Page 504 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
group of this type tends to attract four women for every man. That one of them turned out to be a murderess is entirely beside the point and should not be held against the Y. (I’ll refer to the valuable lesson that I learned on a bike trip and to my murderess below.)
A third strategy was to go to locations that are really set up just to create a social atmosphere, “meet markets,” much like college mixers but far longer, far more expensive, far more intense, and certainly far less escapable than a meet-and-greet in a local restaurant. Not only did I go to Copper Mountain, where, all things being equal, I could ski, but I also went to the Club Med in the Caribbean, where, all things being equal, there would be nothing that I liked to do. I certainly did not go because I like the sun or the beach atmosphere. Here I would learn that Club Med waters its drinks, that there are a lot of angry middle-aged single women in the world, and that I feel silly wearing beads. The high- point for me was a softball game where I shined far more than I did in a bathing suit. In any event, I am, believe it or not, shy in a group setting, and being put on the auction block is very distasteful, so the “meet mar- kets” were destined to be very difficult for me, and I could not wait to escape from Club Med’s Caribbean outpost.
Fourth is serendipity, which is, by definition, not really a strategy at all. That non-strategy can work and in fact did—twice: an attorney whom I met during a negotiating session and who would later became the long-time girlfriend of Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw magazine, and a real estate broker who was the great-granddaughter of Charles Evans Hughes, the eleventh chief justice of the Supreme Court; I met her at a Coronet closing party.
Finally, and most interesting, was the strategy of placing an ad in the personal section of New York magazine. That resulted in over 140 responses, some intriguing, most not, and many merely sad. It also resulted in a fair number of dates. Whether or not the process is stacked heavily in favor of men, its utility, though not marginal, was essentially slight. The fun, to the extent that there was fun, was mostly in writing the advertisement—“Adorable general counsel seeks . . .”—(yucchh!) and in reading the responses:
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