I adore my bubbie. She has a special place in my heart and I would never want to hurt her or cause her concern, but here I was doing just that. I was sorry, and I found myself crying in my pillow every night. Still, I couldn’t marry someone I didn’t have feelings for. And on that everyone in the family agreed. But the pressure did not ease.
“Surely,” family members insisted, “there must be someone who is suitable for you. You can’t be so picky.”
It was hard for me to hear those words but I remembered the teaching of our sages: “The protective fence to wisdom is silence.” I bit my tongue and swallowed hard. Then one Shabbos morning I overheard some of my parents’ friends discussing me. “It’s a rachmanus [a pity]on her; she waited and waited and now she’s part of the shidduch crisis generaton.”
The words pierced my heart. I’m not a crisis!” I wanted to shout. But I knew my cries would be lost in the wind. I was part of a certain age group and in the eyes of many I was now in the “shidduch crisis’” category. I resented that. How dare they say these things about me?
The pressure continued to mount and at some point I decided to move out of my parents’ home. This was something that was just not done in our community. Girls lived at home until they were married. But acceptable or not, I was moving.
I rented a small studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, met a new group of friends – and discovered a second “shidduch crisis.”
This group was comprised of many young men and women, all single and all friends, and that was their undoing. That was their “shidduch crisis.” On Shabbos there were always dinners to attend, hosted by organizations, synagogues, or families. Everybody knew everybody else and that created a crisis situation because when a shidduch was recommended the stock answer was, “Oh I already know him; we are good friends.” Or, “She is very nice but it wouldn’t work out for marriage.”
And so living in a Manhattan Jewish neighborhood that was home to many other singles introduced me to a new problem.
Now I’m 29 and going on that frightening age of 30. It’s one thing to be single in your twenties and something else again to enter your thirties still single. In the secular world it may not mean much but in the observant Jewish world it’s a tough one.
These days I do not go home much, not even for Shabbos. The “crisis” condition resonates there more than ever. I’ve been to singles events, Shabbatons, retreats, and weekends – all to no avail. The same people seem to pop up again and again and primarily they all come from the same neighborhood. I’ve become a nervous wreck.
My married friends invite me for Shabbos. I play with their babies and then they ask me to babysit. I’m more then happy to help out but somehow I’m made to feel like a schmatte. I have been relegated to the position of “nanny in crisis” and I resent that even more.
Rebbetzin, please be kind enough to shed some light on how I might get out of this insane “shidduch crisis” situation. I guess the people who first labeled us thought they were doing something good but the opposite is true. The “crisis” has stigmatized us. And if anyone takes a moment to think about it, he or she will realize that no young person wants to marry a crisis.