a word on the "shidduch crisis"

[marlowe1]

First off, dating sucks. Regular Western dating sucks and frum dating sucks. Western dating involves a lot of dinners, going out, hanging out, living together and wondering what's going on and living in a limbo that doesn't mean anything until you're in a different age range. Shitty movies like He's Just Not That Into You get made. In my darkest

Comments

[gmdreia]

You sure nail the Hebrew angst sometimes, Marlowe. Sometimes I absolutely can't believe you converted.

No offense.

:)

one more

[gmdreia]

I absolutely agree with this.

In essence, dating sucks. And when you date, you only have a chance of finding someone that you can spend the rest of your life with if you do it with a modicum of honesty. And this kind of honesty isn't something that you can arrive at without effort. You might just have to go out with several people before you KNOW what you can stand and what you can't. You might have to go on a hundred more dates before you are good at expressing this person that you've become. And then you have to find someone else who is also honest. Or honest enough. There's always a mixture. You still have to put your best foot forward because first dates are advertising and job interviews more than dates.
It's a dating problem experienced in mainstream dating, too. There's a certain groupthink that tells us we must edit ourselves to be as blandly acceptable and generic to the largest number of people, it's not just Frumster

Re: one more

[marlowe1]

Yeah, that was meant to be about all forms of dating - frum and Western. In Western dating, a lot of "casual dating" gets in the way where one person might not really want to be much more than a one night stand and that's it.

In frum dating, the "MARRY ME NOW" attitude gets in the way and it makes people even more dishonest than they normally would be.

Someone Ortho-Curious? I am trying to use that term.

I actually learned the hard way that someone that "might be willing to convert" is usually someone that just doesn't know what she's doing but isn't ruling anything out and the chance of that leading to a conversion is slim to none.

Re: one more

[gmdreia]

So, if the right Baalat Teshuva came along, or someone who had already converted/was already in the process of converting, or who was Conservative but Ortho-Curious, you would be fine with that

Re: one more

[marlowe1]

Well if you dig the Jewish Libertarians, you should try the Orthodox. We got libertarians crawling out of the woodwork. But for some, you really have to like libertarians enough to hear about the libertarian philosophy ad nauseum.