reflections of frum dating

 

As a baal teshuvah I have been on both sides of the dating fence. In the ‘secular’ world dating consisted of getting to know a person and if you enjoyed her (or his) personality, trying to make it work. She’s Hispanic and you are something else. So you start getting to know Hispanic culture. It’s interesting. I looked most of all for a good heart, a sense of decency, and a feeling of ease with interactions. No need to rush into anything. Enjoy your time together and see what happens. If you took a woman on a date and acted like half a gentleman the woman was thrilled.

 

I found dating in the frum to be the opposite. There was no getting to know anybody and no enjoyment of anything. It was all fear and judgement. If the guy is Sephardic and the woman Ashkenaz, that’s a problem. It’s too different. Oh they are both Ashkenaz but she is from Europe. No good. In the frum world, people tend to look for somebody who matches them exactly. Differences generate feelings of annoyance and fear. He’s too yeshivish. He’s not yeshivish enough. How about she’s a bit yeshivish for me but I like her. How about that as an approach?

 

The question of whether I had a chavrusa every night seemed to be crucial to most of the women. Also, if I had a rav. If I go to minyan 3x a day. If I am close to my family, whatever that means. A negative response to any of these questions nixed the shidduch. Circumstances were not taken into account. Maybe I study better alone. No, that is not acceptable. That means you are anti-social I was told.

 

It wasn’t any better in the Modern Orthodox world. I took one woman to the Museum of Modern Art and she was annoyed that I didn’t know more about Van Gogh, not that she knew anything about him. Is that really important? In the Modern world, you have to be just the right amount of secular. I took one woman to a jazz club after she had given me a whole speech about how she is interested in secular things, but it turned out that the jazz club, which was quite tame, was too secular for her. I could never seem to get the right mix. A woman who said she was tired of the typical date complained after I took her kite flying on an empty beach. I don’t know what the problem was exactly, but she complained to the shadchan who also couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Kite flying sounded good to her, but maybe that’s why the shachan is married.

 

Also missing from frum dating was the woman contributing to anything. In my secular days, women made picnics. One took me to a music concert. They gave cards and gifts. Giving generates warm feelings toward the recipient. So many frum woman complain that they aren’t feeling anything for the person they are dating. That’s what happens when all you do is take. The frum women did nothing but take and sit around judging whether the guy gave to her in just the right way.  It was so one-sided. Even the phone calls, I had to initiate every contact. And if I didn’t call them exactly when they wanted, at just the right frequency, that was a problem. I would say, you can call me. They’d say, no that’s not how it works. This is taken to such extremes that after I asked one woman with whom I had been on numerous dates if we could talk about the relationship she said, “That’s your job.” That’s my job, to have a conversation about the relationship? With myself?

 

I am not completely blaming the women. I think the system makes them this way. It’s a sick system. The women are told to be passive and to be afraid, particularly of anything different.

 

The rules about permitted activities are absurd. You can’t get to know people at a restaurant table. If you are going to marry somebody, you have to enter his or her house, their bedroom even. See how they live.

 

The rabbis are more to blame than anybody. They have so many rules. They fill the women with terror. A guy told me that he was recently at a talk about shidduchim in which the speaker (a rabbi) said, “Girls if he doesn’t a rav, run.”

 

Run? You mean that he’s a serial killer because he doesn’t have a rav? And what’s a rav? What does that even mean? Define it. Is it one person who makes every decision for him, as if the average rabbi has time for that. It’s such an amorphous term, like being close to family. I know all kinds of people who say they are close to family, but when you see them together you see awkward interactions and lots of tension. What many people mean is that they see them often even if everyone is fighting. That means you are close to them.

 

So what I’m saying is the frum dating sucks. It’s atrocious. And I’m not surprised to see many troubled marriages. You have to marry somebody you like, not an object who fits religious or social standards set by your neighbors or your mother. You have figure out what kind of person you are and find somebody you can get along with. And you have to participate in this, take action, give, enjoy. In other words, do the opposite of what most people do in the frum world which is treat others and oneself like garbage. That’s my experience with frum dating.

 

I’m married now. I haven’t dated in decades. I’m still not over the trauma. It really was horrible.