Why do bloggers hide their blogs when they get engaged?
This is important. At the moment, I see no reason why something written for the public should suddenly become private after I get engaged. Can someone explain it to me? You know, just in case I get engaged and need to know this.
- Let’s convert the doomed Chinese singles. There are all these Asian and Indian men who will never marry because of sex-selective abortion by an entire generation of parents.
- Forced association with SMFs will turn everyone off marriage forever and possibly make them Pavlovian-puke at the very thought.
- Polygamy, duh. If there are too few men to go around, why not permit double-dipping? In many polygamous societies the multiple wives band together and create a sisterhood. Imagine always having someone to go to with questions about your hubby, always having girlfriends to hang out with, and always having spare hands to help with the housework. It could be worse.
I would like to dedicate this post to a fine young woman who is no longer with us. Charmingly cynical, you could always count on her for epigrams worthy of a demotivational poster. Her daily uniform was a worn out, floor-sweeping denim skirt. She probably had jewelry just the way she probably had ankles. You rarely saw either.
And then she went and got engaged.
Some other creature is wearing her skin, now. Someone who smiles a lot; who wears dresses and heels and sparkly things framing her face. Someone who admits to bursting into tears at emotional moments (wait, did she say emotional moments?) and worst of all—yes, this is the most ominous of all—confesses to a desire to be nice to everyone.
Dear Friend (if you are, indeed, the same person): you are a lesson to us all. Nobody is immune. No matter how hard core, deeply baked, or hard boiled you are, in a moment of weakness (like a proposal) your defenses can be broached and you be reduced to a shy, giggling, mirror-checking, hair-flipping, makeup-fixing, dress-tugging girl.
Mazal tov, NEF#16.
There are some people I feel related to even though I’m not. For example, the young woman around my age who shares my last name and grew up in Queens. I never met her. But I’ve heard all about her from everyone who has ever tried to play Jewish geography with me. If we ever got together, we’d have a gazillion mutual acquaintances to hash over. Sometimes I wonder if she ever gets asked about me. I’d be jealous if she didn’t.
So naturally, I heard about it when she got engaged from a local OnlySimchas junkie.
“Ooh! Look who’s engaged! A relative of yours?”
“Almost.”
It’s weird, but I really am quite happy for her. I don’t know her and I can’t even say that I feel like I know her. It’s more like I feel like I should know her. And now she’s engaged! Mazal tov to my NENYF (Newly Engaged Not Yet a Friend)! May you have many simchos in the future – and may I hear all about them.
NEFs are weird creatures. Their brains go through bizarre metamorphoses similar to that of someone who’s been inducted into a cult. First, they completely forget what it’s like to be single. This includes everything they disliked about it, such as dating, shadchanim, and especially, NEFs. Next, they become completely unaware of life outside their cul–bubble. Everything revolves around their swami–er, chosson–and the upcoming wedding. Finally, with their neurons rearranging and short-circulations connections so rapidly that their brains look like a synchronized swimming team, they sometimes come to strange conclusions.
Such as, “I could have gotten married plenty of times before, but I guess I just didn’t really want to.”
Really. So, you went out with, say, 50 guys. And you’re saying you probably could have married five of them if you hadn’t dumped them for dumb reasons. So…
This raises a number of questions. The smallest is the implication that if she hadn’t said no to her previous dates, a number of them would have asked for her hand in marriage. It’s a teeny bit arrogant, but I guess a new bride is entitled to feel highly desired.
The most obvious and troublesome implication – to me at least – is the denial of bashert. If you can marry any of a number of people without issue, then how can you say that one is your soulmate? Or, since presumably one can marry someone who isn’t their soulmate, how can someone ever know who is their bashert? How do you know to marry this guy, instead of trying to marry one of those previous possibilities? For that matter, aren’t you a little anxious that your current chosson might be the wrong one?
Everyone in our community talks about bashert. But when it comes down to it, who really believes in it? What does it mean to us?
This reminds me of the advice people like giving single people. “Don’t sound so smart,” or “smile more” or “don’t be so opinionated.” Whenever they say something like that they are essentially saying, “This is the big thing standing between you and marriage. You could have been married already if you’d have just smiled more.”
This also troubles me on multiple levels. But mostly: the idea that you can miss your bashert simply by not smiling enough at him. That somehow, two halves of a whole soul can fail to notice that they fit simply due to one being shy or solemn or opinionated or smart. Somehow, it would seem to me, that if two people click, something so small and easily remedied shouldn’t stand between them. Or else God, who is supposed to occupy his time with matchmaking, could bother himself to intervene and inform the parties about the importance of appearing dumb, tractable, and cheerful before they split up. I mean, there’s a lot at stake here – if we believe in bashert.
Or we could just admit that, as a society, we don’t believe in bashert as much as we’d like to. Bashert is like the Jewish fairy tale. That happily-ever-after we all dream about. It gives us hope because it insists that out there, somewhere, is someone who will be perfect for us. It comforts us by insisting that the forces-that-be in the universe are drawing the couple together, slowly perhaps, but inexorably. So we talk about it, and believe in it the way we believe in Prince Charmings: not really, but as a cognitive shortcut. Because we know that there are no perfect Prince Charmings out there, and we know that the marriage market is a loud, noisy shuk with rapid and often sloppy trading and measuring going on, and it’s all chance and chaos and luck of the draw…
No.
It’s not.
It can’t be.
It appears random, sporadic, and messy, but it’s really just a complex pattern, no more random than the traffic at the Swindon Magic Roundabout. And this I choose to believe.
I was sitting in class gazing at the whiteboard with glazed eyes when the student next to me, who was also a bit bored, whipped off her engagement ring and wedding band and slipped them on my fingers.
Whoa.
That looked weird.
And felt weird.
I’ve never been much of a ring person. Rings get in the way. They weight down your fingers. They bang and snag on things. Having that big rock sticking off my finger felt… weird.
I can kinda get why engagement people always seem distracted by their rings. It’s a weird feeling.
Hard to imagine wearing one of those things the rest of my life. Do you get used to it eventually?
Every now and then someone in a gaggle of women will kvetch that all the good boys are already taken.
Everyone else in the gaggle will sigh in agreement because none of them have met any single good boys either – if they had, they’d be married. Not that any of them would agree on what constitutes a ‘good boy,’ but they all know that there aren’t any.
Then, a month or so later, the kvetcher has morphed: she’s now an NEF. No good boys, huh? You don’t even have to vocalize it. She’ll sheepishly defend herself without prompting. “I got the last good one,” she’ll say.
Some people take offense at this line. “So what’s she saying,” they’ll huff. “That there’s no hope for me? Gee thanks. With NEFs, who needs enemies?”
But I always saw it as something with encouraging implications. Here is a young lady who had thoroughly worked her way through the season’s line of available men. Her conclusion? It’s hopeless. And yet, just when it seems that the bottom has dropped out of the market, she unearths a decent specimen!
Who knows? There might be another one hidden out there. Keep looking. It’s really more of a flea market than an outlet store, anyway. Keep sifting through and you’re bound to find a hidden gem.
Found this in the drafts folder.
Received this from DatGal following the post on “My husband doesn’t let.”
Once upon a time there was DatGal and NEF. DatGal borrowed a pair of dangly earrings from NEF and said she wouldn’t bother returning them, as NEF’s DH (dear husband) wouldn’t allow her to wear such things.
Yes, of course she was poking fun. Isn’t that what engaged people are for? (Rhetorical question. If you don’t know the answer, you must be engaged.)
Realizing she was being mocked (engaged people are not as thick as we would like to think), NEF tried to explained.
“It’s not that he doesn’t let, it’s that when you care about someone so much you just wanna do what makes them happy.”
This was said in that super-smarmy tone that means “Obviously, since your not engaged/married you have no idea what I mean, but I’ll try to explain it anyway.”
If you’ve had the good fortune to never hear that tone, it’s very similar to the one used to say ”Im yirtza Hashem by you” with the little head tilt and comforting smile. It’s a condescending tone. And it’s annoying because it insinuates that single people haven’t got a clue about what it means to like someone or want to make them happy or whatever just because we haven’t found a non-related member of the opposite gender to spend the rest of our life with.
Maybe we don’t know as much about that as married folks might, but – my dear NEFs – neither do you. You’re not married yet. The fact that we’re not engaged does not make us insensitive, selfish cretins, however we might pretend while we’re picking on you. Just FYI.
Why do you want to get married? I tend to ask this of people a lot. You’d think that I’d usually get something like “I want to fulfill my tafkid by raising a family of good Torahdik Jews” with a “And support/sacrifice for Torah” for those who want learning boys. Well actually, I think I’ve only heard that once or twice.
It’s always possible that the girls I hang out with are smart enough to realize that they are not mechuyav to have any family at all, and that there are other ways to sacrifice/support Torah than by doing its laundry. In that case, they would give an answer to the tune of “I want to find my soul-mate and become whole so I can serve Hashem bishleimus.” I actually did hear something like that once, but in response to a different question entirely.
I was asking two recently engaged friends why it is that for the first two months after they get engaged, girls don’t stop yapping about how they’re going to set all their friends up with all their husband’s friends and marry everyone off happily ever after. (This usually lasts until they get busy arranging their wedding. It totally falls off the radar screen once they become “young couplish” and fail to touch base with their friends at all, let alone set them up.) Anyway, they answered that it was twofold: first of all, they never knew guys before (except the ones they were dating, and you can’t exactly say, “Some guy I dated was totally off—maybe he’d be good for you?”) and now they have someone who knows dozens. Secondly, they now have a significant other; they are a team; they are whole… it is such a great feeling that they just want to share it with all their friends.
Well, it’s nice to know what it is that makes engaged people so euphoric—if only single people knew to want it. But nope—never got that answer to my question.
So what answer have I gotten? Here’s a very common one:
“What? Whattaya mean? (nervous laugh) Why wouldn’t I want to get married? Like what—don’t you?”
In other words, either she has no clue why she’s getting married, or she has such a deeply personal reason that she cannot bear to voice it to me. I’ll accept either possibility, because I like to think I’m open-minded, but I’m also a tad cynical, and I suspect that it’s usually the first reason. After all, we all know that after we come back from seminary we start getting married. This is so obvious, that many of us fail to wonder “Why?”
Here’s another:
“I want to move on to the next stage in my life already.”
How’s that for a reason? The girl is simply sick of being single—and mind you, this is after only a few months of it. I don’t think she was so sick of $350 rent in a Brooklyn attic (meals and laundry included) that she wanted to swap it for $900 rent in a Lakewood basement (no meals or laundry included, and maybe not even utilities). She was sick of “being single”, the worst possible stage a girl can inhabit in our community. She was sick of “trying to get married”, a pursuit that consumes time and robs us of our dignity. And of course, she was sick of not being taken seriously simply because she didn’t have a wig on her head. Who can blame young Orthodox Jewish women for trying so desperately to get married? Marriage beats pre-marriage hands down. And for post-seminary girls, it’s all pre-marriage.
Another answer I only heard once, late at night. Me and a friend had attended a wedding out of town and stayed by a third friend who lived nearby. We stayed up well into the wee hours, chatting in the darkness about just about everything, but particularly marriage.
“Don’t you want to get married?” she asked me in exasperation, after some discussion.
“I wouldn’t mind it at all, providing I found the right guy. But I don’t want it for its own sake,” I explained.
“Well of course not, but most girls want to get married.”
“Do you?” I asked.
“Yes! Of course!”
“Why?”
“Why? What do you mean? That’s what you do!”
“Oh come on. That’s not a good reason to take on a lifelong relationship!”
She was quiet a minute, and then said, “You want to know the real reason I want to get married quickly? I mean, I want to get married, but the reason I want to get married right away? Because I don’t want to be the nebach case. I don’t want to be the one everyone looks at and thinks ‘Oh that’s so sad, she’s not married yet.’ And I don’t want to get left behind. I don’t want all my friends to be on to the next stage, raising babies and talking about mother things and I’m left out of it all. That’s why I want to get married.”
And that’s not the end of the story. So desperate was she, that she got engaged before she was ready, and within two months broke the engagement. The stigma would follow her into all her other shidduch attempts, sabotaging her chances, potentially leaving her the old maid she feared so much to be.
How many other girls harbor such fears in their hearts? How many feel pressured to marry simply so they won’t “be left behind” or be the subject of pitying whispers at gatherings?
What are we doing to our young women—and what are we young women doing to ourselves?
Yes, to ourselves. Nobody can make us feel any way we don’t allow them too. After that conversation, I vowed (b’li neder, of course) that I would not feel any pressure to marry for any reason whatsoever. Let them cluck sympathetically and shake their heads. My eligibility for marriage is between me and God, and no third parties need stick their noses in.
