Your Beau’s Not Yet Her Ex--Tres Awkward

If you were a nice Jewish girl dating a nice Jewish boy--and he’s the famously funny David Steinberg, to boot--how would you expect your mom to react?

“The look on my mother’s face was one of horror,” Robyn Todd, the nice Jewish girl in question, is saying.

Oh, yes. Did we happen to mention that Steinberg was in the process of getting a divorce when they started dating a year ago? Exactly like another boyfriend of Todd’s, a music producer in L.A.--she declined to say who--whose trip down that tortuous path eventually sent her reeling home to New York.

“So imagine my hysteria when he said that. I said, ‘Excuse me?’ It was as if the entire room froze for a moment. Nobody was moving. ‘You’re what?’ ”

Fortunately, Todd, a bicoastal casting director, was in the middle of collaborating with writer Lesley Dormen on a how-to for women going through the same thing, the just-published “How to Survive Your Boyfriend’s Divorce: Loving Your Separated Man Without Losing Your Mind” (Evans). So she had plenty of advice to draw on--her own.

The never-married Todd came up with a strategy after consulting with former talk-radio therapist Leslie Pam, and interviewing more than 100 people grappling with marital transition.

“When David read the book, he said, ‘Oh my God, I’m a cliche.’ ”

But, hey, he was an available one, which is the best kind. (His divorce came through a few months ago.) We are chatting with Todd amid the boisterous lunchtime crowd at the Ivy on Robertson Boulevard. We ask her about the pitfalls of dating men who are out of the house but not out of their marriage.

“It’s a very cold time for them,” says the warm and petite Todd, who laughs easily. “So when they meet somebody they connect with, there’s all that warmth they haven’t been getting for a long time. It’s like they’re starved for it.

“And what’s better for a woman than to have someone who’s warm and loving and terrific and accepting immediately? He doesn’t have those walls up that a guy who’s unencumbered has. A guy who’s dating has normal walls up that prevent him from getting too close too fast. And those are there for a reason.”

Yeah, sometimes because they’re losers.

“That’s a reason. So it’s really up to you not to let the relationship go fast, to keep your independence.”

If you don’t, you may be paying heavy penalties for early emotional withdrawal--his. And you’re likely to get embroiled in the high drama of dealing with ex-spouses and attorneys.

“It’s like you’re free-falling,” Todd says. “You don’t know what to expect. Most self-help books have one paragraph saying, ‘Tell him to call you in two years.’ Are you going to do that when you meet the great guy of your life, tell him, ‘Call me in two years and I hope you don’t meet somebody else?’ No.”

If you decide to go for it, Todd suggests you keep your eye on the prize--and it’s not necessarily what you think it is.

“The goal is not to get him through his divorce,” she says. “You want to get to know him and see if he’s the guy for you. So you want to stay focused on that and continue your life.”

One divorcing fellow recently approached Todd at a writers conference to say her book had helped his relationship with his girlfriend. They’d been tussling over his pending custody agreement, because he planned to take the kids on Saturday--her only day off .

“He said, ‘What’s the difference?’ ” Todd says. “Then he read the book. He changed it to Sunday so they could have their time together on Saturday.”

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Irene Lacher’s Out & About column runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Page 2. She can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.