Engagment Turns You Into a Cyborg?

These are the transcripts of an actual conversation that took place about 2 hours ago:

Telephone rings. Bad4 picks it up. Friend is on the line:

Friend: Hey, Bad4, I did it.

Bad4: Did what?

Friend: You know, got engaged. Friend will now be referred to as NEF#11

Bad4: Oh. Why’d you do that?

NEF#11: aside, off the phone She wants to know why we did that. [editor - Note the singular "you" changed to a plural "we".]

Male voice off phone: Why? To keep busy of course.

NEF#11: on the phone To keep busy!

Bad4: So are you going to be too busy for having fun?

NEF#11: aside She wants to know if we’re going to be too busy to have fun.

MVoP: No of course not! We’re going to have plenty of fun.

NEF#11: on phone No of course not! We’re going to have plenty of fun.

Bad4: decides to call their bluff So are you available for an excursion the day after your wedding?

NEF#11: aside She wants to know if we’re available for an excursion the day after our wedding.

MVoP: Yeah sure, why not? Where to?

NEF#11: on phone Yeah sure, why not? Where to?

Talk about a two-for-one deal. This conversation continued in this vein for another exchange or two, but my memory fails me, probably because at this point I was trying to decide whether to call the Roswell hotline and bawl that an alien has taken over my friend’s body, or just plain bawl. I mean, we’re talking about a perky, independent human being who suddenly, in one swift evening, has lost her individuality.

I thought that when it came to engaged friends I’d seen it all. I mean, the floaty ones, the miserable ones, the ones who are perfectly normal except when they’re not, the hysterical ones, the worried ones, the ones who keep telling you they’re normal to convince themselves (because nobody else is that naive), the ones who don’t stop talking, the ones who don’t say a word, and even the ones who double check everything with their future sig-other. But this was the first time I faced an NEF who couldn’t even get out a sentence without assistance. I confess – I’m very impressed. Then again, she always did have to do things with her own panache.

Mazal tov, NEF#11 (aka Mickey Mouse when she comments on this blog). I wish you a swift recovery and many happy returns. May you live happily ever after with your sig-other, Amen.

Every Now & Then I Wonder…

Would the sort of person I’d like to marry want to marry me?

This would probably be easier resolved if I knew what sort of person I’d like to marry, but it becomes clearer with every date. Maybe I’ll know when I’m 25 and have dated 30 people.

Visually Unreasonable

 

A would-be shadchan called my mother about a prospective date.

“Can you fax me Bad4’s profile and a picture?”

My mother made reluctant noises. She doesn’t like this whole “send a photo” business.

“He’s looking for a really beautiful girl, so he needs to see a picture first,” the shadchan explained.

At this point I would have terminated the conversation, saying that the only person who consistently refers to me as beautiful is my grandmother, and she has both a great deal of bias and cataracts. But my mother, bless her, is more zealous for my pride, and she continued the conversation, asking about the young man. He is in college and yeshiva and plans to go to law school.

“Well, I’ll ask my daughter,” my mother said. “Can you provide a profile and a photograph?”

“What do you need a photograph for?” asked the would-be shadchan, baffled.

“Just to know what he looks like,” replied my mother vaguely.

“That’s not how it’s done,” the shadchan worried. “She’ll see him plenty on the first date.”

“True, but she may not want to, if he’s lacking in visual appeal.”

“I just wouldn’t feel comfortable asking him,” the shadchan fretted. “I don’t think he’d be willing.”

My mother insisted.

“This is very unreasonable of you.”

“Well, then I’m afraid he’s just not for us,” my mother said regretfully, and that was that.

You go, Ma!

Litmus Test for Dates

I know it’s been a good date when I can’t answer any of my parents’ questions when I get home.

That means that we weren’t reduced to discussing each other’s siblings, past education, or parents’ jobs.

Conversely, it’s been a bad one when I can spit out the information for a string of five questions before hitting a blank.

A new litmus test for dates, now that my parents have ceased to bother checking into guys.

Just Saw This

Semgirl doesn’t post very often, and I haven’t been in my feed reader in months, but there’s this, if you like to laugh at people: http://semgirl.blogspot.com/2008/10/call-men-in-white-coats.html

Misery Loves Company

Thanks to Random Bochur for this link (http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/11621/). It reminds me of For Matrimonial Purposes, by Kavita Daswani, another Indian girl in search of her heartthrob. They should be assigned reading for the shidduch burnt out, a reminder that it could definitely be worse…

Expanding the Marketplace

People I hardly know call every now and then to redt me a shidduch. Sometimes the guy is a long-term learner. Sometimes he’s a worker. Sometimes he’s getting a secular education but plans to learn. Sometimes it’s a mixture of all three. The guys have little in common except one thing.

“So… why were you thinking of me?” I asked the most recent caller, someone I haven’t physically seen in about 4 years, and had little to do with before that.

“Well, he’s very smart and he knows lots of things and he wants someone who isn’t the typical bais Yaakov girl and isn’t boring. He isn’t boring, he doesn’t want to marry someone… you know… boring.”

“Yeah, I follow. Thanks for thinking of me. Let me bring this before the committee and I’ll let you know, K?”

I hang up and my parents look up expectantly from dinner. “Did you just get a shidduch proposal?” they ask. “From who?” and “Who’s she?” and “Why’d she think of you?”

I explained that the guy wanted a bais Yaakov maidel who wasn’t typical and boring and naturally, I was the first one she thought of.

“You get that pretty often, don’t you?” mused the parents. “You seem to have cornered the ‘unusual bais Yaakov maidel’ market.”

Sometimes it seems like it. But there must be others out there; if you think you fit the bill, please let me know. Include your preference in terms of the guy’s occupation, so I can filter them out, and provide three interesting facts to illustrate the breadth and variety of your knowledge and interests. We may call upon you to provide references who can testify that you are not boring, so keep them on file. Also answer the following question: If you had to be a fish, which sort would you be?

From the Other Side of the Looking Glass

Conversation:

Other Person: “…He’s not a BT or very different than his parents, he’s normal, so – “

Me: “Did you just call BTs abnormal?”

OP: “Well, maybe that was the wrong word, but there’s usually something funny when there’s a big shift, you know?”

Steady-state FFBs have an inherent suspicious of people who have made dramatic shifts in their observance. With the growth of invasive modern armchair psychology, we imagine that truth-seeking aside, there must be some unhappiness or internal issues that drive a person to make dramatic lifestyle changes and break with their family ways. So the first question often asked about people who have “flipped out” is “What’s happening at home?”

I don’t know enough to pass judgement on the private lives of all flipped out folks (can I call them flippers?), but I do know that plenty of people who haven’t flipped come from broken, beat up, injured, or otherwise unwholesome homes. So much for throwing stones through the living room wall. (Saudis have a fondness for glass houses, as an aside. The crown prince has a glass vacation tent, and the glass structure over a Saudi airport terminal is the largest tent in the world. [Aside: what structural characteristics make it a tent versus a glass building with a pointy top?] That country must have a whopping a/c bill. I wonder if anyone has taught them about green living?)

But, waxing anthropological, I have sometimes wondered what it looks like from the other side. Wouldn’t a BT have an inherent suspicion of an FFB? After all, they did some thinking and introspection to arrive at their current observance, whereas the rest of us have been blindly doing it from birth, potentially without much thought at all. The effort they put into increasing their observance is negligable for the unflipped. Do BTs have a natural preference for other BTs, who understand their life a bit more, or do they prefer the FFB for unflinching stability of practice?

That was about the extent of my wonderings until someone pointed out another factor I hadn’t thought of: family practice. Another objection to BTs is that you can’t crash their family for holidays, that you have to worry about your kids eating at their house, or explaining different standards (in the case of the flippers).

There’s a converse to that too. Would a BT prefer someone who has a loving nuclear family where they can crash for yomim tovim, to provide a sort of surrogate religious home? A home where they won’t have to worry about their kids eating or questioning different standards?

So what is all this meandering about? I guess, as someone who has had occasion to absorb the FFB wariness of BTs, I’m wondering what the BT attitude to toward FFBs is. Do we have any around to elucidate?

Don’t Point Out the Bright Side

I, personally, do not mind being single. It is something I mention every so often, though it scandalizes not a few. Just a couple of weeks ago, I found myself sandwhiched between two high school girls who were analyzing my hashkafos and concluding that something was deeply wrong, because of this attitude of mine.

My argument is that a person can do a lot while single. Both ordinary, worldly fun things, and religious/spiritual things. I pointed out that it was possible to fulfill a spiritual tachlis without a husband – look at Sarah Schneirer – and that I enjoy my unburdened, footloose lifestyle (well, between semesters, anyway).

I don’t go around trying to proselytize singles to my views. I only mention them here, and and when someone asks, “But don’t you want to get married?” My answer is: “I guess so. I don’t think about it much.” Why focus on what you don’t have when you have so much?

But apparently, my ideas are only shocking to singles and high school girls, and maybe long-married women. Either that, or they’re lying through their teeth out of pity. Apparently, because Bas Melech, over here, is annoyed by marrieds telling her to enjoy being single because it’s so much more fun than being married. Bas Melech finds the whole thing very irritiating, which I can understand. When you’re not in a lamentable situation, telling someone who is that “it could be worse” is among the more fruitless modes of cheering them up. (I wonder if she’d be just as annoyed if another single said it to her? “Hey, Bas Melech! Buck up – you’re in the best years of your life so why don’t you just enjoy them and forget the rest?” Let’s see what reaction that brings.)

I personally have never heard this from anyone, but then again, I don’t get much sympathy having, as I mentioned, a fundamentally flawed hashkafa. Is it a common comfort offered to singles? What other annoying attempts at sympathy do you get?

What’s Your Pref?

I’ve heard many arguments in support of the shotgun method of setting up dates: pants + skirt = match. And there are many people who will give a myriad stories proving that it can work, because if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.

Then again, daters can provide many stories about how annoying such dates are, because if there’s nothing in common, there’s no point in going out.

SerandEz mulls it over here. What’s your take?

He Followed Me Home… Can We Keep Him?

My first brother’s first date was in Israel. My parents were on the phone every morning asking “How did it go?” and “But you just went out last night!” and “Six hours? Isn’t that a bit long for a second date?” and “You brought her home at what time?”

It was very nerve wracking.

Then there was the phone call one Monday morning when my brother said, “It’s all off…” followed by the Tuesday morning call, “Are you coming to the wedding?”

NEVER AGAIN. So swore my parents. The next child was going to date in good ol’ NYC where they could keep an eye on events and be on top of things.

With two married children and two more dating, they’ve changed their tune.

“Well, if you see someone you like, you can let us know,” they suggested after the first few abysmal dates. Clearly the would-be shadchanim didn’t know their subject well enough. Sad really, that they were my relatives.

“Bad4, why don’t you just bring home a nice young man one evening?” sighed my father a few months later, after a telephone marathon to find out that a suggested gentleman was “a nice boy, a good learner, from a good family, and intelligent.”

“Well then why don’t you research them yourself?” to my brother after he complained that they didn’t understand what sort of girls he wanted to go out with. (He did, and is very happily hardly dating.)

Two nights ago, after my sister walked off into the sunset with her former beau they yawned, smiled, and told me to invite them to my wedding.

Another Word Lost

I was heartily amused while attending a wedding in Shidduchville last night. It was the wedding of my Shidduchville correspondent, actually.

Many people suffer the misconception that Shidduchville is Brooklyn. If this were true, I would hardly need a correspondent!

Anyway, as usual, all the bride’s friends sat together, some working on their first child, some still enjoying the easy styling of their sheitels, and some of us, being, um, single.

I whisper it, because it’s not nice to mention it in public. It isn’t… delicate, I guess. I just learned this at the wedding. A woman was making her way around the table, speaking to all the single girls. That included me, of course. She was talking about segulos that “help the process along” and that have been proven to “speed things up” and so on and so forth. If anyone is interested, try saying the entire Tehillim 3x a week with no interruptions whatsoever. The woman said that it married my Shidduchville correspondent off; I have to confirm that with the source one of these days. You think you know a person, and then you find out that they’ve been saying the entire Tehillim three times a week.

Anyway, I let her go on, moving along to many other segulos that “might be helpful” because I was admiring the finesse with which she managed to conduct the entire monologue without ever mentioning being single, shidduchim, marriage, or dating. It was true artistry. This woman missed her calling in rhetoric.

Very likely, she was worried that mentioning my single status would make me burst into tears. I appreciate her delicacy. I hope it does not become the norm. Perhaps, for the desperate girls of Shidduchville, being single at a wedding is a tearful occasion. But I can’t help but think that it’s like when a little kid falls down, looks at his mother, and if she’s full of concern and comfort, immediately starts crying. If people cue singles to be hypersensitive, we’re bound to play along. (Just look at the girls of Shidduchville.) Instead, you ought to laugh, go “oopsie!” and try to convince us that nothing happened, and it’s just a scratch.

Chin up, me brave lassies. It’s ok that you’re – well, you know – um, still –

…I just haven’t got the talent for this delicacy. YOU’RE SINGLE! I HOPE YOU CAN HANDLE THIS SETBACK CUZ LIFE IS FULL OF THEM.

Not Busy – Just Busy!

It’s been a hectic week. I’ve been very busy, particularly because this week culminates in a trip to Baltimore, partially to visit a friend, partially to visit a city, and partially business.

An innocent statement, right? I would think so. Yet I’ve had wide-eyed responses. “You’re ‘busy’?” “A friend?” “What sort of business?”

SHEESH!