By the time I was 24 I was fed up with shidduchim.

All my close friends were already married, and I had gone out with more girls than I cared to have met.

That was one thing I had in common with Tzippy, who at 23, was similarly disgusted with the dating process. Other than this shared frustration, however, we didn’t connect particularly well, and our dates were marked by long silences. But neither of us had any specific issues with the other, so we continued dating. As the shadchan kept telling us, “If it’s not a no, it’s a yes.”

On the sixth date, in an attempt to break the silence, I blurted out, “It would be so nice to just get engaged and be finished with this whole parshah.”

“I’m ready,” Tzippy immediately responded.

It took me a few seconds to grasp that she had misconstrued my statement for a proposal. And that she had said yes.

If it’s not a no, it’s a yes, I told myself. Plastering a big smile on my face, I said, “Mazel tov!”

Both sets of parents expressed surprise when we called to tell them to prepare a l’chayim, but they were too relieved to ask what had made us decide to spring this engagement on them. Neither of us was quite the older single, but we weren’t far from there, either.

Throughout the engagement, I repeated to myself what I had heard countless times from older, more experienced adults: The connection will come later. Still, I was concerned that Tzippy showed no liking toward me and had zero interest in spending time with me. Whenever I called her, she sounded bored.

When Tzippy came to spend Shabbos at my parents’ home, she said she was tired after a long week, and immediately after the meal Friday night she headed off to bed. She did the same Shabbos afternoon after the meal, which meant that we spent no time at all together all Shabbos.

Sunday morning, my mother took her to choose a setting for her engagement ring, but she showed absolutely no interest in looking at the options the saleslady showed her. My parents, who had married off three sons before me, were deeply disturbed by Tzippy’s indifference. They didn’t say anything to me about it, however, until Tzippy left and I shared with them that I had found her behavior strange.

Upon hearing that I, too, had misgivings about the shidduch, my mother contacted the people she had called for information before we started dating and asked pointed questions about Tzippy’s social skills and emotional stability. Everyone assured her that Tzippy was outgoing and friendly, with no social or emotional deficits.

I myself went to speak with someone who had a lot of experience helping people with shidduchim and shalom bayis, and he told me that he had seen similar situations many times. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he assured me. “The feelings will come after the wedding.”  

I had deep reservations going into the wedding, but I willed myself to ignore those reservations. What did I know, anyway? I was just a young schnook with no experience in anything marriage-related, except maybe dating, of which I had had more than enough. And I didn’t want to rock the boat by breaking the engagement. That would have been so messy, and so embarrassing. People would be busy speculating about what had happened, and then I’d have to go back into shidduchim all over again with a stain on my record. It was easier to just swallow my concerns and move on to the next stage already. Probably we’d live happily ever after, like all the other blissful young couples around us.

Already in the yichud room I realized I had made a big mistake. Tzippy sat there in silence, not looking at me and not responding to my attempts at conversation. Breakfast the morning after the wedding was eaten in silence as well.

Marriage is forever. It’s a disposable generation; they think you can throw out everything. Marriage takes work, it doesn’t happen overnight. People today are looking for instant happiness.

Replaying all these oft-heard sentiments over and over in my head, I resolved that I was going to make this marriage work.

But how do you make a marriage work when the other person is clearly not interested in you? When I spoke to Tzippy she would answer in monosyllables, if that much. When I brought her gifts or treats she wouldn’t utter a word of thanks. When I’d smile at her she’d look away.

Often, I’d come home and hear her on the phone with her friends, talking loudly and even laughing. When she’d notice me, she’d go into a different room and close the door, and then emerge with the dour expression she reserved for me.

Was I really that bad?

“Am I doing something wrong?” I asked her many times. “Is there something bothering you?”

Her only response was to roll her eyes.

I never knew silence could be so deafening, or so painful. I felt as though I didn’t exist. Each time I walked into my own apartment, it was like entering a torture chamber.

After several weeks of this, I suggested we go for marriage counseling. “Whatever you say,” she muttered.

The first therapist we met worked with us on communication techniques, which was a total waste of time. What was the use coaching me to reflect Tzippy’s words and feelings rather than jumping in with solutions to her complaints, when she wasn’t talking to me at all?

The second therapist advised us to do fun things together. “Go for a walk in the park, eat out in a restaurant, play a game together,” she encouraged us. But when we came home and I tried to implement those suggestions, Tzippy always demurred, saying she was too tired, too busy, or not in the mood.

The third therapist seemed to have a better handle on the situation, and recommended that Tzippy see a psychiatrist. “You may be suffering from depression,” she told her.

After hearing that, Tzippy refused to go back to her, or to any other therapist.

In the meantime, I began to suspect that Tzippy wasn’t the only one in her family who might be suffering from depression. Shabbos meals in her family were quiet, somber affairs, with little conversation. And there was a lot of sleeping going on; at any hour of the day, someone in the family could be found in bed.

Several months after I was married, I met a neighbor of Tzippy’s family who had given my parents information when the shidduch was first suggested. The question popped out of my mouth without any forethought: “Are people in this family depressed?”

“Oh, for sure,” he said. “It’s a big problem there.”

“So why didn’t you tell that to my parents?” I asked.

“I didn’t want to ruin the shidduch,” he explained.

One day, ten months after our marriage, I awoke with a terrible headache. When I tried getting out of bed, I felt dizzy, and couldn’t move the right side of my body at all. I opened my mouth to say something, but no words came out.

I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I realized it was serious. “Call 911!” I finally managed to whisper.

“I’m trying to sleep,” Tzippy snapped. It was one of the longest sentences I’d heard from her in days.

Luckily, there was a phone on the nightstand near my bed. Feeling the room spinning around me, I reached out for the phone with my left hand and dialed 911. I managed to give them my address, and then I blacked out.

The next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance speeding to the hospital. Alone.

My parents were the first ones to visit me in the emergency room, where the doctors told me I had suffered a stroke. Tzippy came later in the day, and she was furious. “How dare you call an ambulance when I was still in bed?” she hissed. “Do you know how embarrassing that was for me?”

She didn’t seem to understand that I had almost died. Or maybe she would have preferred it that way. Considering the amount of concern she expressed — none — I got the distinct feeling that having me out of the way would have been a favor to her. When she found out that people in my kollel and the community were saying Tehillim for me, she grimaced. “Why does everyone have to know about this?” she complained.

Five days after the stroke, I was transferred to a rehab center. At that point, the right side of my body was still numb, and the doctors weren’t sure if I’d ever walk again.

As I was being wheeled into the rehab center, I suddenly realized something: I wanted to live. Really live. And that meant I had to get divorced, because with Tzippy, I wasn’t living. When she’d come to visit me in the rehab center — which wasn’t very often — all she’d talk about was how annoyed she was that I had disrupted her daily routine and spoiled our planned vacation.

To the shock of the doctors, I made tremendous progress in physical therapy, regaining most of the use of the right side of my body within a few short weeks. By the time I was released from rehab, I was able to walk with the help of a cane.

Immediately after my release, I told Tzippy I wanted to divorce. “Whatever for?” she wondered. “I’m happy to continue as is.”

Why she wanted to stay in the marriage, I have no idea. We had no relationship whatsoever.

Several people tried to intercede, telling me I had to work harder on the marriage and warning me that post-stroke, post-divorce, my chances of ever getting a normal shidduch were slim. One choshuve person in the community asked me, “Can you honestly say to the Ribbono shel Olam, ‘I can’t stay in this marriage’?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Well, I disagree,” he said.

“Then you obviously don’t understand what I’m going through,” I answered.

Were it not for my stroke, I don’t think I would have had the courage to stand up for myself that way. Less than a year earlier, I hadn’t even been able to speak up when people told me things would be fine after the wedding, even though I myself felt that something was very wrong. But now that I had come face-to-face with my own mortality, I knew that my life was too precious and fleeting to waste. People could talk themselves blue in the face telling me to work on the marriage, but this was my life, and after almost losing that life, I wasn’t ready to let others dictate to me how to live it. So people would disapprove. So they would think I should have tried harder. So they would wag their tongues about the disposable generation. So what?

I spoke to a rav I was close to, and he supported my decision to divorce, even as I kept getting flak from well-meaning individuals who pleaded with me to reconsider. My parents, who had been disturbed by Tzippy’s behavior from the outset and were downright horrified by the way she treated me after my stroke, were fully supportive as well. To their credit, though, they didn’t breathe a negative word to me about Tzippy until after I told them I wanted out.

Once I initiated get proceedings, Tzippy began telling people that I had been abusive. Still, she didn’t want to accept the get I offered, which led me to wonder: If I was really so abusive, why didn’t she want to be rid of me? It wasn’t as though we had children, or assets, to fight over.

I was advised to threaten Tzippy that if she didn’t accept the get by a certain date, I would no longer be willing to give it. Playing tough that way was completely against my nature, although I suppose it played nicely into Tzippy’s narrative about me being abusive. Either way, the threat had the desired result. Shortly after our first anniversary, I was a free man.

I was still in kollel at the time, and I decided to turn my attention to finishing several challenging masechtos of Gemara. Hashem had given me a second chance at life, and I was going to make the best of that life, marriage or not.

I had plenty of physical therapy to do, post-stroke, and I knew that I had months, if not years, of recuperation ahead of me. That being the case, I put the prospect of remarriage out of my mind, figuring that it would be years before anyone would be willing to date me.

But Hashem had other plans. Less than a year after the get, a family friend suggested a single girl who had a non-obvious medical issue. When I met this girl, Shaindy, the dating experience was completely different. It was like meeting an old friend. We had plenty to talk about, and we felt so comfortable together. I had assumed I’d date for a long time before getting engaged a second time, but I had no doubts whatsoever that Shaindy was right for me, and I felt ready to get engaged on the seventh date.

As Hashgachah had it, Shaindy actually knew a different member of Tzippy’s family, and was aware that this family had serious mental health issues. (Apparently this was not a very well-kept secret; it was only the people to whom my parents turned for information who guarded the secret zealously.) That being the case, I didn’t have to do much explaining about the divorce.

Having already been through a nightmarish semblance of marriage, I knew how to appreciate Shaindy from day one. The small things that typically irritate people as they adjust to marriage didn’t bother me at all; I was just grateful to Shaindy for treating me like a human being. We had a beautiful marriage right from the beginning, and now, years later, we still have the type of relationship that people aspire to and dream of.

When I suffered my stroke, none of the doctors could explain why I, a healthy 24-year-old who didn’t smoke or drink and wasn’t overweight, had been suddenly struck with a life-threatening brain hemorrhage. My personal feeling, at the time, was that the stroke was stress-induced, although there was no way to corroborate that medically. Looking back, however, I feel that the stroke was actually a stroke of Hashgachah, for it brought me close enough to death to realize how valuable my life was — and that I alone was responsible for using that life to its fullest. —

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 699)