the very real epidemic of successful black women who cannot find suitable mates.
It's a little like if someone writes an article about how the children of Jewish holocaust survivors have various issues with their parents, and a black person says in the comments, "Well, black people have it bad, too, b/c we're descended from slaves. I don't think the Jewish situation is special."
That's true that black people have all sorts of residual PTSD b/c of our history in this country, but it's kind of beside the point, b/c we're discussing the issues that children of Jewish holocaust survivors have. And they are special. And even if our problems are sometimes similar, being the child of a Holocaust survivor is a unique situation that deserves to be spotlighted w/o being dismissed as a problem that other people have, too.
I use this example only b/c it's one that's actually come up before. I'm not trying to be dramatic.
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