A few weeks ago I went to Montreal, where I met up with a friend of mine who grew up in a very religious family, although she herself is modern Orthodox. She was telling me that she recently went on a shidduch date.
A shidduch date is set up by a Jewish matchmaker with the aim of marriage; this kind of dating is not done casually, but is serious business. The guy came in to see my friend from another city, and had been set up with her a year and a half after she initially saw the matchmaker because it was the first man of comparable religiosity that she found for my friend.
The date didn’t go well, but I still can’t help thinking that maybe there is something to this old school style of up front and pragmatic dating.
First of all, many Jewish people put a very heavy emphasis on only dating Jews but that broad qualification belies the wide range of the Jewishness spectrum. There aren’t that many Jews in the world, but there are many different types of Jews. Finding in the relatively tiny worldwide Jewish population someone with compatible religiosity can be difficult.
When people think about Orthodox dating, they think of shmirat negiyah, or “guarding the touch,” the practice of not touching members of the opposite sex. In a modern world, many find it shocking that young people can date and agree to marry without even holding hands, let alone kissing or sleeping together. I think that the more meaningful aspect of this practice and of Orthodox dating in general is the minimal amount of heartbreak and drama involved. When you are not touching the person you date, there is no rushed intimacy or elevation of the physical within the relationship. And when you are meeting expressly to find out if a person is the right marriage partner for you, there are no mismatched expectations or dilly-dallying for long periods of time before realizing that the person you are with isn’t the person you want to marry.
I do not follow these dating precepts. I don’t plan on going to a matchmaker, I touch boys, I don’t focus exclusively on marriage prospects, and probably as a result, I am have had some emotional dramas. I love “Sex and the City,” and its angsty, uncertain, noncommitting, man-touching, scarred, and emotional women; indeed, I have grown up bracing myself for this sort of adult dating life. Several young Jewish couples at my school got engaged recently; someone asked me in jest, “Shari, when are you going to get engaged?”
“I’ll be lucky if it’s within the decade,” I said, only half-kidding. I grew up around many single Jewish women – I know what it’s like.
I realize there is a certain practicality in dating lots of men and trying them out to figure out what you like and gain experience before finding “the one.” But I think that maybe the Orthodox have it partially right. It certainly is hard to feel pain and heartbreak when religiosity is matched, expectations are clear and boundaries are set.
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