Controversial: Is There a Shidduch Crisis?

Is there a shidduch crisis?

Oh how long I’ve thought about addressing this topic. Jacob’s post about the Shidduch Initiative finally drove me to it. I’ve noticed that many bloggers (including me) tend to put it in quotes. “Shidduch crisis.” Question: does it belong there?

In my humble and uneducated opinion, yessiree.

I don’t think I’m qualified to make a definitive statement that the shidduch situation today is better, worse, or the same as it ever was. But I don’t think anyone else is either.

I’m always amused when someone says, “So many tragedies these days!” There are no more tragedies today than there ever were. The only thing that changes is how many we notice. For example, soon after I started reading newspapers and listening to the radio, the number of murders, earthquakes, and political scandals in the world “multiplied” exponentially. When I got old enough to know people in shidduchim, the efficiency of the system “deteriorated” rapidly.

So the fact that people claim there’s an issue with shidduchim “today” doesn’t mean that there is one. Only that someone has decided to label it.

So, have there always been older singles? First of all, it seems reasonable to assume that there was never a 100% marriage rate. If Miriam bas Amram was single than anyone could have been single. The fact that marrying off children is discussed in such length in the Gemara suggests that it was not quite as easily done as giving away money on a street corner. And how many tales out of Europe revolve around poor girls who have no chance of wedding because they have no dowry or yichus?

My point? Marriage was always an issue. And the rate of non-marriage today may be no higher than it ever was.

So what is the shidduch “crisis” supposed to be? It’s two part:

1. Fewer singles are matching up
2. There are more spinsters than ever before

And the reasons put forth to explain this mysterious development?

One is that singles today are pickier than ever before. They won’t stand for being set up with a stranger and living happily ever after. They want good looks, money, and love.

My response: haven’t couples always been that way? What man doesn’t want a beautiful wife? What woman doesn’t want someone she’s proud of?

Consider Miriam, Moshe Rabbeinu’s sister. A classic “older single.” Nobody wanted to marry her because she was wasn’t pretty. Even the chance of getting the national leader as a brother-in-law couldn’t entice any of the 600,000 males between 20 and 60 to hitch themselves to an ugly woman. And if a tanah had to chain his daughter’s ankles together to force her to take small, ladylike steps because nobody would marry a striding woman… That problem we don’t have. In other centuries the superficiality centered on money or bloodlines. But there’s always been something.

Another reason given is that “there are more good girls than good boys.” This is a bizarre concept.

For starters: what defines a good boy? Perhaps our definition is too narrow?

And aren’t “good” and “bad” relative terms? I mean, don’t the “bad” boys consider themselves perfectly good? So maybe the “crisis” is restricted to a specific segment of society that has a surfeit of female members? If so, why is that?

Next: if, indeed, there are more good girls than good boys, then the shidduch crisis should be reversed for “bad” boys; there should be more bad boys trying to marry than bad girls. Is this the case? Or by “bad” and “good” do we mean “loserish” and “educated” and this is another way of saying that women feel like they have to marry down?

The third reason presented is the pyramid scheme. Every successive generation is larger than the previous one. If we assume that every generation is 49% male and 51% female (that’s the statistics), then every successive generation has an almost equal but larger amount of each gender. Since men start dating in their early to mid twenties, and girls start dating in their late teens early twenties, the theorem states that there are always more girls available per boy because their generation is larger than the one they are marrying into.

The problem with this theory: First of all, generations are measured in scores of years—that is, sets of twenty. Between 19 and 24 is five years. That’s not a generation gap. That isn’t enough time for a serious discrepancy in numbers to occur.

Second of all: the marriage pyramid is nothing new. Women have been marrying up and men marrying down since the dawn of time. (Even Chava was younger than Adam!) So if the “crisis” is something new to our times, this can’t be the cause.

I would like to posit that if there is a Shidduch Crisis, it isn’t as huge as we’d like to believe. I suspect it seems worse because of how the system works – like asking the guys first and overdoing the pre-checkout details. These things create the illusion of lines of desperate girls and innumerable rejections. Additionally, there’s the idiotic labeling of any spinster over 22 as “older”. This creates the illusion of a vast number of “older” singles. Throw it all together and you have hordes of desperate older singles being rejected for superficial reasons.

Am I crazy? Or is everyone else?

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