By Gale Mendelsohn
My mom got married when she was my age: twenty years old. Yet I have never been on a serious date.
To be fair, my mom and dad knew each other their whole lives. They dated during high school, stayed in touch during their year in Israel and started seriously dating when they began college (Both of my parents are YU alumni, so the yichus (lineage) is strong in this one). I am now on the precipice of entering the shidduch (dating through a matchmaker) scene, something neither I nor my parents ever saw coming.
I grew up Modern Orthodox in Los Angeles. My family is shomer Shabbos and kashrus, my mom covers her hair and I was educated in Tanach and the basics of halacha; but I never felt like my Judaism was a huge part of my life until recently. In fact, for most of my life, my Judaism seemed like a burden.
It’s no surprise that this view applied to my romantic life. Like your average Modox girl, I grew up reading secular books, as well as watching secular movies and TV shows. I watched Liv and Maddie cycle through different boyfriends, Maria leaving the cloistered life of the sisterhood to fall in love with Captain von Trapp (the lesson learned here is that the ideal man has seven children and hates Nazis). I read about Hermione and Ron, a slow burn love story culminating in marriage after seven years of friendship. I wanted that. I grew up with a crush on the boy next door and a dream of a high school boyfriend who would hold my hand and give me his letterman jacket.
All of this came to a halt when I went to an all-girls high school. I met a couple boys over the summers, but nothing resulted in the relationship I dreamt of. Over my year in Israel, I met many people, made new friends and cemented relationships with old ones, but nothing of the romantic nature occurred. I decided to become shomer negiah (a law prohibiting physical touch between opposite genders outside of marriage) after my year in Israel. I realized that everything I thought I was supposed to want – holding hands, hugging, casual touch – wasn’t actually making me happy. This decision only strengthened as I spent more time with people whose frumkeit (religiosity) I admired and wanted to emulate.
I read books on relationships and shomer negiah, and I decided that all the frum teachers I had in high school that I had originally dismissed as brainwashed were right: touch has an incredibly unique and powerful effect on people, especially between the sexes, and this effect should be treated with extreme caution and care. As my desire for a more frum lifestyle grew, my desire for a “normal” relationship diminished. The idea of having a “boyfriend” no longer appealed to me. I wanted to find someone who had the same long-term goals as I did, who wanted to be a partner with me in something bigger than ourselves, not just someone who wanted to be with me for purely superficial reasons.
I remember in my senior year of high school, my Chumash teacher took a break from our usual curriculum to tell us about her experience in shidduchim. I listened to her story with awe and revulsion. It seemed so cold and calculated to me to decide whether or not to go out with someone based on a sheet of paper, to treat marriage as a business transaction rather than a love story.
This memory is transposed over a different conversation I had with a friend of mine this past summer. His parents met through shidduchim, and he told me that growing up the way I did, you have this idea that you fall in love, and then you get married. But when you grow up accustomed to the idea of shidduchim, you understand that people will sometimes get married and then fall in love.
In most sources and seforim that I’ve seen, Jewish marriage is a transaction of sorts – stay with me here. We have a mitzvah to have children, and the only way to achieve that is through marriage. Marriage is also a step forward in your avodas Hashem (service of G-d), regardless of whether or not you have children. It is a union between two people who want to work together toward becoming closer to the Creator of the Universe. It is a beautiful bracha and gift from Hashem that this union is either the result of or ends up resulting in love.
With this in mind, I rolled up my sleeves and drafted a shidduch resume. I found it difficult to describe myself as well as my ideal “type” in less than 500 words. How do you sum up the essence of who you are when you’re still in the middle of figuring it out? How do you describe what you’re looking for while remembering that surprises happen, and Hashem has a plan for me no matter what I might think I want? The many shidduch websites out there that I explored also asked me to fit myself into a box, to describe myself as Modern Orthodox, Yeshivish, Heimish, Conservadox, Reform or Traditional. I was also asked to describe my body type, the options ranging from “thin” to “a few extra pounds,” which I found a bit disturbing.
The system is not perfect by a long shot, but when I look at the secular world of dating, I am extraordinarily grateful to be a Jew. How can we expect people to be at their most vulnerable with another person, and then just break up and move on? No wonder there are so many songs about heartbreak.
I have gone through a lot of changes, but one thing that has stayed the same is my belief that I will find love. What I think about how I will find it or how it will come about has definitely evolved, but the ikar (main thing) has stayed the same. To any other singles out there, it’s a hard knock life, and sometimes it stinks. But we are much more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. Putting in effort is not desperate, it is proactive and shows that you care. Hashem has a plan for all of us. The more I remind myself of that, the easier it is to keep hoping for that one right person.