Meet Nils Skudra.

A Jewish man looking for his Shidduch.

“Someone To Bake For”… single male seeking wife: help needed”

– by NILS SKUDRA

UPDATE: I'm looking for a young Jewish woman in her 20s or 30s who is kind, compassionate, accomplished, educated, intellectually driven, adventurous, goal-oriented, easygoing, and down-to-earth. I'm in North Carolina.

I’m a person who likes quotes and keeps long lists of them that I might throw into a conversation at an appropriate moment.  Sometimes they are antithetical to each other like these:  “It is better to be alone than in bad company” (George Washington) and “Better quarreling than lonely” (Irish proverb).  For purposes of the thesis of this article, I’ll go for argument’s sake with the latter.         

I’m allegedly not hard on the eyes (mine are sea blue).  I’m well-educated with two Masters Degrees behind me and a book on the American Civil War which was recently published out of Blacksburg, Virginia.   I’m a hard worker, write and publish regularly, have my own money and plan on buying a condominium in the coming year.  I’m funny, kind, scrupulously honest, and grateful to be inveterately characterized by others as courageous and whip-smart.  I’ll give you the shirt off my back if you really want it and will surprise you with flowers and chocolates even if you don’t.  People say I have my ducks in a row. I’m worthy of love and need someone to fuss over, love madly, share ruminations, and plot a life with.  In short, I need someone to bake for.  I know my way around a kitchen and if you crave a particular meal, just say the words.  I can pull off an Indian curry, balsamic-glazed salmon with a demi-glace sauce, and grilled asparagus or take you to the moon and back with a home-made salsa sauce atop scratch-made chicken taquitos. I’m not short of admiration or accolades but I do lack a wife, which I feel in all candor is a highly desirable partner to have.

So, at the moment I’m feeling twinges of despair.  I’m hearing Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” playing in the background, the same song that Elvis said was probably the saddest one he’d ever heard.  I feel the gravitas of being an adult who is laboring under the compulsion that it is high time to find a partner and to thereby constitute a life which heretofore has been lacking one.  This is where the publication of this article comes in: the idea that it may pay to advertise. Winston Churchill once said: “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack”.  That is what I am metaphorically doing here: driving the point home that it is high time to get a wife and all that’s left is how to figure out how.

My well-meaning but lacking- in-tact cousin in Ft. Lauderdale tells me “you’ll never meet someone by sitting in the house and looking at the walls.”    I “get” what she means: it is time to strategize.  Assuredly my expensive University of California, Berkeley education should have at least prepared me to do that.  Putting pen to paper is the commencement of that process.  I’ve done my affirmations:  I am enough.  I deserve the woman of my dreams.”    So it slowly begins:  I jumpstart my life with the formalized expression of this goal.     Time is a’ wasting – we are looking at “get up and go”, words of action:  don’t contemplate/perseverate – instead:  activate/enervate. We all know that opportunities are everywhere and I now feel obliged to grab each of them.  An invitation to a party may not produce the result of which I am desirous:  meeting my intended BUT I might meet someone who could conceivably INTRODUCE me to a prospective mate – perhaps their friend, cousin, fellow employee or roommate.  I call this “the door argument” – for every door that closes, another one opens.  My Leipzig-born grandmother used to say it softly in German and even in the foreign tongue, the nuances of the saying are not lost on me: “Für jede Tür, die sich schließt, öffnet sich eine andere.” There is another expression – “Für jeden Topf gibt es einen Deckel” – which translates as “For every pot, there is a lid.” I believe in the possibility of finding that lid.

And then there is fate.  This morning on the internet I saw someone named “M. Howson’s” sentiment to “take a chance … change a ‘no’ to a ‘yes’ today.”  My faith, admittedly being assailable right now, however likes the positivity of that comment. Was he talking somehow to me?  Is that a long-shot inference I can make?    I’m not averse to having wisdom from whatever corner it may come from to weigh in on my find-a-wife predicament.

As the proverbial New Age wisdom would have it, one can choose to be happier. For me that includes moving from stasis to effectuated outcome.  No less an authority than Rabbi Jonathan Sacks had it that “if we change the way we think, we will change the way we feel.”  This process he denoted as “reframing.”  Reading these words is a moment of epiphany for me: if one can throw away the doom and gloom attitude and set a sharp intention to find a partner, there is a certain magical alchemy that might be set in motion.    Can one will love into being?  I’m game to find out.

In short I’m all too happy to take “long chances,” a term one of my favorite Civil War historians (Shelby Foote) used to talk about General Robert E. Lee.  I’m a military historian by avocation and the search for my beloved seems to be decidedly one of the biggest engagements I will ever throw myself into.  Going into the relationship fray, however, does seem quite daunting...

A friend tells me that it may be better to start small, keep the bar low so as not to overwhelm.  What can I offer someone who may not be ready to stand under the chuppah with me quite yet?  Here is where the baking angle comes in and why I joined “The Spruce Eats” Baking Facebook Group this week.  I have decided to not only refine and improve my abilities in the kitchen but to woo someone with baking skills consummately groomed under the aegis of the professionals themselves.  There are several arguments as to why such a tactic may have merit.

As Janet Clarkson says in her book “Pie: A Global History”, “We are social animals, and we don’t usually find and eat food alone, so we associate it at an emotional level with people, events and circumstances.  Eventually a food becomes embedded with meaning, allowing anthropologists to ask questions like: ‘So pies mean anything?’”  I think Janet is right.

I have seen it written in various places that cooking is therapy, a way to combat anxiety and depression.  Food MEANS something contextually – perhaps that is why pecan pie is the most requested “last dessert” on death rows. 

Further refining my baking skills will therefore have a clear psychological benefit but the fruits of that labor may just operate to bring someone into my ambit who may deeply value the baker as well.

Wallace Stevens once said in a poem “I go by going.”  I will take that conceit and make it into something that sounds like “I go by baking”. I take the creative energy from a new hobby and transform it into a quest for love, perhaps chocolate and pastry emboldened but an effort that has meaning beyond the pure magic of a culinary success.

I come by meanings easily, as it were, they are presumptively everywhere.  I see it in the flowering of the crepe myrtle tree on my block, lush with purple blossoms. A female jogger in the park who throws a big “hi” my way, although I don’t know her.  The astrology forecast that tells me, “it is your time to shine. Put on your running shoes and go.”  Signs from a prescient universe?  Indeterminate to be sure but one thing I can do is to bake with even more passion and greater expertise, prodigiously, and see if the delicious concoctions I might produce can be the lure to draw the woman of my dreams in.

Surely there is someone out there to bake for. I have a very strong ability to focus and to bring the products of that focus into realization. I feel that this may actually aid in helping me to actualize a plan whose contours will be developed carefully and based on reason and resolve. Somewhere out there in the known universe is a girl who is just waiting to be baked for by someone like me. I know my way around a kitchen and I wear my heart on my sleeve.  Maybe – just maybe –with God’s blessing, our paths can meet.

On a spiritual level, I’m hoping to find a Jewish soulmate with whom I can share Shabbos, attend synagogue, and discuss Jewish topics. I live in an area in which there are very few Jewish people, and the ones who live here are mostly elderly people or families with young children. It is my earnest desire to meet a Jewish woman in her 20s or 30s who shares a strong cultural and spiritual Jewish identity, with whom I can celebrate the Jewish holidays, bake a challah on Shabbat, and appreciate what it means to be a Jew.