1994

The first six months In Atlanta

I was 36 years old in 1994 and I could feel my biological ticking. I wasn’t in a relationship but I was definitely on the prowl. South Florida was like throwing your fishing line in a lake that had nothing but fish in it when it came to getting dates with women.

I thought Atlanta would be more of the same. NOT. It was almost the complete opposite for me and I didn’t do much dating the first six months after moving here. I joined this dating service which at the time was like the Cadillac of dating services here in Atlanta. And it wasn’t cheap!

They photographed you and put this profile together for you. After your photos were developed they put everything together for you. they had these three-ring binders that all the profiles went into. When you wanted to find someone, you had to drive down to the dating service and spend the afternoon going through the 3-ring binders. (this was obviously before the internet). I ended up with one date that didn’t go anywhere. 🤣

January 1994

As far as God and religion were concerned I was as far away as I could be. However, since I still identified as being Jewish I figured I could still play that card if I thought I could play it and benefit.

I think my brother’s partner at the time suggested that I go down to the JCC which was a Jewish singles group. They met a couple of days a week and played volleyball and some other activities.

I figured I’d give it a try. I ended up meeting a few cool guys down there. The women on the other hand…yikes. I never cared for Jewish women. None of them seem like my type. And the ones I met there definitely weren’t.🤣

I volunteered for this auction. You know…an auction where YOU get auctioned off for charity. It was kinda cool. We had to wear tuxedos and it was at a pretty cool place in Atlanta.

There was this gal there that I hadn’t seen before at any of the other JCC events. I was checking her out and was like, “Damn.” I kinda like her. We ended up hitting it off and yes, she was Jewish.

When I lived in Florida one of my Mom’s good friends was Jewish and she was single and athletic (she was like 15 years younger than my mom and close to 10 years older than me).

I was athletic and we became tennis buddies. One thing led to the next and we were more than tennis buddies. But there was no way I was looking for anything serious (she was!). We ended up just being friends (without benefits). Amy on the other hand I ran her through my “meat grinder” to see if she could be the one.

The biggest thing I liked about Amy was that she was Jewish. Even though I didn’t want anything to do with God and religion I figured if we did get married it would make matters a lot easier if we had kids.

All the Jews that I knew and conversed with didn’t seem to believe in God either. It was just a matter of going through the motions which I knew I’d figure out if it came down to that. 

The Proposal

I proposed a few months later. Imagine that. In a little over a year after moving to Atlanta not only was I going to get married, I was getting married to a Jewish woman. We decided on an October wedding in 1994 which wasn’t my ideal month in that I always imagined a wedding in the summer months.

No biggie though. Was that too fast? We didn’t think so. I was 36 and Amy was 32. I think we both could feel the clock ticking and we seemed to have enough of the right ingredients to make this work. Amy lived in Atlanta her whole life and knew quite a bit of people.

This was going to be a big Jewish wedding and the pre-wedding plans got ugly. I’m not going to get into the gory details here but suffice it to say, had I had some Chutzpah I would have backed out of getting married to her. The red flags were flying all over the place. Lesson learned. Going through an engagement reveals just about everything you need to know about the other person.🤣

The Wedding

We ended up getting married on October 9th, 1994. The wedding was stressful, to say the least. I had such mixed emotions. Part of me was like, “What are you doing?” The other part was, “I’ll figure it out.” We had a two-week honeymoon that started in the North Carolina area and ended up at Sandals in the Caribbean.

The first six months of the marriage were just, okay. The things that I saw in the engagement period kept coming up and we grew apart. We were lying in bed one night and we were both fed up. I know she wanted to end it, but I don’t think she wanted to make the first move. I spoke up, “Let’s get divorced.” She was on board.

The divorce decree was documented exactly two years to the day (October 9, 1996) that we got married. 🤣 We didn’t have kids (thank God!) so it was a fairly easy divorce especially since it was only two years. 

Conclusion

The Rabbi who married us took a liking to me and we became good friends. I wasn’t sure what he saw in me, to be honest. We never talked about anything deep religion-wise. I never told him how I felt about God and Judaism. But he was the only good thing that came out of that marriage other than a couple of lessons that I didn’t learn because I would make the same mistake (getting married too fast without knowing the whole picture) not once but twice after that.