To Tie the 'Knot' or Not?

no one has anything smart to say on the issue.

I had a friend whom that happened to and, in fact, recently mentioned him in a blog post on the shidduch system.

The relevant quote:

When he was dating, he had a list of traits (both physical and non-physical) that his future wife had to have. She had to be in a specific age range, with specific hair color, a weight range and on and on. He dated for a while, unsuccessfully. And then, something happened.

He moved out of town and met, apparently on his own, a divorced mother fifteen years his senior. She was overweight and had the “wrong” hair color. And, yet, he was deliriously happy with her. He found his match. She certainly wasn’t was he was looking for on the physical side, but he was so happy with her emotionally, mentally and spiritually that he simply put all that aside and decided that he loved her for who she was inside, despite the fact that she had all these qualities (older, overweight, divorced, mother) that would have caused her to be kept out of the “shidduch market.” In other words, once he found someone he was happy with, the physical side of his “wish list” became less important and, perhaps, irrelevant. They’re still married, fifteen years later.

The Wolf

I know someone who is a Russian baalas teshuva, in her twenties, who became a baalas teshuva when she was eighteen. She decided that she wanted to marry another Russian baal teshuva, because of similar backgrounds, and live in either Russia in a kiruv community or in Israel. She has now been married for three years to an FFB sefardi and they live in Brooklyn.