6 Sleep Freaks Every Woman Needs to Know

Typecasting · by Marina Khorosh

When it comes to a new relationship, nothing is scarier than that first night of sleeping together. I’m not referring to copulation as much as the actual act of co-sleeping, a far more delicate process that immediately determines your subconscious chemistry and compatibility. Not only is there the fear that you won’t vibe well together (nothing is worse than an awkward little spoon feels), but there is also that hidden chance that your Prince Charming by day will turn into a Sleep Freak by night, falling into one of the following categories that every woman should have on her radar!

The Story of Jason Segel, the Reformed Commitment-Phobe

I Know How To Pick'Em · by Marina Khorosh

Illustration by the uber-talented Kelcey Vossen

In the game of sourcing Dbag Dating content, I often feel like the mountain that is constantly chasing down Muhammad via every Bumble and Raya vehicle available, which makes it quite nice when Muhammad occasionally shows up to the mountain in the form of a completely impromptu encounter, reaffirming my faith that meeting unhinged human beings really is my true calling.

Let’s throw it back one month, to the first Friday night in February. #DryJanuary is officially over, I’m back to myself drinking, the world is making sense again. I also have no social life to speak of, so I take a friend up on an offer to go to some random guy’s going-away party in Nolita. Two hours later, I’m standing in the middle of one of the most bizarre places I have ever been to in NYC – it’s called Tropical 128 and it looks like a merger between a Cancun beach bar and a traditional pool hall, swarming with underage NYU kids and the occasional LES hipster. Our party is concentrated by the pool table, where I spot human kryptonite in the form of a tall, tattooed, man-bunned hipster strutting around with a pool stick and a very serious look on his face. It’s one of those situations where I can probably spend all night swapping cool stats with him if I really want to, except that it’s a new year and I have resolved to grow a brain.

“Do you think ‘View Collect’ is a good name for a company?”

French Girls Do Everything Better, Even Instagram (And It’s Because They Don’t Care)

DD x Vogue · by Marina Khorosh

Selfies. Engagement. Follower ratio. Digital footprint. Previously reserved exclusively for the blogger set, self-marketing terminology has become an essential part of our daily vernacular. Admit it: How many times have you gone somewhere “just for the picture,” or made your friends reenact a fun moment so you could capture it in better lighting? And for those of us who feel kind of awkward posting that new Loewe bag on Instagram, there is now Snapchat, where shameless self-promotion can be subdued via a few cleverly placed emojis! In the moments that we aren’t posting, we are watching (read: stalking), observing, and building a bizarre viral fascination with people we have never met in person. While I understand that this is the name of the game, it occasionally scares me when my New York friends know what color Gucci loafers Chiara Ferragni has in her closet. This is a phenomenon I never really encountered in my years of living in Paris. And so I wondered: Is it just that I never noticed, or is it possible that our social media epidemic somehow bypassed the trend-resilient French, kind of like ’80s fitness-mania and athleisure?

7 Thing I Miss about French Men

Typecasting · by Marina Khorosh

“Do you miss Paris?” This is a question I hear approximately every week. (For those of you who are new to this marvel of a blog, I moved back from Paris to New York five months ago.) My internal defense mechanism immediately triggers a flashback to my former Parisian HSBC teller, a human allergen of a man who used to take his sweet time finishing his goûter (afternoon snack), before reluctantly buzzing me in and then taking another twenty minutes to deposit my check, a process that required more signatures than an identity change – a vision that causes me to quickly shake my head and sing an ode to American customer service.

Confessions of an Attention Junkie

Musings of the Mind · by Marina Khorosh

One, two, three, four. These are the guys I have messaging me at the moment. One is a long-term friend with occasional six-whiskey-deep-when-the-full-moon-strikes-benefits. Two is cool, but is currently far away in Moscow, providing daydream material for daydreams of a Great Escape. Three and four, who are more unsaved numbers in my phone than actual identifiable human beings, are guys I’m not really interested in, but text back and forth with, just because.

Just because what? Just because I enjoy texting random half-strangers updates about my day? Not really. Just because I think that, one day, some miracle will happen and will make me view them in a new light? Most likely not. While no shrink has been consulted on this grave issue, I have a secret suspicion that the real reason I may be keeping this mini Raya army around is because I’m nurturing some underlying insecurity with constant male attention.

Sunday Kind of Love: Ajiri Aki and Thomas Buchwalder

Sunday Kind of Love · by Marina Khorosh

Ajiri and Thomas at their Nigerian wedding ceremony, October 2011

As most of you know, Dbag Dating is far from a Mommy Blog. While I’m sure the occasional mother lands on this URL in pursuit of some fun-tertainment á la “This is what I don’t miss”, the majority of us here are still figuring life out. That said, ever so often, I will meet a woman who appears to have attained that covetable personal and professional tandem, evoking a spark of curiosity within me: How does she do it? Was it always this way? What can I – and you guys, consecutively – learn from her? One such woman happens to be my dear friend Ajiri Aki, a Parisian expat who’s list of accomplishments is endless: Wife, mother, author of bestselling coffee table book “Where’s Karl”, and creator of the Parisian expat’s guide to mommyhood, Manna Paris, just to name a few! Annoyed with her mere existence? I would be too, if it wasn’t for the fact that she is also an exceptionally cool human being. During my last trip to Paris, Ajiri took a few hours out of her crazy schedule to sit down over a bottle of wine and share her personal trajectory, touching on everything, from former Dbag flames, to the experience of meeting her husband, Thomas, to the challenges of expat motherhood, for our latest all-girl edition of Sunday Kind of Love!