Are we pushing our singles into marriages they’re not ready for?

It’s the expected trajectory: high school, seminary/yeshivah, dating, marriage. But are all the young adults in our community ready to take out the greatest responsibility of their lives at the same time? How can we know if our child is ready? And is there any way we can help them reach readiness?

Adina came home from seminary in June. Three girls from her circle are already married (not counting Shaindy, who broke her engagement). She’s begging her mother to meet shadchanim.

Tatty shrugs: What’s the rush? Let her find her bearings and put some money in the bank for a few months. She’s just a kid. She spends more time getting iced coffee with her friends than considering her future. How will she ever deal with work and school and housework? Not to mention babies, im yirtzeh Hashem...

Rikki’s gone out seven times with Moshe, and she likes what she sees... more or less. She’s just not feeling it. Her sister Chavi and her best friends Esti and Tova each knew that their husband was The One by date four or five...

The shadchan is calling almost hourly, and Moshe’s siblings want to know if they should start finding babysitting arrangements for the l’chayim. But Rikki just isn’t ready.

As organizations and askanim spread the alarm about the imbalance between the male and female single population, and we hear of early divorces with greater frequency, many people are deeply afraid of becoming statistics — either older singles or divorcees. Concurrently, to even out the purported age gap, boys are being encouraged to date at younger ages.

But are we contributing to a shalom bayis crisis by putting too much pressure on our singles to date and marry before they’re ready? What does “ready” even mean? And how do we get our singles there?

What Does Ready Look Like?

Are today’s pressures causing us to make worse marriage choices than we once did?

“Shalom bayis problems, which may partly be due to poor ‘marriage choices,’ predate current shidduch pressures,” says Lisa Twerski, LCSW. “The discussion and collective concern about the shidduch situation add gravitas.”

Still, while there’s far more worry about being able to snag a boy, she doesn’t believe people are dating or making decisions in a substantively different way than they once did. Today’s singles face different challenges than their parents did, but like many mental health professionals, she doesn’t feel that the “crisis talk” is causing girls to make poor decisions more often.

The consensus, across a wide spectrum of marital therapists, mentors, shadchanim, and rabbanim, is that age is just a number. “Ready” is a level of maturity that has little to do with age — and doesn’t mean fully formed.

“We don’t get married perfect. We’re not supposed to,” says Dr. Tamar Perlman, PsyD, who counsels singles and couples, and also teaches kallahs. Even if the communal norm was to wait until 40, she points out, people would never be fully “ready.”