Enough Talk on Shidduchim

The problems are structural and cannot be solved without a radical overhaul of the system. Those repairs will only happen when the leaders in our community decide that the damage to families is great enough to warrant changing the process.

Sorry that you feel that way but if you are upset about the shidduch discussion you should turn the page or shut the screen. Obviously the discussion is not meant for you. The only way to find solutions is by discussion and by exchanging ideas, comments and experiences. It is unfortunate that some people usurp the threads with an ongoing feud but only the moderators can control that. I choose to skip over the posts that are irritating or take the discussion into another direction. On the other hand I learn from other’s experience and insight.

Is this the place to rehash the problem with boys leaving Eretz Yisrael at an arbitrary cut off date and dating earlier (i.e. requiring even more support)?

Can you imagine if the tuition crisis were to be attacked with such a dry by the numbers approach?

“Girls 23 and older should date like they are 4 yrs older then they are. Anything u would go for at 27 go for at 23. That will make sure u don’t hit 27. “

UNBELIEVABLE. That is all I will say.

Let me know when we are on the same madreiga as the Avos and Emahos, not to mention our grandparents, so we can talk about it.

tzippi: Is offering compensation to someoe who spends hours tutoring your child also shochad???

Lo Yitzloch: “Sometimes we have to live with a crisis”

Last time I checked chazal went to extreme lengths to enable INDIVDUAL agunos to remarry. Our community is facing a situation of epic proportions.

NO, it’s not a crisis we can live with so long as there is what to be done.

oomis1105: “unbelievable??”

it’s the most obvious thing for individual girls to do. Ask people in the field and see what they say.

Tzippi:

1. NO one is insisting that peoplle have to pay. I just statet the obvious. Parents that offer to recognize a shadchans efforts and time will get attention. If a parent doesn’t want to they don’t have to, but those that do will be treated the way they treat the shadchan.

What’s not to understand. And it’s something practical that indiviual girls and parents can do to help themselves.

It used to be the practice that before asking a Rebbe for a Bracha one would give him a small amount of money, called a pidyon.

A gift affects ones Neshama and bends ones heart to the giver, as well as increasing Simcha. This is why Yaakov Avinu asked Esav to hunt some delicacies for him before giving him the Bracha.

Ones heart, everyones, is bent by a payment, this is thoroughly discussed, regarding bribes, in many sugyas in the Gemorrah. It is a universal component of human nature.

Tzippi:

No on is asking anyone to do anything. It is simply a suggestion for girls and their parents. Shadcahnim are hounded by hundreds of people and they are only human.

It’s your choice be one of 500 or be special. Show them you appreciate their efforts, time etc. You will get more attention from them. This is not about bribing anyone, it’s that people will you better if you show them that you appreciate their efforts.

I write this because I know first hand that it works. Girls and their families can either take the advice or leave it, but whats to debate.

If you don’t like it don’t do it.

YW Moderateor-80: with all due respect, this is NOT a bribe, it is appreciation after the fact for time and energy invested.

AZ

I did not say it was a bribe. A bribe however shares the same mechanism of a pidyon in that it is an implanted nature that a gift bends the heart of the recipient. This is why I mentioned the Gemorrahs.

And it is NOT given primarily for appreciation, it is always given BEFORE the Bracha, and must be so in order to be effective. The appreciation is a secondary intention. It is given in order to bend the heart of the Rebbe towards the recipient of the Brocha, to increase the intensity of the Brocha. The Rebbe himself wishes to have the pidyon so that it will help him give a better Brocha. This is well known, even great Rebbes, even Yaakov Avinu.

I am not attempting to argue with you, I don’t even know what your position is. I’m just bringing some useful information to whomever wishes to think about it.

Unfortunately, today we have been drowned in American values and think such a practice is lowly, or at the best, a matter of showing appreciation. It was something else entirely.

AZ: The shadchan generally would’t know whether a potential shidduch candidate will be giving him a super payment if successful or will only pay the requisite amount. So there is no way the shadchan will act accordingly on that. (Especially if it is for the first shidduch amongst siblings. Even if there are married siblings, the other shidduchs could have been done non-“professionally” and hence no record of previous shadchanim payments. Even if there were previous shadchanim it may not be known how much was paid. In short, in the vast majority of times a shadchan will not “know” how much to expect from a parent.)

So what you must mean is that professional shadchanim will act for rich parents and more or less ignore poor parents.

Who needs such shysters.

Another reason to avoid professional shadchanim and stick to the old fashioned tried and true method of using persona family, friends and networking where the party is not in it for the cash.

P.S. to mods: I agree with aries2756 that the same one or two cadre of posters should not be allowed to hijack every shidduch thread with the same off-topic discussion that they constantly steer it to. Let them use one dedicated thread.

I agree with AZ on all of his points. I especially advocate the boys starting the dating process earlier. By that I mean going to Eretz Yisroel earlier and returning earlier and starting to date shortly thereafter, or, depending on the boy, not going at all or going after the wedding.

As for the girls, can someone out there please elucidate why a girl would get a “no” based on age alone? I am refering to a single,female family member who just turned 23 two months ago. She has gotten “rejected” because of her ripe old age.

And we wonder why we have a crises!

Arie2756: “If you have a “solution,” fine,”.

Sounds like he was interested and I obliged.

chasid-of-Hashem: Thanks

volvie: This is the first time I posted a comprehensive list of effective solutions presently BEING WORKED on as well as suggestions for individual girls and their families. I would think that after all this time people would be thrilled that real progress is being made and would love to help further ease the crisis.

Tzippi: Feel free to discuss your concerns with the R”Y who are working on implementing the list above.

Thank you Az for clearing that up – I really did misunderstand what you wrote, though to be fair to me, I think you could have worded it a little more clearly. When you write that “Girls 23 and older should date like they are 4 yrs older then they are. Anything u would go for at 27 go for at 23… ” it sounded as though you were asking 23 year old girls to consider themselves as if they were 27, and therefore date guys appropriate for a 27 year old. Given your age-issue, it made no sense to me.

No one should stop anyone from getting married, neither should anyone pressure someone to get married at a too-young age. What is right for one girl or boy, is not right for the next. The subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle pressure of making a girl at age 23 feel like an old maid, is abhorrent. If at 23 she is washed up, what is she at 25 and 30?

what society does or doesn’t do is hard to control. What is clear is that at aprox. 24 years old the numbers (in the yeshivish community for sure) begin to dip seriously against the girls. Therefore it is their best interest to date with a +4 attitude. I wish it wasn’t so. However so long as we have not eradicated the age gap problem this is in their best interest.

AZ: Won’t your suggestion merely reshuffle the deck on the Titanic? Your advice how a girl should ensure she gets married, rather than stuck without a spouse, by being more compromising in who she will accept as a husband (i.e. your “+4 attitude”) will merely allow that first girl to get a husband but cause some other girl to lose out. No net changes.

Vovlie:

Incorrect: That 24 year old boy who the 23 year old girl is hesitant to seriously consider (for whatever reason) may well end up marrying a 19 year old. Meaning a 19 yaer old got married instead of a 23 year old. If that 23 year old girl would seriously consider the suggestion (because of the plus 4 advice) then she would potentially get married at that time instead of a 19 year old. THAT is NOT reshuffling the deck on the titanic.

In addition the suggestions to the individual girls had nothing to do with the problem at large. They would just proven suggestions to help individual girls. To help the larger problem we need to implement the suggestions that were mentioned previously and are presently being worked on.

Dearest Dunno,

I’m sorry that you don’t want to take part in the solution- finding process. Thats how human beings find solutions to supernatural problems. You must first bump into all the walls before finding the way through the maze. Its klal yisrael’s problem and i subscribe to that society.

I saw this article tonight, explaining why arranged marriages are much smarter than today’s system where people meet until they fall in love:

What if Shakespeare had it wrong about love in “Romeo and Juliet”? In fact, what if all of us have it wrong and our ideals of love and romance are hopelessly awry? Although we are supposed to be celebrating our love for that special someone on Valentine’s Day, perhaps the time has come to reconsider the concept of romantic love, at least as it has been conceived in Western societies.

As we busily track down red roses, the best chocolates and the finest champagnes, we need to ask whether, in the pursuit of the perfect romance, we haven’t declared war on true love. Cupid’s arrow does strike often, but with the U.S. divorce rate near 50%, one has to wonder whether the wound is particularly deep or long-lasting.

As I found when researching my book on the science of human attraction, our typical romantic beliefs are quite often wrong. For instance, even couples who are blissfully happy together can’t count on a happy ending. The PAIR project, a long-term academic study of couples, found that those most in love when they marry are also the most likely to get divorced.

And the chemical attraction that many people rely on to choose a partner has been found to fade “to neutrality” in two to three years. That’s right, neutrality, which might work well for Switzerland but is deadly for a marriage.

Perhaps most damning of all, I discovered that wife murderers tend to be strong subscribers to the romantic ideal. Take that, Romeo and Juliet.

Love and romance did not always rule the roost. As recently as the 1930s, American men ranked mutual attraction as only the fourth most important quality for a relationship, while women had it even lower, placing it fifth (in a 1956 survey, women dropped it all the way to sixth). But in recent decades, love has climbed to No. 1, accompanied by a rise in the importance of looks, which suggests that our romance with romance is long on style and short on substance.

I hate to sound unromantic on this day of all days, but perhaps it’s time to place less emphasis on romantic attraction as the key to finding a partner. What can shoulder some of the load? I would suggest that we rely a little more on what science has discovered about human attraction.

For instance, some researchers can now predict whether a couple will stay together with far more accuracy than the couple themselves. And it has less to do with the things we might think, such as fighting, and far more to do with the things we take for granted, such as asking your spouse about his or her day.

That doesn’t mean we need to jettison every aspect of chemical attraction. Several studies have found that for women, a man’s body odor is a helpful guide to finding a good genetic match (but only if the woman is not taking an oral contraceptive, which reverses her usual smell preferences). Body odor doesn’t sound very romantic, but perhaps the better question to ask is: How did our narrow ideal of romantic love come to hold such complete sway in the first place?

Imagine a dating world turned on its head, in which people were not given the freedom to opt into or out of a relationship — such as a culture that practices arranged marriages. What researchers have found will be shocking to Westerners weaned on the idea of romantic love.

According to a 1982 study by two Indian researchers, the level of self-reported love in arranged marriages increased over time until they surpassed the level of self-reported love in marriages that were freely chosen. Incredible as it sounds, people with a very limited say in choosing their own spouses eventually became happier with their relationships than people with the freedom to choose anyone they wanted.

Although we almost always read “Romeo and Juliet” as the quintessential story of love at first sight,Shakespeare actually offered his own sly critique of romantic love at the beginning of the play. Romeo is pining away for love — but not for Juliet. There is another fair damsel who has rejected Romeo’s advances, and he declares himself inconsolable. He disdains finding someone else and tells Benvolio, “Thou canst not teach me to forget” — which is, of course, precisely what happens a few scenes later when Romeo meets Juliet and realizes that he was completely wrong before and only now has discovered true love.

We never remember that part of the story, though, because if we think of “Romeo and Juliet” from that perspective, the whole play starts to skew in ways that contradict our usual romantic notions.

Perhaps the time has come for us to take a skeptical view of romance, particularly the over-the-top variety peddled so effectively on Valentine’s Day. We should throw off the shackles of our reigning romantic orthodoxy and realize that “Romeo and Juliet” and its many cultural offspring have led us astray. Shakespeare’s story may be transcendent entertainment, but it is disastrous dating advice.

aries2756:

A pamphlet on how to take rejection????? What else are we gonna do for my generation, have a robot that will literally spoon feed them??? A rejection is a sign of maturity on both sides. The boy/girl rejecting is showing her independence (if it truly is the single doing the rejection and not the parent) and the one getting the rejection is learning from a lesson in life that the world is not full of roses.

We might want to tell the singles that they will get rejected but hearing a “No” answer to a date is part of the dating life and experience.

Stop sheltering these singles! They will eventually have to grow up and mature and this will be one of the many rejections in life (dating, jobs, opportunities, etc.) that will come their way.

If they can’t handle a rejection than how do we expect them to handle other disappointments and hard decisions after they get married?