In the beginning, when you walk down the stairs, you feel a bright beam of love in your chest that you think must be so strong it radiates out of your skin. And you wonder if you can finally share. And then you learn that you cannot, you should not, or you will be hurt. You learn to carry your emotion in your heart until if feels curdled and congealed, block-like, smelling of perfume and fear.

You learn to talk about shidduchim in a string of clichés, like threading cheap plastic beads on a bracelet. I want a ring, I want a sheitel. I hate being rejected.

But the truth is that you don’t particularly care about a ring or a sheitel, and rejection is a small, cold word for the hot shame that rises from the middle of your stomach.

You turn around to see people’s eyes following you. The girl just back from seminary, eyes wide and frowning when she looks at you, and you know what she is thinking. I hope I do not turn out like her. Her mother’s eyes bearing the same judgment, but with it fear, and with the fear, anger at you for all the things you have done to get you here. (After some time, you have learned that her anger is to protect her daughter, to banish you to the place of those who have made mistakes so this will not happen to her.) Better than anyone you know how fear and love are knotted together, and how anger protects them both. Your own eyes in the mirror: I don’t have enough dates, I don’t date the right people, maybe I’m not pretty enough? The shadchan’s eyes squinting as she tries to fit you into a box, smaller and smaller.

And the cry of your soul that you exceed all boxes, that you could fill them all up with so much light they would burst.

Sometimes I feel lonely, and small. Sometimes it feels like there is a black pit in my throat. I hate trying to explain all the time. Explain to the shadchanim who I am, explain to my married friends how hard it is to have my social life turned over again, and again, and again. Explain to a boy where I was, exactly, during 9/11, or when Covid hit, or Trump was elected, or the war broke out, when all I want is to give of myself — to nurture a husband and family.

And I must continue to walk down the stairs, and through each round of 40 days, and hold all of this and wait.

What I want:

I want to love.

I want to be loved.

I want someone to say, I was waiting for you.

And still, I must wait.

I do not know the G-d of 40 days.

But I know the G-d of the 41st day.

This is what you learn on the 41st day: He is not me, He is bigger, the world you live in is His. You know this because you are not married, you are not sharing life with another, nor do you carry it within your body. This is all that you want, yet this you were not given.

On the 41st day you learn that you live in a big world, with a Great G-d.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 902)