The Greatest Generation Versus the Me Generation

Once again, I was sent a link to a column by 5TJT Dating Forum columnist, Baila Sebrow. And once again she describes the debacle of today’s dating scene among young Orthodox Jews. She calls the Shidduch system broken.

I don’t know that I would go that far. There are a lot of happy marriages that resulted from this system and still do. It works best for the more right wing Charedi world where compatibility between a couple is more likely. This is where the majority of the Shidduch success stories lie. 

To be clear, none of this applies to most of the Chasidic world. Their system departs radically from the Lithuanian/Yeshiva community. In those communities, parents do all the work and ‘dating’ consists of meeting one time in the living room of one of the parents. Lest anyone ridicule this method of dating, it has been pretty successful thus far. The divorce rates are probably the same as they are in other segments of Orthodoxy. There too the compatibility factor is even greater becuase of the limited scope of life experiences.

The Shidduch system does not apply to the Left wing of modern Orthodoxy either. Couples tend to meet more casually. The Shadchan is rarely if ever used.

The issues the letter write describes are found mostly among Moderate Charedim who also use Shadchanim and Centrists who use them too, although not exclusively. Rather than paraphrase I am going to quote extensively from this column since I think there is a lot of wisdom there. First from the letter writer and then the response.

As a result of their generation’s hyper-consumption of their smartphones (and increasingly so during COVID-19), today’s young adults’ willingness to engage in effort and confront life’s basic obstacles, which is crucial for marriage, has been wholly inhibited by a need for instant gratification.

Anything in life that is not perfect at first glance, “#InstaWorthy,” or requires more effort than ordering an Über is written off as disposable and is further deserving of the full-fledged #CancelCulture treatment.

Also, when my husband and I were single, it was far more common to date and marry someone whose personality was incompatible with yours. Today, we still struggle to bridge each other’s personality differences, yet we are happily married for 30 years, as are all of our middle-aged friends.

Perhaps the “instant gratification” mentality causes my daughters and many of today’s singles to expect their future spouses’ personalities to be “already there” and automatically tailored to them on the first date.

What can we do to teach our kids and their friends how to treat the institution of marriage with more kavod?

Response

Believe it or not, after the Holocaust, in which more than six million Jews were murdered, the rate of marriage was astonishingly high. The type of person someone had been before the war didn’t matter to those looking to get married. They took a “ba’asher hu shom” approach, marrying a person based on the way he or she presented at the time. Yichus was hardly researched in the DP camps when a couple made the decision to go under the chuppah, and, at times, a few kallahs shared one wedding gown! Not only that, but there were spouses who didn’t even speak the same language. And it is through that holy generation of Holocaust survivors who got married and created beautiful generations that we now have such a strong force of Torah-observant Jews, baruch Hashem... 

 (By contrast) No one is interested anymore in overcoming any obstacle to make a relationship work, whether it is marriage or a dating relationship. The belief system that something better is out there and why bother putting in any work is without doubt stemming from the attitude of “instant gratification.” The irony is that with all the gratification in which people are indulging, there is so much unhappiness and anxiety among the very people who subscribe to instant gratification. They are depressed and miserable, seeking more and more gratification but never feeling satisfied. “Cancel culture” has infiltrated the dating scene with a vengeance. So, yes, anyone with something slightly off-kilter on the résumé, whether imagined or real, is quickly ostracized and thrown out of the shayach list of singles. Sadly, the shidduch system has become a devastating catastrophe.

Like I said, there is a lot of wisdom there. In fact, I think that column should be read in full