Someone to Bake For: Single Male Seeking Wife

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.

But here’s the apparent rub: I’m autistic, which may be substantially impairing my efforts to court and take a wife.

For me this is irrelevant: 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’m autistic, but I’m worthy of love and need someone to fuss over, love madly, 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 fig and onion galette, 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 highly desirable 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 (this is a BIG one!) 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.

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.

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.

Surely there is someone out there to bake for. One of the characteristics of Asperger’s Syndrome is that it imbues its host with a very intense ability to focus and to bring the products of that focus into realization. I feel that being an Aspie may actually aid in helping me to actualize a plan whose contours will be developed carefully and predicated upon 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.