Unless commitment is made,

...there are only promises and hopes - Peter F. Drucker

First of all, I want to clarify a few things from my last post. I did not end intend to imply when I stated “One is this tendency to rush into marriage, which accounts for that divorce rate we see.” that I’m against people marrying young. If you’re ready, you’re ready, whatever age you are. Rushing into marriage to me is getting there before you’re ready, whether you’re 19 or 39, and not being ready can be for a multitude of reasons which I’m hoping to explore as I keep posting my thoughts on the the state of the institution of marriage in the modern frum world.

Second: I am against going into therapy when you get engaged, because therapy is a treatment for a problem. If you’ve already got a problem that is serious enough to put you in couples’ therapy, why are you getting engaged? That being said, I am very pro getting guidance and learning how to deal with marriage. Please understand that this is more than a game of semantics here. This is the difference between strengthening something so it won’t break and trying to heal something that has broken far before it should have.

My friend mentioned to me over Shabbat that there is a push for a six-pronged system of Chatan and Kallah classes, which would not only entail whoever teaches the guys to work in conjunction with whoever teaches the ladies, but also for other classes to be mandatory. I’m going to look into this a bit more and get more info, but from what I can remember it’s something like this: halacha, money management, interpersonal relationship skills, a session 6 weeks into the marriage, and a session a year into the marriage. I know I’m missing a prong. sorry.

So, to get back on track, the goal of these posts is to explore the reasons that people are staying single and/or getting divorced at a very different rate than even five years ago. To pick up where I left off last time, another thing stopping people is commitment issues. There are all those old things people say, such as “Men are like dogs - ask a dog if he wants to go on walk, and he’ll get excited. Even if he’s already on a walk. Cause who knows, the next walk could just be that much better.” Well, I think that’s a tendency of (immature) human nature, something that has to be overcome before marriage. And no, it’s not always. Think of people head over heels in love with their spouses who cheat. Getting married is not necessarily a sign that you are ready.

Just wanted to share: I spent Shabbat at my cousin’s Sheva Brachot, and if I’m not mistaken, her husband is the first guy she’s ever dated. Everything these people have to invest in a relationship, in another person, is going to be invested into each other. That’s so cool to me. In a way, I wish I could go back and not have dated any of the people I did so I could find that too. Well, at the very least, the people I dated who I knew I was never going to marry (hello, that’s almost the same number. *grin*). This couple is as committed as committed gets (and thank you to Rivky for bringing up the whole Seinfeldian point of the word being ‘committed’).

Yes, it’s scary to take yourself ‘off the market’, close out all other options and say “this is the one”. Some people balk at the dating point, some people at the couple point, some people at the engagement point. But once you take that step, for whatever degree of a relationship you have, it’s only fair to really do it. If you’re going to date someone, don’t actively look to meet other people at the same time. Get to know the person without confusion. This doesn’t mean that you have to commit to dating that one person after the first date. In fact, whether you’re getting set up or meeting people on your own, if you’ve had only one date with someone and you meet or hear of somene else who sounds amazing, there’s no reason not to meet that person then. But after 3 or 4 dates, come on people, you’ve created certain expectations here. If you keep going on these dates, be cognizant of the fact that you’re working up to being a couple, unless you have discussed it and specifically stated that you are casually dating. (Um, hello, what is casual dating anyhow? Who dates with the specific intention of never getting married? OK, people do. I’ll get into this later, it’s gonna be too much a tangent right now)

Once you’re a couple, *no more trying to meet new people*! In fact, should you somehow just happen to meet someone, remember that you are not free to just see this person. If you decide to make yourself free to be with that person, keep in mind the consequences (it may be well worth it anyhow, just take this into account) - you will be hurting the person you are with, terribly, and the person you’re looking to be with will most likely have that lingering thought in his/her head that if you meet someone else while you two are together, you may walk again. Not happy.

My point here is not really to give dating advice. Just to say that if you’re going to play at being an adult, you need to meet that on all levels. And relating to yourself differently because of where you are in a relationship is a big part of that. Multiply all that for engagement, and more for marriage. (also, as much as being engaged is a huge commitment, better a broken engagement than a broken marriage, which brings with it a heavier emotional toll, lost years as opposed to months, and of course, my personal favorite, social stigma. boo on social stigmas!!!)

We have this strange fascination with staying young, as if it were better a few years ago than it is now. I know people who were close to getting engaged, and just couldn’t accept that that would make them adults, place them at a point in their lives they didn’t want to be yet because it felt old, and they called it off. Most of the couples I know who did that broke up.

Quick lesson, by the way, about making decisions for yourself and not the world around you - one couple who I respect beyond belief did the truly rare thing in our world. They got engaged, decided that they weren’t ready, called off the engagement, and *kept dating* each other. That takes balls. I know it sounds so simple, but people were very nasty about it. And when they decided that they were ready, they made a full commitment and gave their marriage a much stronger foundation than it would have had otherwise. I feel like I’m not being very coherent here.

I remember turning 20. My birthday wasn’t traumatic in and of itself. But I had to readjust the way I thought of myself. I was used to being a teenager, and as my mother said to me that day “How will you explain yourself now? You can’t say ‘Yeah, what do you expect -I’m a teen!’”. It was ingrained in me to think of myself a certain way, and it really bothered me to have to change my self-perception when it was so comfortable for me. Similarly, adjusting to being part of a couple instead of just yourself is very strange. You have someone to take into account, your thought process and behavior have to adapt to this new person’s presence.

I know a huge part of my hesitancy with dating most of the people mentioned to me is that once we’re a couple, I’ll be associated with that guy in people’s minds, and I’m not sure that I like that. It’s one thing to have friends of all stripes. I don’t have to identify myself by what my friends stand for. It makes me antsy to be summed up by the choices and opinions of someone else. Which is why in the past three years I have dated exactly one wonderful person for more then two dates. Not that the other people were bad people. There were just things I wasn’t thrilled to have associated with me. I’ve turned down great people because of how other people perceive things about them, perceptions which I know to be unfounded. But I didn’t want anyone going “Oh, Dani Weiss? Isn’t she dating so-and-so? Wow, she must be (fill-in-the-blank) just like him.” I don’t know how many people are conscious of that, but we tend to get fidgety when the people we’re identified with do things we don’t like. I have been working on separating my identity in my head from the guys I date, and from my family memebers (it’s a similar over-identification, I find). It’s really hard! But I know that I don’t do that to other couples - I recognize them as two separate individuals who come together with sometimes differering opinions, or senses of humor, or whatever the case may be, so there’s hope that people don’t do that to me. : )

My mother also feels that a lot of the problems people have with committing to marriage is that the focus is on the wrong place. People aren’t focusing on what they want to do with the marriage, what they want to accomplish in life. It’s a more immediate ‘need’ that they are looking to fill - do I like you? Do I like hanging out with you? Can I put up with you for the next 60 years? Or whatever the focus may be. There’s so much more to it, more than I know, having never been there, but I can guess at bits of it. Do we have the same goals in life? Will we help each other grow? Can we communicate? More on trust and communication next time, kids. Shavua tov, everyone.