Column: Making it in Missoula

Finding Singles: The Garden City or The Big Apple?

By Big City Bro, 5-22-07

My friend Carl likes to joke that only a few dozen umbrellas exist in the entire world, and they get passed on from person to person in some mysterious fashion.  Perhaps you’ll find one left in a restaurant, or on a bus seat next to you.  I mean, unless you have a really nice umbrella, I bet you can’t even remember where you got the one you have now (assuming it hasn’t strangely disappeared).

Shortly after moving to Missoula several years ago, I found out that Carl’s theory applied to more than just umbrellas.  I found absolutely no single women around the Garden City.  And, chances are that if I were to somehow come across this rare item, as Little Sis found out, they’d already been with your best friend and/or worst enemy.

The promise of a “good government job” lured me to the Big Apple after I finished grad school in Missoula last spring.  The prospect of trading Missoula’s cramped, incestuous dating scene for a city with a million single women was an added bonus.  Little did I know what I was getting myself into.

Actually, when you stop and think about it, Missoula and New York City aren’t that different—except that 125 times more people live here and we have buildings taller than Mount Sentinel.  (I work on the 25th floor of one of them.) When you get right down to it, people flock to both places for the same reason: quality of life. And they’re willing to sacrifice for it.

How many Missoulians could have better jobs and higher incomes in larger cities? The answer to that question is the same as it is to this one: How many aspiring actors here in New York pour coffee waiting for their big Broadway break?

“Quality of life,” mind you, is vastly different for each place.  In Missoula, it generally means being close to nature, drinking a pint of Cold Smoke and enjoying a real sense of community. (Note: Exactly none of those things is possible in New York City, though the Brooklyn Brewery makes a fine lager and you can buy bison at the farmer’s market.)

“Quality of life” in New York has as many definitions as the city does residents—some eight million, give or take.  This means that my high hopes for the one million single women were quickly dashed: New Yorkers are so busy chasing their dreams of Wall Street money, Madison Avenue beauty or, in my case, tickets to a Yankees game that they’re too busy to date.

Social circles are incredibly hard to break into in “the city that never sleeps” because everyone’s so busy, well, not sleeping. Talking to people on the subway or street is pretty much a faux pas.  Plus, more and more companies forbid dating at work.

New Yorkers, believe it or not, are actually pretty friendly if you need directions or something easy like that.  The rest of the time, though, they’re quite guarded.  You can’t walk up to someone and start talking to them like you can at the Old Post or at a Missoula friend’s potluck. They’ll either think you’re crazy, or that you’re trying to steal their wallet. 

This makes meeting someone special more of a challenge in a place where you might think it’d be relatively easy.  In fact, if it weren’t for an amazing stroke luck in the online dating arena, I’m confident I’d still be single here in New York (but that’s a story for another guest column).

In Missoula, it seems—at least from the two years I spent there—that the pretenses associated with dating elsewhere just don’t exist. The typical date there, such as skiing at Snowbowl, tubing on the Clark Fork or hiking the M trail, is as far from typical as you can get in most other places.

So there you go, Missoula.  Your dating scene, as inadequate and frustrating as it might seem at times, is superior to that of the biggest city in the country.  All you need to do is go up to someone and say hi.  And, after they tell you that they just started dating one of your buddies, don’t give up.  A cool single guy or girl is bound to pop up soon.

And if you’re really having trouble meeting someone, just ask the next attractive guy or girl you meet if you can borrow their umbrella.

Postscript: Big City Bro is not related (biologically speaking) to Big or Little Sis.

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