Maybe the solution is to stop going by “the rules.” WHY is it a good idea to take a girl to a hotel lounge? I have never been able to understand that concept. With all the pritzus that happens at treif hotels,and especially in the bar/lounge, why would anyone want a couple on a date to go there? Why not a trip to the zoo or aquarium, a museum (NICE QUIET place), in the warmer weather, the park (take a picnic basket), let them sue their imagination a little bit, for a change, if going out to dinner even for pizza, is not an option for some reason.
There is a reason we have a crisis today, and that is simply because the present system stinks. The checking out ad nauseum, the rule that the boy’s side has to accept the shidduch first, then the girl, the rules about what is considered classy or unclassy (plastic on the tablecloths, or just the tablecloth itself on the table, stacking versus not stacking the dishes as they are removed fromt he table, shoes with laces or no laces).
How can people make shidduchim when they are so caught up in the shtuss I just mentione? You think a boy comes from a better home because his mother can afford to have a housekeeper wash and iron her linen tablecloth, and someone else wants to keep that tablecloth clean and neat for several uses? Is a girl a better prospect for being a good wife and mother because she will come back to the table repeatedly to take the dishes off, rather than making one or two trips and stacking everything? What happened to menschlechkeit, good middos, a sense of humor, compassion for others, empathy, seichel (not just learning)? We are so caught up in the extremely unimportant minutiae, that we no longer see the forest for the trees.
This crisis is a making of our parental generation. More people would be able to meet their zivugim, if they could do so in a NON-shidduch way, the way many of us did. Ther should be places where young people may congregate and meet each other in a natural way. But wait – they have been taught that this is not tzniusdig. THAT is the first thing they have to unlearn. There is nothing untzniusdig about boys and girls learning how to converse with each other in group setting, especially if those group setting are wholesome environments (NOT A SHIUR in this case). We have created a generation of people who are afraid to talk to each other, and who think even looking at each other is wrong. The crisis is that our kids do not know how to be normal young men and women anymore.
There was a very interesting article in the Jewish Press this past week, written by a young man who started a group to help people find their zivugim in a “less maddening” way. His article was written as a satire, but it underscored some very interesting ideas that most kids today do not hold fopr themselves. The article pertains to a job interview, and I suggest you all read it, if you haven’t already. The analogy is very obvious, and I agree with the author. I don’t always agree with everything he writes, but this particular inyan IMO is very true.