Ring Me: Chapter 13
| August 19, 2020
How could she stand next to this guy for the rest of her life? How could she marry him, after everyone she’d passed up?
Shani Leiman with Zivia Reischer
Chaviva was 30 when she came to see me. She was determined to get married. “I’m going to marry the next guy who waltzes through the door,” she announced. “I’ll just make it work.”
I asked her about her dating history. She told me she was always getting set up with “weirdos” and couldn’t understand what had happened to all the “normal” guys.
“I know, I know, the normal guys are all married,” she said, “and we’re left with the guys who have issues.”
That’s not exactly how it works.
Some couples who marry young may have been flexible enough to just take the plunge. Not because their spouses are perfect — every person has flaws — but they just believed things would work out. They saw flaws, but they went with it anyway, with the perspective that it wasn’t a big deal.
Chaviva, though, dated in analytical mode. Every time she dated, she found reasons why the guy wasn’t good enough. He was too assertive. He was too gentle and feminine. He wasn’t polished enough. He was too intellectual. He was too short, too bald, had no manners (“Where do these guys grow up, in a dorm?” Well, actually…); he was too frum and rigid or too modern and accepting. How could she stand next to this guy for the rest of her life? How could she marry him, after everyone she’d passed up?
Chaviva was undermining herself with her critical mindset. But she was sincere in her desire to get married, and over the course of several discussions she was able to see where her thought patterns weren’t serving her well. I had high hopes for Chaviva when she started dating Shua.
Shua was a great guy. He was 34 and worked in finance. There were lots of things about him that Chaviva admired – he was well read and a clear thinker, he traveled a lot and had a broad worldview. He enjoyed nature, which Chaviva appreciated, and he was a futuristic thinker and very sought after in his field.
There was just one flaw, one I’d heard about before. Chaviva reported that “he’s fascinating to be with and talk to, but he’s a little socially awkward.” He was “nerdy,” she said, in the way he spoke and dressed.
“You can always go shopping with him after you’re engaged or married,” I suggested. “Externals like that can be changed. Don’t make a life-altering decision based on something that can be easily fixed. He treats you well, he’s considerate, he has sterling middos. He’ll make an incredible spouse and father one day.”
“But…” Chaviva said.
“It’s true that socially he’s a little awkward, but he’s an amazing person. I really like him, you really like him, he has many friends, people gravitate to him.”
Chaviva recognized the trap she was falling into and did some serious thinking. I knew she was leaning toward saying yes. She really wanted to get married, but I could see that she was struggling. Still, over time, and many conversations, she seemed to be unraveling the issue. We spent a long time talking after one intense date, and I watched her relax and grow more comfortable with the decision to move forward.
When she called me early the next morning, I was expecting to hear good news. But instead she said, “It’s over. I’m ending it. I’ll call Shua myself.”
“What? What happened between last night and this morning? When we hung up, you sounded so positive.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “But then I spoke to one of my single friends. She’s my age. She told me straight out that I don’t know what I’m doing. Here I am, a cool girl, what am I thinking moving ahead with a guy who’s nerdy and a little socially off? She’s right. I can’t do this.”
I didn’t know which friend she had spoken to, and I didn’t have time to call her. I had a relationship to salvage and I wanted to stop a girl from making the biggest mistake of her life. Chaviva was going to walk away from a wonderful opportunity in the hope that she’d find the perfect cool guy she had dreamed of for so many years. He probably didn’t even exist!
Five steps forward, three steps back. I davened that Hashem should put the right words in my mouth, and then I spoke to Chaviva for hours. I asked her how she’d feel if at 35 and still single, she looked back on her 30-year-old self now. What would that 35-year-old, still-single Chaviva say to 30-year-old Chaviva?
That gave her pause.
“Whatever it is that your single self would say at 35,” I told her, “say it now!”
Chaviva and Shua just celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary. They have two adorable children — they send me portraits every year. I just received the latest one, showing a beautiful family grouped on a wooden bridge over a brook. Chaviva and her little girls look gorgeous, and Shua is smiling at them. His clothes are classy and clearly expensive.
“I taught him a thing or two,” Chaviva confided candidly in a recent phone conversation. “How to look someone in the eye when they talk, how to maintain a smoother conversation.
“And Shani,” she said, “he treats me like a queen. My life is full and rich. He’s not cool, he’s never going to be. But this was absolutely the right decision for me.” She paused. “Tell everyone you meet about me. I almost turned him down.
“Get married, work on your marriage, that’s what everyone does. Then you’ll have a chance to be like me — fulfilled and incredibly happy.”
(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 706)
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