I was going through old posts when I found my link to a funny post by Bas~Melech. It’s worth a read. I miss her writing. She stopped blogging when she, ah, got engaged… Engaged! That scourge of creative effort. The blight of originality. The… well, you know how it is. A person has a fun, sparkling personality with lots of creative output, and then they go and get married and you’re lucky if they do anything more interesting than upside-down horseradish cake ever again.

“…Well, I have to meet someone later this afternoon.”

“Anyone I know?”

“No.”

“Who is it?”

“Somebody.”

“Yes, obviously. I mean, who?”

“Somebody, just somebody.”

“Oh! Somebody. Sorry. I’m a little slow today. Well, enjoy hanging out with Somebody.”

I guess I’m jaded. I no longer get indignant about indignities, semantics, and cognitive shortcuts that people take in shidduchim.

How involved should a shadchan be?

On the one hand, a few pointers on whether the girl expects you to hold opens doors or will be horrified by it can make a big difference to a date. On the other, telling a guy where to take his date would suggest that you’re not entirely confident in his abilities to navigate the grown-up world.

Then again, if the shadchan has asked some of my dates “Where do you plan to take her?” it might have prevented them from stepping off the train into residential Brooklyn and saying “So, where are we going?”

Then back again, you can’t expect the shadchan to guide a guy through every possible mine in the field, with questions like “Do you plan to speak to her on this date? Do you plan to speak to her about anything except your PhD thesis? When she starts talking about how cold she is, will you take her indoors?” After all, if you have that little confidence in the guy, you probably shouldn’t be setting him up.

And then, sometimes, the shadchan is the clueless one. Like the shadchan who called a guy on the day of the first date to inform him that the girl was sick, they’d have to postpone, but wouldn’t it be so nice of him to drop off flowers erev Shabbos for her? The mind boggles. I mean, they hadn’t even met yet.

So, how involved is too involved? Should the shadchan give the guy your phone number and bow out, or should (s)he be coaxing the parties through every step of the way? Which would you rather? Which would your dates rather?

I wonder if there’s some way they can harness this phenomenon to help PTSD victims.

Like SerandEz blog, and discussions about shallowness in the dating community.

I have absolutely no excuse for posting that link except that I haven’t had time to write a post in two weeks, for which I apologize.

And, if you start on that one and sigh, try this next one on for size. There is some debate over whether it is family friendly (PG-13, methinks, for language), so don’t click if you’re very aidel. But here’s the gist of it (and the very best pull-quote):

We have to quit defining ourselves solely in relation to [non-existent] dudes. Like, “I am not meI am some imaginary man’s imaginary perfect 10, plus 50 extra pounds, minus a 20-inch waist, plus a threatening commitment to feminism, minus any desire to pretend to care about bike polo! That’s me!” No, that’s not you. That is a weird monster you made up to torture yourself.

…Fundamentally, men are attracted to the exact same thing in women as women are in men: Confidence. Self-assuredness. Agency. Knowing who you are.

The author is probably single, but her point – that normal, non-supermodels get married all the time – is tacitly true.

When I wrote this post I wasn’t convinced of my thesis myself. I wrote it mostly to comfort NMF#7 who, last I heard, got married and didn’t become a doctor after all. It’s a bit of a trend in the wannbe-doctor field. Either you marry a politely tolerant guy and watch your medical dreams become impractical upon pregnancy, or you stay single and become a doctor and then…?

As one gentleman put it, “I married my wife after she did teshuva for the‘averah’ of attending medical school by becoming a neurologist.”

So, medical types – there’s hope for you.

The bais Yaakov high-school graduate is suddenly handed a dizzying range of control over her life: what to wear Monday through Friday, how late to stay out at night, what ice cream to have for supper, what subjects to study in college.

Giddy on independence and control, the young single woman sees nothing but promise aheada life crafted to her desires, perfect by her own design. She has it planned out, step by step, from volunteer summer job this year to the influential career down the line. She knows exactly what it takes, and she knows that shell get there.

Except for one thing. The marriage factor. Shes not really sure where it fits in, though shed be happy to adjust for it at any point. But neither does she know how to make it happen. And while shes confident that shell achieve it, she really wishes she could see, just a little more clearly, how.

The phrase career-path is well-known. The phrase marriage-pathnot so much. Even though we exercise reduced control over our employment, there are tried and true techniques for job hunting and ladder climbing. We know that if we keep at it, well eventually meet with some success.

Not so with dating. Network at weddings, harass shadchanimtheres no guarantee that youll ever get to sit across from a nervous young man and sip coke.

Its disconcerting. Disheartening. Disgruntling. The most frustrating part of being orthodox, female, and single isnt being singleits not being able to do anything about it. Men, at least, have their lists to occupy them, to maintain that faade of control. But women well, how else to explain our inexplicable attachment to those SYAS accounts?

But maybe thats not such a bad thing. With all the control we have over our lives, its easy to forget that we dont make our own fate. Not to start quoting kochi viotzem yadi at you (or anyoneIm talking about myself here oh God I just sounded like a high school teacher twice in one sentence), but sometimes you need to ram into that wall to force you to stop, breath, and refocus. My dating status is out of my control, and so is everything else. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride, and stop backseat driving for God.

Usually I don’t mind being single. I have lots of clever and fun friends, I self-entertain pretty easily, and I only worry about my cooking when I have guests. Eating out is easy to rig so that you wind up either at people you like or with people you like. And the only person leaving socks on the floor is me, which is somehow not very bothersome.

But there are some social situations where you just can’t rig it to be comfortable. Weddings can be awkward. Family reunions too. And that’s when it is suddenly glaringly obvious that you are Single, all alone in the world, on your own, a perpetual outsider…

Long long ago I mused about how nice it would be if men vied for our attention the way bucks vie for that of a doe. Well, over Pesach it happened to me. Sort of. Not with men, and not with bucks.