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“If you think the point of marriage is children and having another person in the room, why shouldn’t the whole thing be random?”
Has to be another person in the same religious ballpark so it can’t be random.
You don’t have to apologize for leading your own life. A rav is not an owner. It’s a person, hopefully, with more life experience, Torah knowledge, and wisdom, who can offer guidance. But they are never in your shoes, so in the end you have to have your own mind. They don’t have the power of prophecy.
You also can go to more than one person. You don’t have to get a new one.
It happened to me about 10 times. And since I’m a male, it came at the end of 10 rounds of driving 2 hours, buying them dinner, and trying to act perfect to keep their crazy fears at bay.
People today are looney tunes and it can make shiduchim a severe test. Many expect too much from people and don’t know how to form a connection.
It’s just something to endure.
A Rav once suggested to me to be business like about dating. Don’t take it all to heart, don’t get emotional about it. I found it to be good advice.
Just get out there again. The main point of marriage is children and having another person in the room. You’ll find another. Don’t get attached until you are married.
The crisis is because people are spoiled brats. Most think they deserve the world and fail to see the good in people.
my wife’s kitchen
Some women are very fickle and under the influence of modern attitudes will trash a marriage in 10 seconds. I know a number of very nice men whose wives divorced them and took the kids. The get rules are likely created to prevent that sort of thing. So the divorce mongers like to advertise the extreme cases and pretend every man is a monster and all gets are justified. They are not. Just like you can’t walk away from your kids if you don’t like them, you can’t necessarily walk away from your spouse either.
Cleveland. Love the Midwest.
You can blame the school system which brainwashed the poor girl.
big white fluffy clouds
<The fact that she wants me to change my Rabbi for her shows that she doesn’t value Daat Torah. Don’t you think so?>
No. If she didn’t respect rabbanim in general, if she saw no occasion to consult with rabbanim ever in life, if she didn’t look to the views of gadolim on the major matters affecting the community, if she didn’t respect Chazal (heaven forbid) that would be another matter.
You are under no obligation to follow any one rav, particularly in personal matters, particularly if he isn’t a major figure.
golfer
thank you
but you have to admit phenomenon sounds more plural, like alumnus
<Dare I say I hope you and your other half didnt guess wrong because that doesnt bode well for the halachik status of the offspring.>
That comment speaks to the degradation of the Jewish people for all sorts of reasons. Is Jewishness that much in question today? Wow. My bube was as yiddish as they come, from a shtetl.
I didn’t say we have never spoken to rabbis in our entire lives. But there’s a time and place for that. Today people attach rabbis to their hips and try to get them to run their lives. These rabbis may have less life experience than any of us. Or do you have daily access to the gadol hador?
Look at this thread. This young man has found a nice bas yisroel to marry and he might trash the whole thing because he wants some kind of marriage consisting of 3 people.
<MyTurn, you’re not sure why a woman needs a Rav?
Perhaps someone would like to find and bump that famous thread where PBA and friends tried to determine whether women actually are Jewish. I’m sure you’d have a lot to say.>
I’m not following you.
A woman needs a father. A woman needs a husband. That’s the way it has worked for thousands of years. You think your bube’s bube had a Rav?
It’s not tznius for women to be marching off to rabbis. This is a new phenomena.
<she is a really hyper-sensitive person>
Who today isn’t hyper-sensitive? We are a bunch of cry babies. He’s also being hypersensitive. Look at the title of this whole discussion ‘she wants me to change my rabbi.’ No she doesn’t. She just doesn’t want this rabbi as her rabbi. (Not sure why a woman needs a rav).
The irony is that you are going to find that the rabbi doesn’t have so much time for you as time goes by. I imagine that now you are in school or recently out of school. A lot changes over time. Rabbis will come and go. The spouse remains. If you have a person you like, hold on to her. You may not find another.
I’m curious, what does your Rav say about all this?
<She got offended by him for no reason and the fact that she doesn’t want him as a Rabbi after all that he did for us shows that she is judemental and unappreciative.>
Gratitude has nothing to do with comfort with a person. In fact that’s the whole point, a person needs to show gratitude even to someone they can’t stand. I hear nothing that says she isn’t doing that.
If I see anyone being judgmental it’s you.
Since nobody on this board knows what the rabbi actually said, it’s hard for us to know if it was nothing. But know that people today in general are very thin skinned. So if it was over nothing, nothing new about that and no reason not to continue with her.
<You REALLY dont understand what he meant by “family rov?” WOW!>
My wife comes to me. I go to my Rav. That’s the traditional way and the way we work it in our home. So no we don’t have a “family Rav.” It’s interesting to see how new fangled practices become looked upon as imperatives.
<The feminist in me is groaning.>
The Jew in my is groaning that there’s a feminist in you.
Nothing to discuss. Totally unacceptable. Scary.
Wow talk about a modern day problem. I don’t think it’s a hacaras hatov issue. I can have gratitude for someone without having to allow them to run my life. Also, She didn’t say that you can’t go to him, just that she isn’t comfortable. That’s not outrageous. Sounds to me that she came up with a good compromise and the ability to compromise is maybe the most important quality in a spouse.
I’m not sure what is meant by a family rav. Chicken shilos? Shalom bayis? You can have more than one Rav in your life, a personal one and a family one. Does any one Rav have the time for all your questions?
I think it’s a mistake to begin with to be dragging your woman to your rabbi. The way it’s supposed to work is that your wife asks you and you ask your rav when you can’t answer. Maybe that will happen more as you get more mature and learn to tackle life’s challenges on your own. That can be tougher I admit when one is young in this crazy world of ours. I don’t want to sound like an apikorus here but you are supposed to use your own brain in life and to run your household. The gadol hador can’t do that for you in part because he’s not in your house, not close to every nuance of every issue. So yes rabbinical guidance is very important but rabbis don’t run your home on a day to day basis. The husband and wife do and they need to be able to work together, to hear each other, to get along, to compromise.
So I wouldn’t get too worked up about this; although it would be interesting to know what was said that was inappropriate. Maybe she’s being a little oversensitive. People today are way too thin skinned. Maybe he really was inappropriate.
How do men hold the cards in shiduchim? Every date takes two people saying yes and showing up. And then of course the men must drive and pay and then if they marry support the woman for the rest of their lives.
Probably happens all the time. Men are expected to be taller, smarter, more learned, and richer. Lots of pressure there.
“They may reject boys for being dull, lacking a sense of humor etc, until they find what they consider a “true personality match.” Those same girls despair and find the whole world corrupt and intolerable when they are rejected by the boys.”
This is very well put. You can also say that they are just plain spoiled. If there’s one single cause of the singles crisis it’s that people today are spoiled brats. This takes many forms.
<<where are the boys who are respectful, respectable, kind, gentlemen, who love Torah >>
I know plenty of boys like that. And I know no more girls like that. Hopefully they can find each other, unless they are not as kind as they see themselves and they are out finding fault in one another.
You have to be more specific when you talk about being normal. The boys are under way more pressure than the girls in general and on the dates. It’s much more easy to relax and converse when you are in the passenger seat than when you are the one who has to drive 2 hours, meet the parents, find a place to eat, find parking, and be the perfect gentleman the whole way. The men are under a microscope placed upon them by hypercritical ladies of all sorts. We see some of them on this discussion board.
<The girls still have the majority of the waiting to be asked out. The boys generally are the ones getting all the profiles (sent to their moms), and it’s like Baskin-Robbins all over for them.>
Depends which circles you are talking about. There are more girls who want a boy in learning than there are boys who want to be in learning. No shock there, it’s harder to be something than to want something.
In those circles, the boys have the lists. In many other groups, MO, BTs, older singles, boys who have the sense to know they need a parnassah, there the men don’t have such lists, some can’t get a date at all.
oomis I’m glad that you see such good in your girls. Some parents put their kids down and that’s really tragic. You just have to know that’s in part because you are their mother. It’s important that you have an ayan tov for the boys too. Most of them also are good kids and doing their best and are good matches for your daughters. Let them all get on with life. There are so many people today who take pride in destroying shiduchim. They love to say no. We need people who love to say yes, who find the good in people, even people who are not their kids.
jewishfeminist02, I won’t quote all of your answers but will say I found them refreshing. A woman who calls herself a feminist (or did) but sees in that an obligation to shoulder some of the burden that comes with the man’s role is a whole different kind of person from the kind that just wants to take everything and doesn’t see the many advantages that women have in the traditional role. They want to keep those and then acquire what they perceive as the male’s advantage. They should be called selfishists, not feminists. If you traveled, asked out, even paid then you are doing something entirely different.
One of the really scary things about dating for many guys is that their introduction to women (other than their mother) is people who take. You wonder is this what marriage is going to be like? I give, she takes? NY dating is the very worst. Israeli dating is much fairer. Out of town you don’t have to drive as far. NY guys have it the worst.
I really struggled with the burden of asking out women. Even calling women as arranged by the shadchan was painful to me. Some guys tell me it doesn’t bother them at all. I found not only the rejection excruciating, but even the asking.
Obviously, there’s no way for anyone of us to know who has it worse, or if one side has it worse. We each know our own pain. I do observe that the public discourse rarely recognizes the pain of the men. In the frum world, men are often looked as being made of stone and women as being delicate flowers. I have seen grown men break down into sobs when talking about their shiduch woes.
I’m not saying that anybody should marry without having good, positive feelings about the other person. I’m saying that today people want perfection. They are shopping for iphones. You can’t expect a 25 year old person in this day and age to be perfect. And you certainly can’t expect a 35 single person to be anything other than a train wreck.
The main happiness of marriage is in being married. We focus way too much on finding these perfect matches. That’s what I mean by half-decent match.
I believe that in life we should take our main pointers from the halacha. If the halacha says 18 to the chupah and our dating philosophy has us 32 and single, or 40 and single, then there is something wrong with our dating philosophy. We are making it all too complicated. You pay a big price for dragging it out. You lose your innocence for one. Dating is a kind of promiscuity. You may lose your fertility. I have seen that happen to many. And children are the greatest joy. And you lost the ability to connect to your spouse. We are closest to the people we meet when we are young. Marrying young is the way we have worked for 1000s of years and the way demanded by the halacha, musar, aggadatah, the whole Torah talks about it. If people want to mess with that and say times have changed, I can’t stop them. But I can cry for them because they are throwing their lives away.
And parents who interfere with their children’s shiduchim and fill their heads with grandiose expectations and don’t talk sense into them and get them married young – that’s the biggest nebach of all, because people with life experience should be wise, not fools.
You don’t sound unintelligent at all. You sound just fine and probably a whole lot more mature than your stupid classmates. School can be a torture chamber.
Don’t think it’s just you. Friendship is a rarity today. Respect is a rarity today. I don’t know if that cheers you up. We live in very sad times. People get betrayed left, right, and center.
What I try to do is not so much have friends but familiar faces. This isn’t to say that one can’t find a friend. Just watch your back.
We need Moshiach. I can’t think of any other solutions anymore.
But don’t despair. God loves you. And deep down the Jewish people have love for one another even though it’s covered up today.
oomis can we assume that your daughters are all fascinating and gracious? Perhaps you are being a little critical of the males of our society, something I’m seeing a whole lot of on these pages. The boys are under tremendous pressure in general and on the date in particular. Not so the girls. There’s a post on these pages by a woman who says her son is going off the derech. He’s shomer shabbos but skips scharcharis and sleeps till noon. For a boy that’s off the derech. But that’s what we call a good girl. There’s so much less pressure on the women that it’s easier for them to act a little more together on dates, particular when on that date they are passive and the guy is doing all the driving, paying, and thinking of things to do, facing the parents etc.
jewishfeminist02
Singles date so long because they have goyish view of life. If the Mishnah tells us to be married at 18, how can it be that we need to date till we are 30 or more?
I didn’t say that anybody should marry a bad person or a really bad match, just a decent match. That’s all you need in this life as life is a journey and a challenge that is meant to be done in the company of a spouse.
The waiting around for the perfect one is the recipe for disaster. And I know so many cases of people who ruined themselves that way.
I’m curious, since you call yourself a feminist, do you pick up your dates or meet them halfway? Do you split the check or even pick up the check? Do you brave rejection and ask out the guy. In other words, are you really a feminist? If you are married what do you recommend to the women? Do you call for a multi-decade search for a spouse with the men doing all the work?
Ofcourse, I’m wondering where you are finding these guys. My wife and I set up about 25 dates a year and rarely do the guys ask about looks before the date or comment afterward.
I’ll note that the women are the ones who end the shiduch 90% of the time.
Here’s my suggestion to you:
Yes, the system is broken and sick in about 1000 ways. You won’t be able to fix it. Nobody can on their own.
Just go out there and brave it. Do your part. Be focused on your goal, which is to get married and have a family. The main happiness of marriage is just being married and having children. You don’t need a great match, just a half decent person. Don’t look for excitement or great conversations or beauty. Just good enough is good enough.
You’ll meet tons of confused people. This includes the singles, their parents, their friends, the matchmakers. Ignore them. Stay focused on your goal.
Go on the date, Be a mentch, have a parnassah, be kovayah itim, minimize contact with the secular world because they’ll fill your head with nonsense. And get yourself married. You find a decent girl, marry her. Hashem will help you and bring you happiness.
Don’t spend 1000 hours talking about dating. It’s a waste of time. And don’t waste time on people who aren’t serious minded about getting married.
Remedies depend a lot on the type of kid this is. Sometimes, you get very intelligent, independent minded kids who get turned off by all the dogma that is common today. They can be directed to the numerous people who encourage a broad minded Judaism: R’ Joseph Soloveitchik, R’ Samson Raphael Hirsch, R’ Yaakov Kamenetsky. Sorry no links
Some kids are not intellectually inclined. This doesn’t mean they are not intelligent, just that they don’t find themselves in books and ideas. They are people of action. This whole one-size-fits-all model of an entire childhood sitting at a desk destroys them as does the view that Judaism = learning and davening. Kids like this often need a parnassah that gives them a sense of purposefulness and independence. They also need a different kind of connection to Judaism, perhaps one that emphasizes the value of mitzvos, including chesed. Some find this in moving to Israel and being a part of the activity there in running a country. The key is action, not thought.
Some kids have been abused and need to work out the damage and regain their sense of dignity and worth. A good therapist can help there. Try ASCASupport.org for support groups.
Some kids are so wrapped up in drugs or general junk culture that they can’t think straight anymore. Usually Jewish kids have a special instinct that they aren’t going to do well in the long run like that and have a special strength to extricate themselves. Drugs have a powerful hold on the brain and body. Shmuel Gluck’s organization can help there – areivim I think it’s called.
Some kids just need a change of derech. The MO kid becomes more charedi. The charedi kid becomes MO. It would help if he knew that you were open to that.
Some kids struggle with mental illness that may or may not be in the genes. But a person can have a satisfying life even with mental illness. Like any illness they need to learn about it and work with it.
One of the really tricky things about the halacha is that it can be very difficult to work all of this out while single – not that a highly confused person can necessarily be successfully married. Forgive the bluntness here but the tivas and loneliness can really make a young person crazy where they can’t focus on anything but that. It’s a real Catch 22, a conundrum. But tying together the hope of getting married with getting one’s life on a track can be helpful.
I can’t imagine that giving him a chance to talk would hurt the situation. Main thing is not to argue with him, just let him talk and unburden his heart. He’s probably had people talking over him his whole life (not you, but plenty of others). Many young people never think about their future, so asking him about his future may spark the idea that he needs to think about and start working something out. And deep inside he wants to. Many people don’t even know that they are allowed to build their own vision for a life and to formulate their own thoughts about Judaism. Amazing things can happen when a person is allowed to think. Just ask him questions, not in a nagging way, not in a judging way, but in a way where you are interested in his point of view. Let him know that you want to help him. A mother’s love goes a long, long way.
If I read the prior posts correctly you are living in Israel. But you seem to be a natural English speaker so perhaps you are originally American. Was he raised partially in the USA? That can complicate matters some if he now finds himself in a very restrictive community.
There are many options and I have seen all kinds of kids go from OTD to frum. But I must stress that frum doesn’t mean masmid yeshiva man necessarily. Too many people have that picture, that the kid will turn himself around and never again look away from the Gemara. Frum means Shomer Shabbos with a connection to God. There are many forms of this. A white shirt is not obligatory.
The one sided dating causes all kinds of problems – the women, many of them, get in a taking mode. When passive, you become picky and hard to please. When you give, you tend to like the one you give to. Also, the guys are just too exhausted from all the work to really concentrate on the date itself.
I’m curious, what does your son say about all this. Maybe you mentioned it, I didn’t read through all of the posts. What does he believe about God and Torah? What does he want to do with his life?
Has he tried other derachim such as Religious Zionist or Torah Im Derech Eretz? For many today, the entire definition of Torah observance is Gemara study. This doesn’t work for many people.
The driving is ridiculous. The women need to meet the men more. My memory of shiduchim is men give, women take. It wouldn’t be so bad if people were marrying the 3rd person after 4 dates, but this dating for years to find the perfect, perfect one, where the guys are doing all the calling, driving, paying, thinking of things to do, and proving of themselves is unhealthy for all.