Torah613Torah

WIY: That’s a tangential point. I would answer in another topic but I want to bump this up anyway, since I worked so hard on it. 🙂

I honestly didn’t know I had so many opinions on this issue!!

You can’t tell. Focus on whether she is right for you and a kind and happy person. Nice happy people are generally healthy people. (obviously, within normal limits.)

For me it’s still very intuitive. So for now, I’ll attempt to class the arguments and hopefully I’ll be able to express some of what I feel along the way.

1. The class of arguments which protest basic human psychology:

“All men want the best women” – Any man with reasonable self-esteem wants the best woman he can get. Same goes for women with men. This is healthy.

“All men want the most beautiful woman” Hashem made them that way.

“Women are better than men”. On IQ measures, for example, female IQs tend towards the mean, while male IQs tend to fall at the higher and lower ends of the spectrum. Same goes for beauty measures and psychological disorders (this is my personal meta-analysis of all the studies I ever read)

In other words, it’s not that women are better than men, but women are more uniform than men. I believe this applies to frumkeit as well. In general, women are more likely to be close to average, and men to either be way above average or way below average. So it’s not that women are better than men but women are more average than men. And that’s fine.

“Girls only want long-term learners” Not exactly, normal women want a man who they can trust to lead them through life. They also want him to be respected and learned. If being in learning symbolizes that that’s what they are going to want.

“It’s all about the money” It’s shocking, but humans like money, even frum humans. And life is expensive. And if you have six kids and a regular salary and didn’t save up any money for each of their futures’, that was irresponsible.

“Mother-in-laws are picky” She wants the best woman for her beloved son, as she should.

“Shadchanim only want to work with the rich / powerful / beautiful / talented” So does everyone.

And finally, “older men want to marry younger women” this makes sense not only psychologically, but biologically!

2. The class of arguments that uses misleading statistics:

“There is a shidduch crisis”

Prove it.

– “age gap pyramid” need I explain more.

Men have always married younger women. There is nothing new under the sun and there is absolutely no data to support this.

– “many girls won’t get married”

Based on age gap pyramid in most cases. Who won’t get married? Only poor girls? When won’t will they get married? Between the ages of 18 and 21? How can we help them? By throwing money at shadchanim?

– “It’s a numbers game, just make yourself attractive to most people”.

Some say that 90% of people can marry the other 90% of people. This is not true. Looks, personal issues, background, and geography do limit the people we are going to date and marry. And that’s fine – if no one had hakpados, we’d have an even harder time deciding who to marry!

-“There are 100s of good women for every good man.”

I don’t know men. But I do know women. I am involved with hidden people at risk, and women are great actresses. There’s a lot of truth to the boys = garlic, girls = onions analogy. also see women are more average above.

3. The class of arguments that uses emotional blackmail.

– Frumkeit fear-mongering.

The message that the frummer a woman is, the harder it is to get married, unless your father is a Rosh Yeshiva, is a dangerous one. I’ve heard this propagated by friends of mine whose parents are extremely chashuv, and was not impressed.

– Women are desperate to get married.

Men and women, we are ALL supposed to serve Hashem, that’s our goal in life, and unlike men, we can do that without marriage. We just WANT to serve Hashem with everything he gave us, physically and spiritually, so we want to get married. But men NEED to get married. They have the mitzva of Pru Ur’vu.

– Segulos

Lotteries and Segulos are a tax on the numerically challenged. Obviously, if you don’t participate, you don’t really care about getting married.

– If you were perfect, you’d have found your bashert by now.

This argument attempts to convince girls that they’re not married because they didn’t go to BJJ or have a crooked nose or their father wears blue shirts. I won’t bother responding.

– Comparing single women to agunos

That’s a really horrible comparison. I don’t even have the words to argue with it, but really?? An aguna suffers tremendously. Being single is just NOT COMPARABLE.

Let’s just focus on doing what we should be doing, growing and serving Hashem. All the rest is commentary.

The OP was to show not that the system is messed up, but our attitude is messed up, and NASI only reflects this devaluation of women, which is not actually true as in practice, nearly everyone does get married eventually.

I’d really like to hear whether people think I have made a good point, or agree / disagree, or maybe I am looking at this the wrong way… Or maybe a la PBA shtika k’hodaa v’shvacha. The point is about the way we go about trying to get men to date.

WIY: Yes and no.

Squeak: Yes and no.