“People are younger in spirit today than they once were,” says Chana Rose, a shadchan in Flatbush who has made shidduchim for people of all ages. “I have people in their eighties calling for shidduchim.”

For those pursuing a shidduch during middle age or beyond, the path can be lonely and strewn with obstacles, but a caring support network can make all the difference.

Starting the Search

The first obstacle in the path of our heroes’ quest is the lack of available resources. While most of us can rattle off names of several shadchanim, and many amateur matchmakers happily pair off their cousins and coworkers, shadchanim who work with mature singles are few and far between.

Daniel Hayman, a prolific shadchan in the Lubavitch community, found his calling when he was looking for his own zivug sheini. When he introduced himself to a shadchan and gave his age — mid-forties — she had no idea what to do with him. “There’s a terrible void of shadchanim dealing with older singles,” he explains, which sparked his desire to help this demographic find their bashert.

Chana Devorah Urbach of Passaic, who made her first shidduch by pairing a bochur she noticed on her wedding video with a friend of hers, started out with a younger clientele. Over time, she realized that older singles were at a disadvantage in shidduchim, since they tended to be less visible in the community and had fewer people looking out for them.

At a 55+ shidduch event she recently hosted, Chana Devorah experienced such an outpouring of gratitude that she realized there’s a profound lack of appropriate venues in which mature singles can meet shadchanim and each other. “They’re really eager for opportunities,” she says.

Aside from being an underserved niche, older single women also struggle with a shidduch crisis not unlike the one alleged to exist among their younger compatriots: There seem to be more eligible women than men.

As with the more well-known shidduch crisis, hypotheses abound. Some assert that it only seems so. Family First’s Perel Grossman, one of the founders of an organization called Second Time Singles, says that while the group was active, she got lots of calls from women, but few from men.

“My personal opinion is that the men are less proactive. It could be people are redting them shidduchim, so they have less need to network,” says Perel. Men have the advantage of being out and about at shul, shiurim and public communal activities, she says, so they get redt more shidduchim than women. Also, since their social lives tend to be filled with these activities, they may feel less of a compelling need to remarry. “I’d love to see someone spearhead an effort to call rabbanim, or somehow make contact with people in each shul to assemble a database of available men,” she says.