NYC Taxi Driver Tells It Straight

Why do aidel maidels need to be so tznius? The mashal is often given to a precious diamond, which is kept hidden away in a safe, not exposed where anyone can see or steal it.

In the opening anecdote of Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt’s latest article, a NYC taxi driver explains the problem with this comparison:

 

We usually don’t take a car,” the yeshiva boy says to the driver, an older Irish man with a hearty laugh and a dapper straw hat. “But the lady was inappropriately attired (he winks at his date), in her heels I mean, so we had to — “

The yeshiva boy’s date cuts him off and leans forward to the driver, deciding to turn her frustrations into a joke: “Sir, he doesn’t really care about the heels. It’s my actual choice of attire that he finds inappropriate. My skirts are too short, it makes him nervous, he won’t even call me by my name, you know how religious boys are…”

The driver turns the corner. “That’s the problem with religion, it’s sexist,” he says, looking at her in his mirror. “I know because my parents were religious Catholics. It’s all a bunch of sexist garbage.”

The boy and girl laugh nervously over the profanity, and the girl says slowly, “Well, I don’t think religion itself is sexist, it’s just that chauvinists still exist…” She casts the boy a look.

The boy turns back to the driver: “But don’t you agree, sir, that if you have the most precious diamond in the world, you keep it wrapped up? You don’t take it to the streets to show the entire world?”

The girl gasps silently — she is taken backwards in time, back to the apologetics they taught in 7th grade, again and again, bas melech, kol kvoda pnima, a princess’s honor is all inside, a divine jewel to be kept hidden…

But before she can respond, the driver presses the brakes. He turns around and faces the yeshiva boy, and says slowly, his voice shaking with rage: “Listen to me, boy. This is not an object you’re talking about. This is a living, breathing human being.”

 

What he is saying is: when you lock someone away like a diamond, you are treating them like property, not a person.

This is how objectification works:  By preventing other humans from meeting your “diamond,” you prevent other humans from acknowledging their humanity. The other humans only know about them from descriptions. This, essentially, turns them into objects defined by their description.

Not making sense? I’ll be less abstract:

If men learn about women strictly from a photo proffered by a shadchan, then they will accept and reject women based on the simplest algorithm: appearances. Which objectifies women. So, by keeping women hidden from men, you objectify them. You do not protect them.

I can’t believe I blogged about shidduchim for seven years and never realized this.

But there you go: that is the root problem. The reason why shidduch dating is so offensive.

There’s another, similar, point to be made about sexualization. Arguably, there is nothing overtly (or possibly even covertly) sexual about a woman’s knees. However, if a gentleman glances at your knees, blushes, looks away, and refuses to look at you anymore, then your knees have just been sexualized. And you have just been turned into an object. A sexual object. Something that can’t be looked at without creating sexual thoughts, because everything about you — and especially your knobbly knees — are sexual.

In the opening story, the boy (and yes, he’s a boy not a man or even a guy) decided that Avital’s skirt was too short to be seen in public. He begins making decisions for her about how she ought to appear in public, on the theory that she’s not a person, she’s a diamond. Bam! Objectified! Sexualized!

So you see why Avital was a little upset.

By the way, I’m awed by her presence of mind and her guts in telling that smug bochur how it is. She’s my new rebbe. I’m a total fan. Go read her article.

Also, thank you NYC for having awesome taxicab drivers.

 

 

Reason #14 for Getting Married

This Guy Really Wants a Date

Dubbed “NYC’s Most Desperate Single Man” by the New York Post, and his name is Yossi.

 

HT to OA.

It’s Not Just Me

I bought a friend a copy of Lori Gottlieb’s book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. Not because I believe in settling, but because I knew that she wanted to. She kept going out with all these guys who were perfect except… for one fatal flaw. And she’d wonder if she should stop caring about these things because she’s twenty-seven and is three children behind her classmates, and all she wants is to be married.

So yes, she’s definitely the target audience. I bought her the book.

“Guess what,” Gottlieb says. “There is no perfect man. Kind of how you’re not a perfect woman, so ditch that mile-long shopping list of pointless minutiae and find someone good enough. Then deal with it. Because at least you’ll be married.”

Well, Friend loved it. She kept reading passages aloud about how picky women are, their ridiculous demands, and how few things are really important in a marriage.

“You should read this when I’m done!” she enthused.

“Not a chance,” I replied. “You know I don’t want to settle.” You see, the premise of Lori’s book is that most of all, every woman wants to get married. It’s only a false sense of entitlement that prevents us from picking out the first non-psychotic y-x chromosome pair that strolls past.

And there are certainly many women, like Friend, who feel this way. Their goal is to Get Married. They just need to find someone suitable to do it with. Then they can relax into marital bliss and babies with an easy sigh, knowing they have secured the most important accessory of the rest of the their life.

There are even married people who agree with this. “I’m so glad I married young,” they smile blissfully. “I could not have handled being single this long.”

I usually gape at them in astonishment. Is this the well-adjusted, multi-interested, adventurous person I knew in high school who never had a bored moment in her life? Saying she couldn’t have handled being single? Then I decide that it must be like me saying I couldn’t have handled being married that young. We’re all happy with what life has handed us because we have no idea what the alternative is really like. That’s not a bad thing.

Still, it bugs me.

Because I’ve never felt that way.

I can see the appeal of a committed relationship and the joys of offspring (at least between years 1 and 12), but the tug of the institution of marriage itself has never been a desperate need that overrides my desire for independence or self-sufficiency. I’ve always felt rather alone in this way.

But the nice thing about Gottlieb’s book is the overwhelming negative reaction it’s gotten from lots of women. Some just don’t like being told that they’re picky. But some don’t like the idea of settling. Like me, they do not fear a future in which kindly relatives give them cats for their birthdays. At least, they don’t fear it more than they fear being institutionalize with someone they discover they have trouble respecting.

Now, I happen to agree with Gottlieb that disrespecting someone because they haven’t read Kafka or “aren’t romantic enough” is kind of dumb. But I would also like to point out that there are many happy marriages based on equally dumb points of attraction. A teacher in seminary bragged to us about a match she made between a rich, trophy-wife hunting man and a beautiful, gold-digging woman. “Maybe it seems shallow,” she laughed at her horrified, idealistic, not-yet-dating class. “But it works for them. So what does it matter?”

To which I say, exactly. And if you’d rather stay single than spend the rest of your life with someone who is ugly, or poor, unromantic, or disinterested in existential literature, well, that’s a deeply personal thing, and certainly your priority to make.

Just make sure that you are okay with that. Because otherwise you should probably settle.

Not me, though. I don’t believe in settling.

What’s Your No-Beer Answer?

I have a career problem. Not with the career. It’s great so far. But it wreaks havoc on my dating. Heck, its even bad for not dating. I was at circus school the other night and a happily married classmate asked me what I do.

“Scientist,” I said vaguely.

“Oh wow,” he looked stunned.

“You?” I asked, keeping it friendly.

“Well, now I don’t want to say,” he hesitates. “I’m just an intake nurse at the hospital.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Well, it’s not a smart.”

“So what? It’s a good job and you’re still way better at lion-taming than I am. That’s not going to change how I see you.”

The thing that bugged me about this exchange was that I’d given him my “beer” answer. I was trying to be non-intimidating. What’s a girl to do when her “beer” answer is also a “no-beer” answer?

Here’s how it goes. If a girl is in a bar and a guy comes over and asks what she does, she can give one of two answers: the “beer” answer, which will hopefully lead to further conversation and him offering to buy her a beer; or the “no beer” answer, which will make him suddenly recall urgent business elsewhere. This is purely theoretical for me, as I never get approached in bars, since I’m not generally in them. But the idea still holds: the turn-off answer, and the not-so-turnoff answer.

When I came across this idea, I asked my companions, a preschool teacher and a librarian, what their “no beer” answers would be. After some deep mulling, the preschool teacher answered “Early childhood development specialist.” The librarian didn’t miss a beat. “Librarian,” she said promptly.

Like the librarian, my beer and no-beer answers are essentially the same. Which I find troubling.  What on earth is a girl to answer if people back away slowly from the lite version? A lie?

…then again, it sure is fun to whip out the no-beer answer. “I’m a microneurobiologist specializing in intracellular organelle funambulism. But that’s boring. What do you do? Hey, is something wrong?”

Billboard Dating

There might be millions of men out there for you. I mean it: literally millions. If you’re a Chinese woman. But how can you get all the candidates to come knocking so you can sift through them?

Use billboard advertising, of course.

 

Thank you, Ungossip Girl for the link.

The Guide to Dating Profiles (INFOGRAPH!)

There’s an infograph for everything these days. And there’s an infograph for how men and women should design their dating profiles for better response. Courtesy of Zoosk, fourth largest dating website on the ‘net and avid Facebook advertiser.

Dining with One

I like cooking.

Well, that’s not strictly true. I like eating good food presented well. And it’s a great pleasure to eat delicious, beautiful food that I made myself.

Moreover, I think I’m worth it. I, Bad4, deserve to eat well. So I do.

A (single) friend once told me that she lives on canned tuna and raw vegetables because “It doesn’t pay to cook for one.”

I told her that was the saddest thing I’d ever heard.

She got angry and told me she felt condescended at.

I snarked back that she shouldn’t demand respect from me when she wasn’t giving it to herself. She was a friend I admired and respected and enjoyed spending time with, and I couldn’t believe that she thought she wasn’t worth taking care of except incidentally while caring for a man.

We glared at each other for a while. She didn’t talk to me for three days. Then she came back and said it had nothing to do with any man—she was just too lazy to cook and she liked her tuna, so there.

I said I respected that, because everyone has a right to be lazy if it makes them happy, but I still thought she deserved good food, so she could come over for supper whenever she wanted. We grudgingly made up.  She came over for supper.

I see no shame in cooking for one, arranging a plate for one, and relishing it… alone. If you want to share, well, that’s what Instagram is for, right?

Which is why I was pleased to find that there’s an entire book of famous chefs reminiscing about their favorite one-person meals. And offended that the subtitle has the word “confession” in it. Can we please erase the stigma of not spending every moment with another person?

In The Muppets song “Me Party” there’s a line I love:

There are days when all this girl can see
Is a world that’s made for two

And it’s true. Our society assumes  a party of two. Everyone makes fun of teenage girls who can’t go to the bathroom alone. But how many grown adults have the guts to dine out alone?

I thought I did, and there are times when I have. But frequently I’ve resorted to reading a book to avoid figuring out what to do with my eyes. You can’t just stare at your food. That seems like bad manners. But looking around at the other patrons seems a little creepy. Sometimes, takeout just seems like a better option.

Which is why I loved this article about preferring to dine alone that an MF sent me.  Well, she sent me this article first, but there was a link, so that makes two people who proudly dine alone, and if you add me, well, three’s a crowd, and a horde is a type of crowd, so there are hordes of people who enjoy dining alone, so there.

New Year’s Post

I am not a big New Year’s reveler. My acknowledgment of the new calendar year usually consists of sticking my head under the pillow at midnight when the shouting wakes me up. I also accept the day off from work, albeit grudgingly. (Can’t I work on New Year’s and take off on one of my holidays? Answer: No.  The computer system couldn’t process that request. Neither could my boss.)

Anyway, I recently started using a feed reader, and every other blogger seems to have a New Year’s post. Resolutions or retrospectives or predictions or something like that. So now I feel like I need a New Year’s themed post.

Retrospective:

WordPress is kind enough to restropect on my blog for me. I have posted their stats for you.

Resolutions:

I don’t  do resolutions. I have better things to fail at. Besides, what does a shidduch blogger resolve to do? Get married this year? Thank you. I’ve been working on this for seven years. Why would I suddenly succeed now?

Maybe I could resolve to be a better dater. Try throwing out my list or just stop dumping guys because they aren’t worth giving up my hair for. But eh. No. A girl needs some standards. I’m sticking with my list.

So no resolutions. Great! Moving right along, let’s make some predictions.

Predictions:

I predict that 75% of the 19-year-olds who found this blog during a late-night, post-date googling session will be engaged by the end of the year. I predict that 75% of the long-time readers will not be—and I’m including the married readers in that number.

Not to disparage the 19-year-old readership. I think being single at 19 is more miserable than being single at 27. I’m just so used to it by now. All those raw emotions are covered with so much scar tissue. I no longer care about the things that got me ranting (and writing) at 19. I apologize to my readers: I just don’t have the passion any more. Maybe I should predict my retirement in the next year.

Starting Fresh:

Is there such a thing as starting fresh?

I once had a theory that one of the great harms in relationships comes from the “you always do this” mindset. That is “You have done this thing I don’t like several times in the past, therefore I assume you will do it again now, and I’m going to preempt that or overreact to innocent errors and statements as if you were repeating this past offense.”

So I did a thought experiment. What if you could treat your friends and relatives as completely fresh slates every day? Nothing they’ve done in the past will affect how you perceive them now.

And I realized that this kind of negates the whole point of a relationship. Knowing and understanding the other person, what they do, like, and think, and also what they probably need to work on.

Why am I rambling on this way? Fresh starts. Right. I don’t believe in those either. I am not a brand new person at the start of a new year. I’m the same old flawed me. And chances are good I’m going to continue making the same mistakes this year that I’ve made in the past. But I will take this “stop and think” moment to strike a deal with me: I’ll erase the “you always” mentality if I can prove that I actually don’t always.

Time to get cracking.

It’s 2014!

Amy Webb on TED

I posted about Amy’s book about how to date before. Here’s her TED talk below. (Thanks, Doc.) It’s fun.

Amy believes that you should make a list and stick to it. It worked for her: she found a guy who checked her list and married him.
I made a list like hers once. I used it once to eliminate a guy who really was a bad idea (in retrospect). I forget where I put that list, though. And obviously, it hasn’t done more than eliminate men yet.

Conversely, we have Goldy Krantz saying that you should chuck your list, because the guy she married didn’t check hers at all, and the only reason she went out with him was because he sort of drifted into her life slowly, via the “friend” route.  This one sounds easy: Just date everyone. Well, I do that too. Still single. This method doesn’t eliminate men, which is to say it sure does waste a lot of Sundays. Hasn’t panned out for me either.

I suspect the real truth is actually both of them, which is to say, whatever works for you. Or maybe a third way, which I don’t know about yet, because I’m still single.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of Amy’s, so watch her TED talk. It’s only 20 minutes.

Using Twitter to Get a Date

Do you want to date Ralph? You will need a Twitter account, and get in line.

Dear Sir: This May Be Why You’re Not Married Yet

It’s very convenient, not to mention traditional, to let your parents take care of your shidduch research for you. However, before you do, you should make sure you’re on the same page as them about what you’re looking for.

I’m copy-pasting this from an email  I got from a friend we’ll call Sfati. Here’s a quick introduction:

A couple of months ago her mother asked Sfati if she knew any single girls who would work for the son of a sister of a friend (exhale) who was working on a Ph.D in medieval Jewish history at NYU, with the goal of becoming a professor. Sfati says, “Gee whiz! I have a friend who just started a PhD in renaissance Jewish history at Columbia. I think she wants to be a professor too! They should have something to talk about.”

“Send her info!” Sfati’s mother encouraged.

So Sfati emails her friend, who responds with a standard shidduch profile containing no content of interest: some basics about her family and schooling, but nothing about who she is and what she’s looking for. Sfati wrote back, asking her friend to compose a more descriptive paragraph, which she then appended to the document and forwarded to her mother, who forwarded it to the mother of the boy.

“She’s a real Hungarian mother,” Sfati’s mother warned her. “Always perfectly put together, you know?”

“That bodes ill,” Sfati frowned. “I mean, my friend isn’t a shlump, but she’s not a dressed-up doll either.”

A couple of weeks later, Sfati received a phone call from this Hungarian Mom. The transcripts go like such:

Mother: So is she funny? Her resume was a little funny.

Me: (Oh, no. So much for my great idea.) No–her resume was a standard resume and I asked her for more information–I put that on there.

Mother: But she wrote it, right?

Me: Yes.

Mother: Cause my son would think it’s a little funny. [Note her son does not appear to have read it.] Is she funny?

Me: No, she’s not funny. I mean, she is very intelligent. She’s doing her PhD in History, which is not something most Bais Yaakov girls from Boro Park do, so she’s obviously very intelligent, but no, she’s not funny.

Mother: Ok. Is she Litvish? Because I get the impression from her resume that her family is Litvish, and that’s not going to work. We’re Chassidish. I mean, my son is not going to wear a shtreimel or anything, but he’s going to wear a bekeshe or something.

Me: (don’t think there will be much of a difference between your families no matter what what you wear) I actually don’t know. I never saw her father or brothers.

Mother: Ok. Sometimes people who are very smart, they kind of don’t have friends. I mean, my son is very smart, but he–did she fit in, did she have friends?

Me: Yes, definitely. I was part of her chevra (deliberately using a frum word to be establish myself as part of her in-group, as much as I can be while living in Overland Park, KS). She had a lot of friends.

Mother: Does she have good middos?

Me: Yes. She is very smart, so she understands people, and can be sensitive to their feelings.

Mother: Ok. How does she look?

Me: She has dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, big eyes…

Mother: Is she thin or is she chubby?

Me: (she is chubby but somehow I don’t think this is a good thing to say) She’s not thin but she’s not chubby either.

Mother: Is she big?

Me: Well, she’s not big. I don’t know exactly how tall she is–

Mother: She’s 5’3, it says so on her resume.

Me: Ok. Well, she’s not big–

Mother: So she’s full.

Me: Yes, she’s full.

Mother: (with a tone of finality) Well, that won’t work.  My son, he never asks if the girl is beautiful or what she looks like, but he needs someone who is skinny. He’s very skinny, my son.

Me: Oh. Well–do you want to know more about her, just in case?

Mother: What I would really love to do is see a picture of her.

Me: (Hoping this won’t be another strike) Well, she’s on Facebook.

Mother: Oh, really? (thankfully, doesn’t seem to be bothered) Ok, under her name?

Me: Yes. Do you have any more questions?

Mother: Does she have a stable family?

Me: Well, I never really went over to her house. I met her mother once and she seemed very nice, and she herself is very emotionally stable.

Mother: Ok. Well, thank you. I’ll look at her picture on Facebook. Thank you.

Me: Thank you, bye.

 

NEF Overload

There have definitely been times when I felt like the girl in the lower left of this photo. I mean, c’mon people! Leave me some single friends? Or at least space yourselves out so I don’t have to listen to all of you gush at once? Who am I supposed to complain to after hanging up from that?

I admit, I feel for her. I have never had to deal with 9 NEFs all at once trying to blind me with their rings. How fortunate am I! I never realized how good I’ve had it.

Friday Repost: Why Are You Telling Me That?

I kind of laughed when I reread this exchange.

…She began listing all my sterling virtues, and, running short a bit earlier than she’d intended, fell back on plain ol’ information about me. “…and she had a blog,” she enthused to the mother.

“A blog…?” asked the mother uncertainly. “Um, isn’t that bad for shidduchim?”

As in, “are you bragging about that? Shouldn’t that be a turnoff? Hang on while I consult my manual for the appropriate reaction…”

Don’t You Love It When Cartoons Make You Feel Smart?

HT to Gossip Girl

 

Office Parties

My complacency was shredded at a Friday night Shabbos meal.

“I invited some coworkers,” the husband explained when I dialed up for a meal. “They were curious about how the Jewish Sabbath thing works.”

“Should be interesting,” I said. “Doesn’t perturb me in the slightest.”

Little did I know how perturbed I was going to be.

In the end only one coworker came, with his girlfriend. “Joe didn’t want to come,” the husband explained. “He didn’t have anyone to come with.”

I was puzzled.  “What are we, chopped liver?”

“No,” the host explained, “It’s just that non-Jews don’t go to parties if they don’t have someone to go with them.”

I continued to look puzzled.

“Like a girlfriend.”

I was still puzzled. “Did you tell him you were going to have single, unescorted women here, and we’re totally unselfconscious about it?”

He smiled indulgently. “In our culture that’s normal. He feels weird going somewhere alone.”

Well! Talk about perturbed! I started wondering: should I be feeling self-conscious now? I go everywhere alone. It has simply never occurred to me that I need another person – let alone a guy – in tow to justify my presence.

When it came time for the company holiday party, my curiosity turned to anxiety.

“I’ll order a kosher meal for you,” the HR lady said. “Does your plus one need one too?”

“Um, no… There is no plus one.”

She gave me an odd look. “Well let me know if you need another kosher meal.”

I wondered if I should take a page out of Joe’s book and just not go. What do non-Jews do in this situation? They don’t all have boyfriends all the time, do they?

I turned to Dear Google, the Wise One, for the answer to this question. She was encouraging.

“Don’t be afraid to go to your company holiday party alone,” she rah-rah’d. “Go alone and rock that party anyway.”

Right. Phrased like that, you just know it’s going to be awkward. Especially when you’re not the party-rocking type.

“You’re going to the party? It’ll be great!” a coworker said, with the too-interested leer that either means “I can’t wait to see who your boyfriend is” or else “I can’t wait to see you in a dress.” Both equally discomforting. But I was determined. I wanted to go. 

So I went.

There were an even number of place-settings at the table. They had to remove the one next to me.

“You’re here alone?” a coworker asked. “Oh no, that’s great! Really!”

Suddenly, I felt a gaping hole in the space next to me.

“Rock this party anyway,” I reminded myself. “You don’t need a guy to give you confidence and worth.”

Well, maybe not self-confidence and self-worth. But the eyes of the beholder should not be underestimated.

“I can’t be the only one with this problem,” I complained to a shadchan. “Do you have any decent guys who want to a do a holiday party arrangement?”

“I do,” she said, flipping through her binder. “Here, take a look at this one. What do you think?”

“Can he chit-chat with strangers while pretending to know me?”

Great. Forget “a guy you can take home to your mother.” Now I was picking a “guy you can bring to an office party.”

Disgusted with myself, I handed back the binder. He wasn’t my type anyway. 

So this year, when the invitation went out, and the HR lady came around to say “Just let me know if you need a kosher meal… or two,” I said “When do you need to know by?”

She gave me three weeks.

Great. That gives me three weeks to decide whether to go alone, to go at all, or…

“I need a guy who can be scheduled three weeks in advance to be available immediately motzai Shabbos for double-wrapped, reheated steak and beer,” I told my flatmate. “Help?”

“I’ll go with you,” she offered. “But I’m not drinking beer.”

“I can’t take you! I plan to marry a man one day.”

“Women switch back and forth all the time.”

Okay, change that. I have three weeks to decide whether to go alone, whether to go at all, to find a guy, or to come out of a closet I’m not in.

Wedding Music

“…and I give you the brocha that you should find someone who is right for you bikarov in the right time,” she finished off.

I’ve gotten very good at smiling mechanically at these, but this was my friend. She reads my blog. She listens to me kvetch. She should know better.

“Seriously? That’s the best brocha you can give me?”

“Why, what could be better?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe that I should be happy with whatever my life is however it turns out.”

“Of course I want you to be happy! Happily married! I want you to settle down and start a life!”

“Well now you’ve busted my bubble. Here I am, 27 years old, and I thought I started a life when I started paying my own bills. I have a life.”

“It’s not the same, and you know it.”

“No it’s not the same, and I do know it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a life.”

In retrospect, I might have been PMSing.

Driving home, I twirled the dial to WQXR for some classical music. The familiar beat of Pomp and Circumstance floats out of my speakers. I laughed. Some songs just always make me smile, and Pomp and Circumstance is one of them. It is just so thoroughly reminiscent of solemn collegiates in ridiculous gowns marching down the aisle, proud to be finished with their degrees and about to start life.

To start life.

My mind took the leap.

Wouldn’t it be perfect? Walking down the aisle to P & C, the song that goes with moving on, with graduating to the next stage in life.

Really, the mind wonders. Why isn’t this a more popular wedding tune?

Catch It While You Can

Oops. I apologize for nearly missing this. But November 11 is Singles Day in China. Use the celebration to go out and maybe meet someone!

Trust Your (Young) Adults

I graduated bais yaakov high school with a head full of ideas about marriage that I trusted but didn’t believe. That is: I trusted the teachers who’d taught them to me. They were older and wiser and presumably had my best interest in mind. But many of the things they said didn’t pass the critical thinking test, so I struggled to believe them.

One day I found myself on an eighth date.  I liked the guy. Respected him. Enjoyed spending time with him. But I also knew that eight dates meant we were Serious and that freaked me out. I had no reason to break up with him, and no desire to marry him.

Luckily, the guy didn’t go to a bais yaakov. He pointed out that something big was missing in our relationship. We were, to put it mildly, stuck in the Friend Zone, and going nowhere fast. He broke us up. He was absolutely right and I was secretly relieved, but it took me a couple of years to come round to agreeing with him.

Trusting without believing gets us girls in trouble. We try to do what we’re told because it must be right, and yet, something inside is crying that it can’t be. But, ever trusting, we sometimes allow our elders and wisers to drive us into places we really shouldn’t be.

Back when I was 21, I had friends who were lucky enough to have breakdowns and wind up in therapy before they could be pushed into an inauspicious marriage. Now that I’m 27, I have friends who are divorced, because they didn’t manage it until after. 

I’m sure by now everyone has read Gital’s story in the Post about how she let the people trusted nudge her into a marriage she didn’t believe in with a sociopath simply because he came from the Feinstein family.

I told the matchmaker I wanted to stop seeing him, that we weren’t a fit…

My parents asked me to think about it because his parents were so insistent I had the wrong impression of him.

In Orthodox dating, you rely a lot on what other people tell you — what their impression is. So I gave him another chance.

I don’t want to sing any Disney-style “follow your heart” tunes here. But at some point, the yeshivish community has to believe they’ve instilled their children with the right values and a pinch of common sense, and trust them to navigate the world themselves. Until they do, girls will struggle to trust themselves. Bad decisions ensue.

For a while I thought I was the only girl naive enough to treat feeling of reluctance for a guy with repetitions of the mantra “love comes after marriage” — something oft repeated in high school, but without the sort of elaboration necessary for girls who have been segregated from boys their entire lives. But now I know the unhappily married and the happily divorced — sometimes with children in tow — who weren’t as lucky as I was.

The parents and teachers advising these girls into their relationships mean well. They want the best for them. None of them dream of creating a future divorcee, let alone an agunah. But they still view them as children, girls, unable to trust the inner compass they’ve been cultivating through years of schooling and upbringing. And the “girls” share this view, because it’s held by the people they trust the most.

This makes me sad.

And long term, it makes a lot of other people sad too.

Thursday Link: Even Umbrellas Deserve True Love

Or else Pixar is incurably romantic.

 

HT to FES.

Thursday Link: I’ve Been Outdone

I had a go at writing a geeky love poem way back when, but there’s a better version here, courtesy of Big Bang Theory:

Question for People Married More Than Five Years

Have you found True Love?

This question comes from my friend, who wants to know if True Love exists in the Jewish world. She doesn’t know how to define it. Rather, she chooses to let each couple define it in their own relationship.

So, people married 5+ years: would you say you have found True Love?

Thursday Link: Bad Lists

 

Got this from an MF. It links to a blog containing the musings of, apparently, a fantastically in-love (and good-looking) couple on the subject of Cupid’s arrow, sheep-eyed bliss, Aphrodite’s elixir, or maybe something to do with St. Valentine. It’s a Blog About Love, in short.

In this post, the female half ruminates on the viral article by Lori Gottlieb, in which she urges women to settle for Mr. Good-Enough when they’re young, so they don’t wind up totally alone when they’re old.

We’ve covered that ground before.

The blogger says people may be more willing to settle if they realize why they have higher expectations. Do they have a list to fill the void created by an imbalance in their psyche?

Personally, I don’t think that’s my problem, but these things are always more apparent to third parties. I’m sure someone could tell me about my imbalances and how they’re skewing my expectations. Sadly, although many people have told me why other people won’t marry me, nobody has yet endeavored to tell me why I won’t marry other people. Odd that. I wonder why?