No, we're not holding hands, we're just relaxing.  Ramona Singer looks surprised -- did she just see Jill Zarin?

I've been addicted to The Real Housewives series for several years now, but this year the meanness and vitriol seem to have gone wild. I just saw part of the first segment of this year's new New Jersey Housewives and family members were already brawling at a christening. A christening!

Meanness does get boring. And this year the Housewives may not have jumped the shark, but they certainly have jumped the snark. 

The first time I saw The Real Housewives of Orange County I was in my hospital room in Mt. Sinai hospital in New York City. The year was 2007, and I was recovering from surgery.

In the room, and later, recovering alone with my cat, these self-centered women with their banal talk diverted me mightily. I needed interactions, random conversations that didn't tax me. The series saved me from thinking too hard.

Watching empty-headed, privileged gals became a guilty pleasure, and I recuperated slowly to their snarls and fits, feeling stronger as I watched, surely better and wiser than they were. 

Except I slowly realized that they are making money being themselves and I started feeling more and more like a couch potato at a mud-wrestling match. 

From OC, the series has spread -- to New York, New Jersey, Atlanta, DC, Beverly Hills and Miami, and there may be more. And then there are the reunions, and the endless reruns and Andy Cohen's late-night clubhouse -- with no end in sight.

Yes, the women on these Bravo breakaway hits are often mean, abusive, banal, boozy, culturally ignorant, narcissistic, vain, selfish, annoying -- and yes, for four years I have despised many of them -- and yet I have stuck with them, along with millions of otherwise (mostly) intelligent (mostly) women.

And then I met Ramona Singer, from the New York series, and things started to change.

Last summer I was invited to a restaurant opening in Manhattan.

Cameras were flashing, and I glimpsed a bit of blonde hair and more than a bit of cleavage: Ramona! Without her husband Mario, but Ramona nevertheless, in all her wacky glory.  (She was spilling out of the short black dress with the long zipper from the Brooklyn fashion show from the season before.)

She walked by to get away from the crowds, and when I smiled we made some eye contact -- and with Ramona's eyes, that's something. So she sat with me awhile. 

  No flash, but  I seem to be doing the talking here

(For those RH fans who care: Ramona told me then that she thought Bethenny’s wedding was a fairytale, she still liked Alex and she still equivocated about Jill. Climate change? Afghanistan? No. I have no idea of her politics, and don’t want to know. It was more "turtle time.")

But here's the thing: Sitting with Ramona Singer felt like when I was in high school and I found myself at the exalted cafeteria table alone with the most popular girl in school, with everyone dropping by, and ignoring me. And I felt it was unfair, just as I would have in high school. She wasn't all that.

Ramona is pretty -- those poppy eyes are really puppy eyes -- and she wasn't rude. But when I steered the conversation away from her ventures-- wine, jewelry, creams, blogs, books, appearances; no album, yet, thank the lord -- I got an intense Ramona-like stare and a pause waiting for me to change the subject back to her. Of course. 

Meeting her made me realize how much I'm feeding a beast I don't much care for. A rich, privileged needy beast of a series.

I have been weaning away from most of these shows in the past months, aside from relapses when my friends alert me to something especially egregious. But when the New York series returned a few weeks ago, I had to check out Ramona.

So far this season she is meaner and boozier than last year. (The bright, funny woman who seemed to hold that NYC series together, Bethenny Frankel, has gone on to her own show which I do watch without remorse because of her rags-to-riches story, and the great family around her.) 

One irony; The Miami Housewives franchise this past winter was terrible. I wasn't watching, and then Bill came home one day and said that he knew one of the women on the show, Marisol Patton, a public relations exec who has an office next to his, and I realized I had come across her too. So we both started watching the Miami show, at least Marisol's segments, especially those with her mother. But otherwise the series was really boring, and I hear it's not renewed.

I can't expect to break the Housewives habit easily, but I realize in the post-reality of meeting Ramona, that most of the time the women aren't fun at all.

OK, maybe the ones in Beverly Hills are fun, just for the fantasy element. I'll guess I'll give them one more chance.