I find myself in the interesting situation of agreeing with two articles about marriage that are almost exactly opposite of each other.
In a Jerusalem Post article, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach exhorts people to not have shallow values when seeking out their mates. He then goes into some detail about where our values are and where they ought to be. His examples of the shallow values are similar across the Orthodox religious spectrum, from very Charedi to very modern Orthodox. These values focus mostly on looks for men and money for women. He instead argues that character should be the primary focus. Yet even the most sincere of Shadchanim in the Torah world are guilty of focusing on these shallow values. To put it the way Rabbi Boteach does:
Seeing today's matchmakers catering to the male addiction to sex objects and the female addiction to success objects is turning me off.
I can vouch for this mentality at least as far as young men are concerned. It doesn’t matter whether they are Charedi or modern Orthodox. Far too many young men have told me that they will only date thin women. That usually means ‘model’ thin. A young woman’s character is important to be sure, but secondary and/or taken for granted. I have advocated getting married as young as possible assuming the maturity level is there. That is far more important than age. But if ‘thin’ is the most important ‘in’ to these young men, then the maturity level just isn’t there.
But is the maturity level enough? Not if you read a very poignant article in Ynet by a young religious woman who is getting divorced for exactly the opposite reasons. She was ‘too mature’. She put Torah values above all else.
Torah values. That sounds nice when it is put that way. What can be more important than Torah values to an observant Jew? Perhaps but the sad truth is that the more religious one is, the less likelihood there is that there will be ‘hands on’ learning about an essential feature of marriage: the emotional needs of the spouse. That is where the western culture of secular world has us beat.
Not that I advocate emulating the sexual morals much of western culture. I don’t. But I do understand where this young woman is coming from. She is getting divorced because both she - and more importantly her husband - never learned the social interactive skills between men and women. They both entered the marriage Hashkafically mature. They both had the same religious values and goals but her husband lacked a basic understanding of his wife's emotional needs. He lacked basic knowledge about the opposite sex that secular people in western cultures learn naturally as they interact.
Some people may say that this isn’t important… that her problems are of an immature nature. But I beg to differ. There is definitely something to be said for both males and females learning how to interact with each other via experience. Both physically and emotionally. But matters of intimacy are just not the focus of the Torah world. And though it is dealt with in many Kallah and Chassan classes, it is far from enough. Courses and lectures do not substitute for actual experience. The following paragraphs are the thoughts of a woman who is suffering as a result.
He (her husband) doesn’t know how to conduct himself with me. He doesn’t know how to touch, how to show interest, or how to make my happy with small gestures. Yes, he does everything I ask him to do, but sometimes I want him to do a little more – to hug me from behind, or send a romantic text message.
Suddenly, I woke up. I’m a child. A baby. Yet I have a husband and a child in my stomach. …We’ve all been brainwashed that this is the right way, but it isn’t so.
My husband is a truly good guy, but it appears that he just doesn’t know what to do. He never learned how to conduct himself with a woman. We, at the all-female school, had a class about intimacy and family. I’m not sure that this will make a difference, as ultimately we mostly beat around the bush. The lessons were mostly irrelevant for us at that stage of our life. But at least we had something, which is much more than nothing.
How can we expect a guy who never held a conversation that was more than a minute long with a girl to enter a life of marriage without proper preparation? How can we expect him to build bridges that he never learned to build? Don’t the rabbis see the distress faced by their students, and especially by their students’ wives?
Now, I’m sure her thoughts do not reflect the view of every married religious young woman. Nor do I think most marriages break up for solely this reason. In fact most of the religious young married couples I know are very happily married. In many cases the couples did not interact with any members of the opposite sex prior to marriage at all. But I wonder if this isn’t a silent problem that most women just learn to live with?
Rabbi Boteach mentions a startling statistic in this reagard: 40 million Americans whose marriages are utterly sexless.
Aside from the procreative aspect of it, I wonder what the numbers are in Orthodox marriages where there was no experiential learning by men about the emotional needs of women and to a lesser extent, by women about men? I know of one very sad Charedi case where this was precidely the issue that led to a divorce. The husband… a good man, with great Midos, and a true Talmid Chacham who learns full time in a Kollel was just not interested in intimacy other than procreation. Is he an exception? Or is he symptomatic of a greater problem?
Like I said, I do not advocate a sudden shift to coeducation in our schools. I am opposed to that, especially in high schools. But I think this woman’s words ought to be paid attention to. There has to be a better way to solve the kinds of problems she is talking about.
I have advocated limited proactive social interaction between the sexes throughout one’s educational lifetime… mostly in the form of family settings ala the Shabbos table, or at public social events like weddings, or perhaps in religious social groups like Bnei Akiva.
I fear this woman’s story represents a far greater problem than we are currently aware of ...and is at least in part, an underlying reason for the alarming increases we've seen in recent years in the rates of divorces between Orthodox couples.
