It's a chilly winter evening at the commonwealth club, and the house is packed. The Market Street networking and culture center has long been a hub of San Francisco’s intellectual life, with a membership that tends toward the well-heeled, the politically enlightened, the perpetually curious. They’re exactly the sort of people whom one might like to meet, especially if one is single, especially if one has exhausted all other options and is dreading the thought of another Valentine’s Day alone, curled up in front of Downton Abbey. Which is why tonight’s panel—“How to Get Your Holiday Squeeze”—has drawn all types: professionals in financial district suits, grad students toting bike helmets, balding men with unfortunate ponytails, society women with Prada boots and equally unfortunate facelifts.
But the panel just tells us what we’ve all heard before. Put yourself out there, a sex blogger urges, injecting a spicy anecdote about picking up an aspiring Navy Seal at a rifle range. Don’t get stuck in your own tribe, take off your labels, take chances. The panel’s token man (who, natch, has a girlfriend) suggests creative “activity dates” like cooking classes. Feminist author and sexpert Carol Queen reminds us that, no matter what, “there is honor in being single.” Not exactly what this audience—now stealing furtive glances at one another while maintaining that San Francisco pose of studied nonchalance that we call “flirting” and other places call “bored”—came to hear.
Matchmaker Joy Nordenstrom, blond, pretty, sweet voiced is talking about the importance of Presenting Your Most Authentic Self when she is interrupted by a wailing siren.
The moderator asks her to speak up.
“YOUR MOST AUTHENTIC SELF,” Nordenstrom repeats, but there are more sirens now, and they’re starting to sound not like a few cop cars but like an overture for Armageddon, because they are followed by the sound of chanting and yelling. The police are trying to break up the Occupy camp at Justin Herman Plaza a few blocks away.
Outside, the streets resound with shouts about the haves and the have-nots, the wealthy and the poor, the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. But here inside, money is strikingly absent from the conversation. No one talks about the ways in which the Bay Area’s peculiar mix of tech boom and rest-of-us recession—call it the ReBubble—has affected where, why, and how we look for our mates. No one mentions the awkwardness of asking to move in with a new girlfriend because you’ve just been evicted, or choosing a restaurant for a date with a guy whose unemployment just ran out. Nor does anyone bring up the fortunate but still disconcerting need to play down your own financial good luck while courting an independent-minded artist with nothing but ramen in her cupboard.
Against this backdrop, much of tonight’s advice seems outmoded, even quaint. Look outside your tribe? Sure, but not outside your zip code, because who can afford cab fare. Cooking classes? Do they offer need-based scholarships? And what if Your Most Authentic Self wakes up screaming in the middle of the night, haunted by visions of no health insurance, no Social Security, and no one left to commiserate with because they’ve all married and moved back to Indiana? For first-date conversation, a less authentic self might be a better bet.
It’s the economy, Cupid. Whether we like to admit it or not, money matters more than ever for San Franciscans, in life, in work, and most definitely in love.
Money talk or no money talk, the crowd at the Commonwealth Club has been drawn together by an undeniable truth: Dating in San Francisco sucks. People here are notoriously cliquish, rejection-shy, and wary of approaching others. We’re also picky and judgmental (which might account for the wariness), and when it comes to settling down, our insistence on independence and affi nity for sexual exploration do not exactly prioritize commitment, monogamy, or, you know, calling people back.
Where San Francisco has made up for these less-thanendearing qualities is in its romantic egalitarianism. For such a judgmental place, we’ve been unusually accepting
of romantic partners who follow nontraditional financial paths—i.e., people who don’t work (much). Sexy was never the banker in $500 shoes; it was the poet just back from Chiapas, the painter who spent all her money on canvases, the surfer who lived in his van on Ocean Beach and answered to no one but Poseidon. You could call it immaturity or middle-class privilege; you could get fancy and call it the extended adolescence of the first class first-world narcissist, and you’d be right. But San Francisco was also a city that had seen its share of booms and busts, and had shown, over and over, that no matter how badly you crashed, you would have another chance. And that confidence carried over into romance: Your true love might be selling weed today, but tomorrow he or she could be running a division of Google. It was never too early to retire, and it was never too late to grow up.
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