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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/34350/full/34350/a-valentine-memo-to-men-got-cold-feet-author-helps-couples-take-heat-off-en/ <br /><br /> <b>A Valentine memo to men: Got cold feet? Author helps couples take heat off engagement</b> <br /> Monday, February 11, 2008 | by <p>rachel sarah </p> <br /><br /><p>Valentine’s Day is almost here and the pressure is on. Are you single? Do you have a date? If you’re dating someone, is there any talk about getting engaged?<br /><br /> Let’s face it, in the Jewish community, the pressure to tie the knot is not limited to Valentine’s Day. It’s daily. Jews love love. They love celebrations. They love weddings.<br /><br /> When Kim and Jon Runyan, of San Francisco, fell in love, she was sure that he was “the one.” There was just one little hitch: Jon wasn’t Jewish.<br /><br /> “I was looking for a Jewish guy,” said Kim, now 33, who hails from Connecticut. “It was tough for my parents. They were saying, ‘Who’s this guy from California? What are his roots?’”<br /><br /> Kim and Jon were living on the East Coast in a “commuter relationship” — Jon went to school in New Haven, and Kim worked in New York City — when Jon, now 31, announced that he wanted to apply to law school in his home state California.<br /><br /> That’s when Kim started to think about her future with him on the West Coast. “I was saying that I could access the Jewish community out there, but it would be weird to do it alone. It was hard for me to reconcile being with a non-Jewish guy.”<br /><br /> “I said, ‘It’s too bad you can’t convert to agnostic Judaism’ and he said, ‘I would.’ I was shocked. ‘You would?’”<br /><br /> Jon proposed, and Kim’s rabbi converted him. <br /><br /> “It was all about compromise for us,” Kim says. “He was making this commitment to become part of this practice I feel so much a part of.”<br /><br /> In 2004, the rabbi who converted Jon married them in Kim’s childhood backyard in Connecticut. Today, the couple has a 1-year-old son and another baby on the way. Jon’s mom is even reading “Judaism for Dummies.”<br /><br /> Religion wasn’t the issue when Scot Candell, now 39, was dating Andrea Passman, now 35. It was the pressure her friends and family were putting on them.<br /><br /> Scot remembers a boat trip he took with Andrea and her family after they’d been dating for a couple of years. The captain of the boat turned around and asked: “How long have you two been married?”<br /><br /> Andrea’s cousin shouted out from the rear: “He has commitment issues!”<br /><br /> The captain was amused, “Ask her now!” he said to Scot. “C’mon!”<br /><br /> “I almost jumped off and swam for my life,” recalls Scot. <br /><br /> The pressure didn’t end there. Andrea and Scot, of Mill Valley, continued to date. As the months passed, her family called often asking, “When are you two getting married?” <br /><br /> It’s not uncommon for Jewish women with long-term boyfriends to get drilled by family and friends: “When’s the big day?” <br /><br /> What’s a girl to do? Well, Andrea learned what not do: nag Scot, which, of course, didn’t work. <br /><br /> Andrea, a relationship coach, soon noticed she wasn’t alone: “It wasn’t too long before I found out that I wasn’t the only one dropping some not-so-subtle hints. Not to mention all the obsessing, wondering if there’s a ring in the picture, and all the minutes used on the cell phone venting to the committee of girlfriends.”<br /><br /> Scot tried to shrug off all the pressure. “As a guy, I understand that women have biological pressures to get married,” he says. “You kind of feel like an a——— if you’re going to date someone, and you know you’re not going to get married. Then you’ve screwed up this person’s life. So, you have that pressure you’re putting on yourself. If you care about the woman, you don’t want to screw her over like that.”<br /><br /> Fortunately, Scot didn’t do that. He married Andrea in August 2003 in Newport, R.I. Today, Andrea and Scot have a 13-month-old son. <br /><br /> In the meantime, Andrea got inspired to write a guidebook about what she calls “pre-engagement limbo.” The book, “His Cold Feet: A Guide for the Woman Who Wants to Tie the Knot With the Guy Who Wants to Talk About it Later,” is out just in time for Valentine’s Day.<br /><br /> Andrea hopes it helps couples who find themselves in a predicament like Jewish couple Steve and Sarah (names have been changed).<br /><br /> When Steve took his then-girlfriend, Sarah, up to Montreal to meet his bubbe, Grandma was ecstatic. <br /><br /> “She kept telling me what a beautiful boy he was,” Sarah recalls Steve’s grandmother telling her. <br /><br /> But after meeting Sarah a few times, Steve’s bubbe was impatient. “She said it was taking too long,” Sarah recalls — “it” meaning their engagement. <br /><br /> “At one point,” Sarah says, Bubbe took Steve’s father aside and said, ‘You make it happen.’”<br /><br /> Since Steve and Sarah met on JDate, they would be having a Jewish wedding— and Bubbe didn’t want to miss it. <br /><br /> But there was a possible deal breaker: cohabitation. “On our second or third date, I said I would never live with anyone I wasn’t engaged to. And he said he would never get engaged to someone he hadn’t lived with first.”<br /><br /> Steve also had wanted to buy a house before they met — and Sarah joined him to house hunt. “I remember saying to him, ‘Is this a house for us, or is this a house for you?’ He made it clear he was excited to have my input.”<br /><br /> Steve bid on seven places but they all fell through.<br /><br /> A year later his offer on a home was accepted, and he invited Sarah to move in with him. “My parents had a fit,” Sarah recalls. “I had friends who I had seen nag, and I knew I didn’t want to do that. I knew I wanted him to do things on his time. He said he had every intention of getting married to me.”<br /><br /> It was true: Steve proposed to her during a trip to China, and the Noe Valley couple got married in Carmel Valley in 2005.<br /><br /> So, what can you do if you’re dating a guy who has cold feet this Valentine’s Day?<br /><br /> “The key is accepting that the person you’re going to be with is not perfect,” said Andrea’s husband, Scot. That’s what guys need to understand.”<br /><br /> “The looking-for-something-better concept is really common for men,” he adds. Guys have this image growing up of being Hugh Hefner or James Bond.”<br /><br /> The hitch, of course, is that they won’t have that special woman to warm their feet on Valentine’s Day.<br /><br /> <br><br /><br /> <b>“His Cold Feet: A Guide for the Woman Who Wants to Tie the Knot With the Guy Who Wants to Talk About it Later”</b> by Andrea Passman Candell (240 pages, St. Martin’s Press, $13.95)</p> <p> <b>Andrea Candell Passman</b> will be at a Valentine’s event 6-7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 12 at Sumbody, 2167 Union St., S.F.</p> <p> </p>

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