Seeking Guidance

But it’s not always about getting married too young. Very often, divorce can be attributed to a lack of hadrachah or bad hadrachah. Bad hadrachah can be a marriage therapist who has not bought into the sanctity of marriage, says Malkie Klein*. “A therapist who says, ‘You’re not happy? Leave.’

“In Judaism, happiness is a byproduct of a life well-lived, of doing the right thing,” Malkie says. “It’s not a stand-alone goal. When you isolate your own personal happiness as the objective, it’s very easy to focus on everything that’s wrong, And if you’re not happy, that becomes a reason to get divorced.”

When you’re looking for a therapist, she explains, it’s important to understand the person’s values. “It’s all well and good to say a therapist has to leave her agenda at the door, but no one is totally capable of doing that,” Malkie adds. “How suffused is the therapist with Torahdig hashkafos? You want someone who understands marriage and Yiddishkeit and how the two come together.”

A therapist who brings their own baggage into their work can also provide a couple with harmful guidance. Malkie relates the story of a woman who came to her for hadrachah. This woman had been to a frum therapist, but what she didn’t know was that this this therapist was struggling in her own marriage and had several divorced siblings — all factors that were coloring her own perspective. Sensing that something wasn’t right, the woman left her therapist and sought guidance elsewhere.

Today, she’s still happily married.

Halachah states that if a person testifies in a capital case, they must be involved in the punishment — they must take responsibility for what comes next. Sometimes, we have therapists or mentors encourage a person to leave the marriage without understanding the fallout divorce will cause. What can follow is 20 years of children being tossed between parents who are angry at one another; sometimes there can be parental alienation; single parents struggling to stay afloat financially; a man or woman without social support because their friends are married. People who encourage divorce need to be aware of the cost of the divorce, appreciate the challenges that it will cause the person they’re advising.

A Torah-True Marriage

Deciding to divorce is always painful. But is that pain inevitable, or can some of these marriages be salvaged? “In a Torah-true marriage,” Rabbi Schwartz says, “you accept imperfection. We’re getting married and we hope to improve ourselves. We both grow, and through the process of growth, we come together. I don’t believe people easily throw away a marriage, but if you’re not accepting of imperfection, if growing and improving together is not the goal, why would you hold on to something that’s imperfect?”

“We’re all imperfect, but marriage is about growth,” Rena adds. “If the spouse in question is not only suffering, they’re being damaged, that’s a whole other ball game. In other words, if a person feels, or people around her see that she is a shadow of her former self — that she’s losing her personality, her vitality — that’s disquieting. If a person is no longer able to function, to do things they once did, that’s a cause for concern. For example, a woman I know pretty much stopped driving. Her husband was always telling her, ‘You can’t do this, and you can’t do that, and you can’t do the other thing.’ She so lost her confidence that she stopped driving. This is an example of a spouse whose marriage is damaging them, someone for whom the parshah of Gittin was written.”

But such cases are the exception, not the norm.

There’s another facet to bad hadrachah. Let’s say one spouse discovers something serious only after the wedding — for example, their husband/wife is taking medication. This is not to condone withholding this information during the dating process, but the medication itself doesn’t have to be grounds for divorce. Many people take medication very safely; it’s not necessarily an impediment to marriage and parenthood. Say the couple is married a month. Should they cut their losses and just “get divorced,” start over? In situations like these, those in the know have found that the young husbands are often advised to leave, whereas the wives are guided to try to keep the marriage going.

The Parental Role

We’ve all heard the horror stories where parents interfere in their children’s marriages and bring them to the brink of divorce — or through it. We’ve been cautioned and enjoined and adjured by therapists and kallah teachers not to talk about our marriage with our parents. But I’ll be frank: I don’t buy into a lot of it. When I look around the room, I see mostly healthy parents raising mostly healthy children; I see normal people who love their families and want what’s best for them.

“For the most part, parents can be supportive,” Rena agrees. “They love their child, love their child-in-law, they can help them in countless ways. But parents can’t fix their children’s marriages, and trying to do that is not wise. It’s very, very hard for a parent to watch their child struggle in a marriage. It’s a really painful place for a parent to be. And I empathize with that pain, but at the same time, I think parents must have good boundaries and realize that their role is to be supportive of their child, but not to interfere. Let the child go on their journey. If they want to pay for therapy, that’s great. Let them pay for therapy. But the parent can’t be the therapist.”

Another note of caution: Mothers must be aware that just because a daughter complains to her doesn’t mean there is a serious problem in her marriage. Did her every kvetch about school, about camp, about her social life mean there were serious problems there? She’s no longer under your jurisdiction, so it can be overwhelming and scary for a mother to hear her daughter talk in this way, but you need to use the same seichel you used while she was living in your home.

Is there ever a case for parental involvement?

“I would always advise parents to be cautious, because it is so hard to be objective when it comes to watching your children suffer,” Malkie says. “But if you think your child is in danger, of course that warrants involvement. You need to make sure your child is safe. Still, you’re going to need your own guidance, to ensure you’re making rational decisions, not emotional ones.”

Soundbites are great. But I want to see this approach into action. I challenge my interviewees with two scenarios.

In one, Shifra comes to her mother and says, “I need help. My mornings are so rushed, and Yitzchok goes to late Shacharis. I wouldn’t mind so much if he used that time to help me get the kids out, but he sleeps until five minutes before he has to leave.”

In the other, Chany is visiting for Shabbos shortly after giving birth. Her mother watches as Chany gets up early with the kids while Yaakov sleeps through it all. Then she sees Yaakov react pretty strongly to Chany’s having forgotten to pack his tie.

“How would you respond to each of them?” I ask Malkie Klein.

“When a child comes to the parent and says, ‘I need help,’ you help them,” Malkie answers. “In your first case, you offer to hire a girl to come in the morning or whatnot. On the other hand, say Shifra had asked her mother to speak to Yitzchok — that is not going to be helpful, that is not something that would increase shalom in the home of the young couple.

“In the second scenario, I’d say the mother has to step back. Of course, as Chany’s mother, you want to give Yaakov a piece of your mind. But keep in mind that you are seeing one slice of the young couple’s life. You don’t know if this is all the time, or if there’s an additional stressor that’s causing Yaakov to act like this. You can’t globalize from one interaction that you saw. And we tend to do this.

“In general, my approach in terms of giving advice is that unasked-for advice is bad advice. And even when you are asked for advice, it needs to be given gently and with great discretion.”

Unfortunately, Rena asserts, there are more parents who sabotage their children’s marriage than you’d realize. “There was one really sweet woman with five kids,” Rena recalls, ”And her mother would just constantly tell her, ‘You know you could have done better.’ She eroded her daughter’s marriage. Every marriage has cracks and fissures and issues that have to be healed and rebuilt. But this poor woman had her mother pounding into her head that she could have done better. Is it a wonder that she got divorced?”

Truly Untenable

While in most cases, preserving marriage is ideal, not every marriage can or should be saved.

Mental illness is a leading cause for divorce. “But not everyone with mental illness, or taking psychiatric medications, is unmarriageable,” Rabbi Schwartz cautions. “People can take medication for life and are very healthy and even can excel. On the other hand, there are cases where you have to feel like you have to tiptoe around because the person is fragile. That’s a very hard life to have, to have to tiptoe around a person. Addiction is also a very hard issue, with very high recidivism rates.

“The willingness to get help is one line in the sand,” Rabbi Schwartz says. “If you’re living with someone who has a severe issue affecting their mental or emotional health, and this precludes them from being a proper spouse, that shouldn’t be an automatic, ‘Goodbye, I’m out the door.’ But if that person isn’t willing to get help and be compliant with the recommendations of professionals — that’s a cause for concern. It’s very individual, and there are no blanket statements I’m comfortable making about this. We need a shikul hadaas, a balance, that comes from daas Torah.”

Some women choose a different line in the sand, Malkie Klein says. “They ask themselves: ‘How disabling is it for me to survive this marriage and raise my children with this?’ There are women, holy women, who choose to live with these issues, sometimes until the children are older, sometimes even later. And in many cases, they were better off this way. The damage of divorce, the impact of divorce on the family, is so severe that staying married is often the better alternative, even when their spouse has severe issues.”

Foundations

Marriage is founded on a husband and wife seeing and responding to their spouse’s needs. When the spouse is not feeling seen or heard, all the other irritants become much more irritating.

“You have to try to clarify what the real situation is,” says Rena. “When a person is in pain, they’re often very confused, and they’ll describe the symptoms of the problem without necessarily understanding what the real problem is. For example, she’ll be crying that he forgot her birthday, or she asked him three times to stop at the cleaners on the way home and he didn’t do it. These are symptoms. But the fundamental problem here is that she’s not getting a sense that she really matters to him. She’s not getting a sense of being seen in the marriage, being heard in the relationship.”

It goes both ways, Rabbi Schwartz maintains. Men have an innate need for respect. Women often don’t understand why a man is offended if someone sits in his chair, or he’s considered just another one of the votes in the family. But a man needs to know that he’s important in the family, that he’s meaningful. Women have other needs — to be loved and admired, to feel unique and special — but they generally don’t have this same need for respect. When his wife doesn’t respect him, that’s hurtful, that’s not seeing or hearing him.

“And don’t wait until he ‘earns’ your respect,” according to Rena. “Girls come to me all the time, saying, ’Of course I want to respect him, but….’

“Remember, people grow into their roles. They become deserving because of the respect we accord them. Think of the young rav of older congregants. He will grow into someone deserving respect. The formula works.”

Then there are times, Rena continues, that, “I realized the woman in front of me was missing some really fundamental information about what a Torah-true marriage is supposed to look like.”

The Torah tells us that Yitzchak Avinu married Rivka and then he loved her.

“That’s not the Western view of marriage,” Rena notes. “In secular culture, marriage is about love, love, love. We view love as an outgrowth of a relationship that has a much greater potential. We’re here to grow, to build a family, participate in a community, do chesed on a greater level. There’s so much more in our Torah marriage that ultimately brings to love, but that is not the end in itself. We’re not here for love. We’re here because Hashem felt that this union is the ideal way to bring about these greater goals.”

Then there’s the idea that Western ideology is all about equality. Man and woman are one and the same. That’s not the Torah’s way. The Maharal says that the man is the nosen and the woman is the mekabel. Man brings resources, spirituality, whatever it is into the marriage, and the woman has to be willing to receive. We train our girls to be givers, to do chesed, which is beautiful and critical. But it’s sometimes hard for a girl who’s never heard this concept to open herself and be mekabel from her husband. She needs to understand that the way you open the spigot of brachah into your life is by inserting that dynamic into the relationship. This is a spiritual phenomenon — we’re not talking about receiving his paycheck.

A Smart Wife

I bring up one last point, which feels a little heretical: “I feel like a lot of this boils down to middos. Are these things that girls are taught in high school and seminary, but that boys are… kind of left behind?”

“Absolutely.” Rena doesn’t skip a beat. “But years and years ago, I was talking to Mrs. Greenwald of Monsey, a very smart woman who had made 400 shidduchim by then. During our conversation, she said this to me: ‘When the girls and the guys get married, the girls are ahead of the guys. They know things that are more relevant to relationships. They’ve done more things in the world. They’ve traveled. The guy has mostly stayed in one place. So the first year, she’s really ahead of him. The second year, through the process of being married, he starts to move up.

“And if she’s a very smart wife, by the third year, he’ll pull ahead. Man grows from taking on the responsibility of a wife.’

“I say this to almost every woman who comes to see me, no matter what she comes to see me about,” Rena continues. “I say, ‘Hashem made you a smart Jewish woman. Be a smart Jewish woman. We have to use our seichel, the binah Hashem gave us, and we have to apply whatever kochos Hashem gave us in this arena.

“In the secular world,” Rena says, “marriage is an afterthought. But in the Torah world, marriage is a primary thought because it’s the arena that Hashem gave us in which the maximum growth can potentially take place.”

A woman weighs in

Separation Stigma

T. Greenbaum

Contrary to popular opinion, getting divorced is definitely not the easy way out

“People nowadays are getting divorced for no good reason.”

It pains me when I hear or read comments from people like: “Nowadays, people expect everything to be perfect from the beginning and choose to divorce instead of working on their marriage.” Or, “Young people think that their spouse needs to fill all their needs, and if it’s not like that, they lose interest in the relationship.” Or even, “It’s a microwave generation. Everything has to happen by pressing a button, and if it doesn’t, the immediate solution is divorce.”

While all these quotes can be true in some cases, it hurts me that people blame divorces on the impatience, intolerance, and the immediate desire for results in this generation.

I’ve been in this situation myself, and it’s impossible to describe the pain, loneliness and consistent doubt that you aren’t doing enough. Personally, I wasn’t floating on some idealistic cloud nine when I got married. I was pretty realistic, knowing that it would be an adjustment to live with another human being with unique personality traits, from a different background and home.

But no one told me that my husband was going to gamble my money away. No one told me that he had a drinking problem. His family managed to keep it from me until we got married. And there I was, a couple of months after the wedding, and all I could do was cry.

What made me even more agitated was when people told me, “Oh, your husband looks so sweet!” I tried to convince him that we should speak with someone to work on our marriage, but he wasn’t interested. Finally, when I went for help for myself, I realized that I didn’t have a future with him. After a series of nights sitting at home alone until he returned, drunk and unable to communicate normally, I finally mustered up the courage to leave.

There was nothing fun or easy about leaving. Coming back to my hometown wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. In the beginning, I was afraid to go out, knowing that people would ask what I was doing there, knowing that I would have to tell them that I had separated from my husband. I wasn’t afraid to tell people, but the thought of their reactions terrified me.

And reactions I got. Overly nosy questions like, “What happened?!” and the incredibly personal, “Is there still hope?” Ridiculously tone-deaf comments like, “Oh, these men!” and “But he’s so nice!”

There’s a famous saying: “You can’t really know what happens behind closed doors.” It shouldn’t only be adhered to when someone is married, but also when someone takes the terrifying, brave first step out of a painful marriage. If the reason for a divorce seems mundane to you, please take a step back and realize that you will never, ever be able to grasp what that person felt while being married to their spouse.

Maybe a different person might have been able to live with those particular challenges. But if this person decided that they can’t, who are you to say that this is “not a good reason?” Imagine the marriage counselor who would respond to a struggling couple with, “Guys, look, it’s easy! I have a list here. On the right side of the paper, here are all the good reasons to get divorced. On the left side, you have the bad reasons to divorce. So if you have a good reason, your next stop is a get. If not, then all you have to do is stay married! That’s it for today! See you next session!”

No, a marriage counselor understands that no two humans are the same and no two couples are the same. They don’t just help with difficulties and give advice — they have to work with both people together, tailoring their counseling to what’s right for both individuals. This isn’t just about “good reasons” and “bad reasons,” it’s about how the individual husband and wife are coping in their unique situation.

Now, some will say, “Oh, but some people just get upset at the stupidest things. Like, her husband forgot to write her a birthday card, and the next day, she left him.” This is a myth! If someone left because of a reason that seems so insignificant, there was already a buildup of pain that led to that kind of escalation. Nobody gets up one morning after years of a regular, good relationship and thinks, “Hmm, my husband didn’t buy me a cheese Danish today like he usually does, so I think it’s time to leave.”

I don’t think anyone thinks that divorced is a fun and carefree place to be. It’s tough coping with a separation. It was especially hard for me, since I had to pick myself up and leave the country and go back to my hometown. And then, finally, dealing with the get and everything that comes with it, including community stigma, loneliness, and emotional turmoil.

Feeling alone is not because I don’t have a support system around me, but because no one can really understand what I’m going through. It’s also emotionally exhausting whenever I hear my ex’s name or when I bump into his family members. I also get many “nebach” looks.

Whether I like it or not, being a divorcée is not a popular position in our frum communities. And I don’t expect it to be! But it still bothers me when I see people turning around to peer at me at chuppahs, engagement parties, and kiddushim, and I can almost see what they are thinking: Oy, nebach, she’s divorced, how terrible.

I do tell people that I was doing much worse while I was still married, so don’t pity me too much for being divorced, thank you. But I am not going to pretend that all is super easy and smooth after the marriage is over. And it’s also not exactly over as soon as you’re out of the relationship. It can take months, even years of work to completely leave a relationship behind.

Let me also let you in on a secret fear that many divorcing people have: When will I get married again? WILL I get married again? How can I ever build trust in another person again? How will I manage all the time that I will spend alone?

Indeed, divorce is not the easy way out. Sometimes, it’s easier to swallow an unhealthy relationship in order to fit into the boxes of our community, so that we don’t stick out like thorns between roses. But if someone believes that they need to take this step, obviously after consulting daas Torah, it’s definitely not going to be an easy decision and definitely not for a silly, unimportant reason.

It can’t be.

A woman recounts

Back from the Edge

As told to Chavi Schoenfeld

There are moments when I question the decision to stay. But there are more moments when I’m flooded with gratitude that we didn’t walk away

I

wish I could say that I don’t still think about it. That there are never moments when I have my doubts, that I’m totally content in my life as it is today.

But the truth is, there are still scattered moments when I wonder if I should have divorced my husband.

Not all the time. Not like it was when we first walked into our rav’s office, six years ago, and told him that we were thinking about a divorce. Back then, it seemed so clear that there was no other choice. For the kids, we told the rav. We were dysfunctional, which I had shouted across the dining room at my husband a week before, furious and in tears over a broken plate. The plate had been left at the table. I asked him to clear it. He snapped something snide, and I had said something sharp back, and then he had slammed his hand on the table so hard that the plate had crashed to the floor.

And yes, it wasn’t the first time that we’d gotten into a fight in front of our children, who knew to make themselves scarce when the explosions began. But it was the first time that something had been broken. I wondered, in a haze of fury, what might break next. I thought to look at the kids, huddled at the basement stairs, and saw our then ten-year-old clutching our five-year-old, whispering comforting words into her ear.

It jolted something inside of me.

I’m a child of divorce, of parents who loathed each other so much that they couldn’t even attend my wedding at the same time — my father walked me down to the chuppah, and my mother danced with me once he was gone. I didn’t want my relationship to be as unhealthy as my parents’. If we’re passing the kids back and forth one day, I thought, I don’t want it to reach that point where we can’t even be at the same event.

And that was it — the glowing red line, brilliant in its foreboding. DIVORCE, spelled out in front of me so clearly that it was seared into the backs of my eyelids. I couldn’t avoid it. I couldn’t escape it.

“Do you even want to be married to me?” I asked once the kids were safely upstairs, quick and meek when asked to go to bed.

He looked up. Our eyes met.

And a week later, we went to the rav.

He listened to our halting explanations in silence, asked to speak to us each alone and then together. I know what my husband must have said — that I was too pushy, too demanding. That I expected things of him without explaining them to him (I’d explained them dozens of times!). That I got just as angry as he did and refused to speak to him for days.

When we were back together in the room, he asked us about therapy.

I remember how I’d laughed. “Therapy is when there’s something left to salvage,” I pointed out.

“That’s right,” he said, and the laughter died on my lips.

It seemed ridiculous to me. My husband and I had been fighting for years. It had only gotten worse and worse. We never should have married in the first place, but we’d only understood that once we had kids. We would do immeasurable damage to our children if we stayed together.

To my astonishment, my husband agreed with him. At the time, I thought that he was just trying to position himself as the reasonable one, that he was thinking ahead to custody battles and testimonies. Now, I know that when they had spoken privately, he had gone on and on about my faults to the rav, but had also admitted that he thought I might have some leftover trauma from my years watching my parents wage war. That I was ready to run because I didn’t know another way.

He believed we had a chance before I did, which is still something that I cling to today in my moments of doubt.

Therapy isn’t a magic bullet. There are plenty of couples who go through it and only find their way to a more cordial divorce. There are others who hate each other even more by the end of it. And it always felt a little bit like I was paying someone else to make me do the work. Do one kind gesture a day for him. Jot down triggers and your responses to them. Five-minute conversations where you each listen to the other.

It was agonizing. It did nothing about our explosive arguments at first. But bit by bit, they got milder. Bit by bit, we trained ourselves to push off the conflict until the kids were out of the room, until we could have whispered arguments hours later, when the anger had died. Bit by bit, the arguments faded away.

One day, three years ago, we all went on a Chol Hamoed trip together to the zoo. We paid extra for a ride on the train that goes around the zoo because the four-year-old had begged for it, and my husband put her on his lap and pointed out the animals to her. He was teasing her good-naturedly, was making her giggle with his made-up animal names, and he was grinning this wide smile as he turned and caught my eye.

And I think that was it.

That was the moment that I looked at him and thought, I’m so happy I’m still married to this man.

It was a breakthrough. It wasn’t a perfect fix. We still had an argument through gritted teeth that night about a plumbing crisis, and he still stormed out to Maariv and didn’t talk to me until the morning. But my entire perspective shifted, just a little. I stopped thinking of therapy as an exit plan and started thinking about it as a way to move forward together.

So I do think of divorce sometimes. It’s still hard. We can still be dysfunctional at times. There are still fights, and once in a while, we slip and they’re in front of the kids. I can’t say that my marriage is a dream.

But those moments are few and far between. This marriage is something I’ve fought for, something I’ve built up from the ruins, something that I don’t intend to let go of. This marriage is good, most of the time, and I’ve learned to see it for the gift that it is.

Bashert isn’t always simple. It isn’t always perfect. Sometimes, it’s just two people who seem ill-suited for each other learning how to make their jagged edges fit together.

And I’m so, so glad that I’m still married to my husband.

A therapist says

Please Don’t Marry Off Your Children

Elisheva Liss

Is it wise or healthy to push your uncertain child toward marriage?

A

friend told me that she’d heard a respected shadchan speak about how important it is to “marry kids off” young and quickly, ideally to one of the first people they date, and to try to “get them engaged” after just a few dates. The rationale offered: The more they know and think and analyze, the harder a decision became. She asked me if all frum therapists share that perspective.

I can’t speak on behalf of all therapists, just as I’m confident that the shadchan’s opinion isn’t representative of all shadchanim, but I strongly disagree with that approach.

Some parents, shadchanim, and other caring adults take pride in announcing that two young people dated and got engaged quickly. They view it as a brachah that the couple found their partners so easily.

And sometimes, it genuinely is.

But therapists often hear messy backstories or epilogues that others don’t know. We regularly get calls and messages like, “Would you have any immediate availability to meet with my son/daughter? The wedding is in a few weeks, so we urgently need to get things back on track.”

Or, “Do you think it’s possible for you to help me? I’m married to a good person, but I don’t really like/respect/ feel connected to my spouse. I was told that it would come after the wedding, but it hasn’t.”

There is often social, familial, or communal pressure to marry young and within a specific time frame. When this proceeds smoothly and happily, everyone rejoices.

When it feels rushed or pressured or demanded… everyone rejoices.

Except, perhaps, the chassan or kallah.

Sometimes, therapists are called in to assist right before the engagement. Sometimes it’s during the engagement. Other times, it’s once the couple is married.

Proponents of hurrying young people to the chuppah will confidently share their happy ending stories. They tend to involve couples who were so nervous that they almost didn’t go through with it, but, “Baruch Hashem, we were mechazek them and got them where they needed to be, so mazel tov — all is well now. Good thing we didn’t let them drag their feet.”

And yes, sometimes, that loving encouragement from the parents, the shadchan, the dating coach, the rav or rebbetzin, or the aunt-who’s-not-a-professional- but-really-good-at-this-stuff was exactly what they needed, and now, they are indeed deeply grateful and happily married.

But more often than many realize, the story ends very differently, and hardly anyone knows until the spouse-to-be finally opens up.

“I thought something felt off when we were getting engaged, but I was told his rebbi said we needed to get engaged or break up. Now, we’re married, but I wish I’d just let it end.”

“I told my parents I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry her, but they reassured me that she was exactly what I needed, and that the feelings would come later. It’s been a few years, but we’re both still miserable.”

These are the sort of painful confessions therapists hear regularly.

Another justification some offer for hustling to seal the deal: “Well, if you look at the divorce rates in the broader population, it’s clear that dating longer doesn’t lead to happier marriages. Look at the lower divorce rates in the chassidish communities, who get engaged after only one or two meetings, or the yeshivish world, where it’s usually just a few weeks. Clearly, when it comes to dating, less is more.”

This logic sounds compelling at first, but numbers don’t always tell the full story. Perhaps the divorce rates are lower in fast-dating communities because their marriages are genuinely happier. On the other hand, maybe it’s because the cultural stigma against divorce is a powerful deterrent, compounded by the young couple’s children and financial dependence.

It’s also possible that the communal values and messaging around commitment and family-building are stronger than those of individual autonomy and relational well-being. But staying married and staying happily, healthily married are two very different conditions.

It would be difficult to get accurate and useful data on this phenomenon. Anecdotally, we see that some of the couples who were “married off” young and quickly seem to be proud and thriving, some are at varying degrees of “okay,” and others are devastated and traumatized.

So why challenge the protocols if there’s no perfect solution?

I believe that if a person is mature enough to be in an adult relationship, to start a family, and to take responsibility for a home, that person should be mature enough to make this decision in an informed, autonomous, and intentional way.

Choosing who to marry is arguably the most impactful life decision you’ll make. Whether this decision is made after one meeting or a year (or more) of dating, you can’t possibly learn everything about the person or your future. At some point, making the long-term commitment is a leap of faith. Yet there is a gargantuan difference between making that leap after connecting enough to feel ready, and being told, “This is right for you. It’s time. Just do it.” Marriage is not a Nike commercial.

I don’t believe there is a perfect time frame, number of dates, or set of algorithmic compatibilities (yet) that we can give singles to guarantee their readiness. What they need will vary based on their personalities, worldviews, and cultural influences. But I do believe that relationships deserve to start with two people who want to be in them, by choice. And choice means feeling like they were able to get a basic idea of what this commitment entails — both when it comes to the potential partner, and their expectations of marriage.

Having parents and mentors who can offer the benefit of their guidance and life experience can be a precious gift. But there is a profound difference between guidance and control.

It’s been explained to me that another prevalent belief among communities who marry off their children to spouses they don’t know well is that parents and other trusted adults have their children’s best interests in mind, “perhaps even some form of ruach hakodesh or siyata d’Shmaya,” and are more qualified to choose a single’s partner than the singles themselves. “And anyway, Hashem makes zivugim — you can really put any two people from similar backgrounds together, and if they’re willing to work on their middos and be good to one another, they can be happy,” some will confidently opine.

For many years, with my own moderately different background and biases in mind, I respected this practice as a cultural, philosophical difference that I couldn’t personally relate to. And while I own that I am still biased by my limited life experience and exposure, part of that includes having sat with the pained, heartbroken casualties of this approach.

Unfortunately, since most of the people who feel empowered to speak openly about their married-off-young trauma are those who ultimately divorce and leave the fold, they’re often dismissed as outliers, the exceptions that prove the rule. “Healthy, frum, well-adjusted young couples do beautifully marrying this way. It’s only the ‘people with issues’ who fail.”

Yet it’s this assumption that leaves some of these otherwise “healthy, frum, well-adjusted people” suffering in painful unions, lest they be considered a failure. (There are other variables: staying together for their children, concern about siblings’ shidduch prospects, fear of being alone, family abandonment, and financial dependency.) And so many end up suffering privately and even perpetuate this practice with their own children despite desperately wishing otherwise. They just feel that they have no choice. Even divorced singles, if they hope to remarry within their community, don’t always feel comfortable criticizing the process.

When a scared, young, engaged, or almost-engaged person is referred to me, I confess to the referring parent (or rav, kallah teacher, or mentor) that I can’t and won’t promise to help them get their kid to the chuppah. But what I am happy to do is help this young adult figure out if they’d like to get themselves to the chuppah.

When I tell the person, “You know, you don’t have to go through with this if you don’t think it’s right for you,” the relief is often immediately visible — and not always because they actually want to call it off. Often, just giving someone the permission to take their time or to not move forward can help them become emotionally ready to commit.

And sometimes, it allows them to be honest enough with themselves to say, “This really isn’t what I want,” or “I’m just not ready yet,” and find the clarity and courage to step away. It might be uncomfortable and embarrassing in the short term, but it’s far more painful to be in a marriage where one of you doesn’t want to be there.

To clarify: People who have more agency to choose a partner aren’t necessarily more likely to stay married, or even to have more fulfilling relationships. But the inevitable risks and unknowns that come with marriage are a choice they made of their own volition, on their own time frame, with “informed consent.” So when they hit the normal (or extenuating) difficulties of life and marriage, they can feel empowered to strategize together. And even if it doesn’t end well, they can look back and know that they made the best decision they could at the time, rather than feeling betrayed and confused by a reality that happened to them.

The point of all this is not to, chas v’shalom, cast aspersions on whole communities or even just to criticize. One way that we practice love for others is by advocating to alleviate pain where possible and make things better for others. I genuinely believe that the overwhelming majority of parents and mentors who “marry off” their adult children have noble intentions and want the best for them. My hope here is to raise awareness about some of the lesser-known struggles, with the goal of preventing suffering and setting up more young people for healthier, happier, holier marriages.

This is not to disconnect or discourage parents from their role in supporting their children to the chuppah. The Gemara lists finding a spouse as one of the obligations a parent has toward a child. That indicates an expectation that parents oversee and facilitate the process. It can be accomplished through chinuch, affiliation with community and resources, helping the adult child network, offering guidance along the way, and planning the wedding and the newlyweds’ new home. Within different frum communities, there are different degrees to how involved the parents are, and how much people who are dating rely on their parents and other adults for these.

The goal of this article is to encourage parents to empower their children with knowledge, information, self-awareness, free will, and permission to decide responsibly, once an option is in place, if this is the person s/he wants to marry. As I often say to clients, “I won’t make this decision for you. But I’d be happy to help you clarify your own thoughts and feelings so that you can make it for yourself with confidence.”

So what is the alternative?

A shift in perspective, and by extension, in language and process. Instead of parents viewing it as our obligation to “marry off” our “kids,” while the children passively trust the process, perhaps we could consider a paradigm shift.

As parents, we can model and teach relationship skills, including communication, self-awareness, life skills, and conscious middos work.

Once our children are old enough, mature enough, and emotionally ready to consider marriage, we can have candid conversations with them about what marriage involves, how they see and work on themselves, what their hopes, values, and plans are, and what to look for when dating.

Then, we can help them participate in the process of networking within the shidduch system framework to find suitable partners. For different communities the level of involvement may differ, but the point is that they should not be mere passive pawns in the process, but rather active participants. Once they’ve met someone they feel could be right, we can deliberately not rush them, support their process, allow them to question, and offer them the option to talk to either a mentor or a professional if they’d like additional help or guidance. We can make it clear that we want to see them married in a healthy way, at the right time, to someone they feel is right. That it’s more important than seeing them married quickly to someone with the “right résumé,” yichus, or externals based on communal criteria. We may do much of the backround work, but they should feel that they own the decision of whom they marry.

We can encourage them to listen to their own sense of emotional, rational, spiritual, and physical attraction and compatibility with their dates. And instead of “marrying off our kids,” where they are the infantilized objects and we are the authoritarian subjects, we can celebrate our young adults actively and happily choosing to get married when they are ready, to partners they choose, with Hashem’s help.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 950)