Eric Schaeffer wants to marry you

Meet the filmmaker, online dater and blogosphere punching bag who is searching for women under 36 willing to bear him three children.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Relationships, Dating, Rebecca Traister, Life

Feb. 8, 2007 | If you are one of those Miss Havishams out there who believes that chick-lit dating confessionals provide too perky a picture of today's sexual marketplace, please meet the confirmation of your worst fears: Eric Schaeffer. An otherwise ordinary 15-minute visitor to fame's picnic, this writer-director-actor attracted some pretty unpleasant attention recently, when media site Gawker began posting items about his blog, I Can't Believe I'm Still Single. Schaeffer has made a handful of movies ("If Lucy Fell," "Fall," "My Life's in Turnaround"), a short-lived television show about eating disorders and, apparently, a prolific splash on the New York dating scene.

On-screen, Schaeffer, a native New Yorker, has tried to style himself as a Woody Allen-ish figure, though his creepy-crawly persona is more paranoid and kinky than Allen's (and substantially less funny). Schaeffer's characters -- all full of pseudo-spiritual romantic heehaw, and affected, self-conscious tics -- have tended closer to bone-chilling than endearing.

But after 15 years of directing and starring in largely ignored and tepidly received films, Schaeffer has struck a chord in New York City and online, just by being ... Eric Schaeffer, a 45-year-old binge-eating, downward-dogging, recovering drug-addict hypochondriac with an online dating habit, a taste for happy-ending massages and golden showers -- and a hankerin' for a wife who wants to bear him three children starting in about five to six years.

Yup, ladies, he's available! And if the gush of venomous responses elicited by Gawker's items are any measure, he's been a busy bee. Schaeffer's blog, which he started in the fall of 2006 to promote his upcoming book of the same name, chronicles in lovingly attentive detail the minutiae of his life: from his cookie consumption, to stray thoughts he had on the subway, to the time he woke up thinking he soiled himself only to discover that some vegan chocolate chips he'd gobbled while sleep-eating had melted in his pubic hair.

But mostly, as its title would suggest, Schaeffer's blog chronicles his attempts to score a wife. He describes the "Nerveettes" he meets online, his experiences with dominatrixes who asphyxiate him and insert thin metal rods into his penis, and why it's OK, as a 45-year-old, to date 25-year-olds: "I simply know deep in my soul that I want my own children....and I don't want them for at least 5 years. I don't get mad when women like black guys, or young guys or buff guys, it's their preference...STOP GETTING MAD AT ME AND THE REST OF US 45 YEAR OLD MEN WHOSE CUT OFF IS 36 OKAY?!!...YOU DECIDED NOT TO HAVE KIDS YET ANDTHAT'S FINE BUT WE DON'T HAVE TO HAVE THEM YET, OKAY?!"

That tirade was the first portion of Schaeffer's blog to be quoted by Gawker, and it created a storm of commenter response -- much of it from women claiming to have encountered him on the dating scene in New York. One woman wrote in asserting that her first date with Schaeffer was at a gym, and that he asked her to "fuck him in the 2nd floor bathroom." Other women testified to his obsessive need for personal compliments about his appearance, his habit of demanding oral sex and an AIDS test on first dates, and the fact that he is "the guy all my friends bring up when people start talking about online dating psychos." Indeed, it seemed that an examination of Schaeffer's blog touched an extremely sensitive nerve, especially among female readers.

In almost parodic exaggeration, Schaeffer and his blog appear to embody some of the worst stereotypes about what's wrong with "the men out there": that they are obnoxiously self-impressed and lazy, that they are commitment-phobic and obsessed with finding a wife, that they are riddled with unnerving hang-ups about everything from food to sex to spirituality. What makes him most fascinating -- in a car crash sort of way -- is that his utter lack of self-awareness, coupled with his excruciating self-obsession, mean that unlike most fucked-up people, men or women, he is willing and eager to let it all hang out.

I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, off the blog, live and in person. We met at a diner near his apartment on Manhattan's far Upper West Side, where he clearly knew the waiters. He was dressed in a frayed blue flannel shirt, and was, as he would later describe a date to me, "fine, attractive enough" -- blue-eyed, square and of smallish stature.

How did you feel about the publicity on Gawker?

What's Gawker? All I know is one day the hits on my site went up and somebody told me it was because I had been linked on Gawker. But I abstain from all media.

So you didn't know what Gawker was, but I assume you've heard that there were people who've dated you writing in?

Gossip to me is the opposite of what I believe is going to help the world succeed. So all I know is that whatever they wrote helped thousands of people come to my Web site and most of them have stayed. Did they publish any of the hundreds of letters I got that were nice people writing in?

They published one by someone who said, "He's not that bad," but it wasn't exactly positive.

Let's consider the source. You seem like a smart, thoughtful, caring human being. That's my sense. So person to person, just sitting here at the table, human to human, in this fucked-up, fractured world, when are we going to start to just love each other? Most people who call into Rush Limbaugh are his supporters. Most people who write into Gawker are people who love talking gossip about people. Women who get pleasure from other people's pain.

I read Gawker. Many people read it, or sites like it, as a diversion, and a bit of a break from work. I don't think everyone who reads Gawker takes pleasure in other people's pain. But this is all to say that it elicited a really strong negative reaction.

I get tremendous fan and love mail from all around the world from people whose lives are fundamentally changed by my work. People on their deathbed who get hope from my films. That's polar opposite to these negative, snippy things. Somebody told me [they wrote on Gawker] that "he lies that he's 5'8"." I mean, are we fucking 13 years old? They could spend that 10-minute break from work reading my blog or going out-fucking-side and finding old ladies to help across the street with their bags.

Let's talk about your blog. Why did you decide to write about your search for a wife?

My last serious girlfriend was seven years ago, and I've only had three third dates since then, and I find it hard to meet someone that I like. In our culture, the American man is told, "When you build it, she will come." Like there is literally going to be a fucking football field of women waiting when you're finally ready. That's the paradigm: Men don't want to commit, women make them commit.

My last girlfriend seemed to say she wanted to get married, and when I finally asked her she said no, and my eyes were opened. [Maybe] the problem isn't "I have a boyfriend who won't commit" [but] a woman's own possible ambivalence [about whether she] wants to get married. Suddenly it's like, wow, this is hard. I think a lot of people will identify with me. I'm pretty much the Everyman, I just talk about it. I am just like every other dude.

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