Heeb

Although many a girl my age pours over the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column with rapt interest, the whole concept never really appealed to me. So it was with extreme trepidation that I finally took a look this week.

Um, isn’t this column supposed to be romantic, or something?

The story, entitled “Always a Frog, Now My Prince” details the classic situation: Jewish woman gets on in years, woman’s mom runs into the mother of a former classmate (the pimply, awkward, Russian boy—of course!), numbers are exchanged, a date is made. Awkwardness ensues—wait, no, they get married?

Sounds like a fairytale, right? Well, yeah, if the whole damn column didn’t serve as one big, fat criticism of the author’s poor, short, froggy husband:

My mind reeled as I tried to process the possibility that after all this time, distance and indiscriminate fornication, the frog-legged, compact, 5-foot-4 Russian Lev had been my intended. Lev! About whom I’d thought sexually exactly once, as a teenager, and purely as a gross-out exercise.

It was through his letters that I saw Lev for the first time. They didn’t stutter, they had style and they revealed a guy who had complexity — and who appreciated it in others. This wasn’t just another Jewish man living with his mother.

He worked, I looked for a bigger apartment and we went out to a different restaurant every night. I became fatter and his wallet became thinner. He didn’t seem to mind either one.

He even provides her with health insurance! How romantic!

Granted, this woman is a comedienne, so I guess this whole thing could be classified as humor, but like the audience at Gotham Comedy Club (where she dragged her poor future husband to watch her rail on men for God knows how long) this story just left me “disturbed and depressed.”