As you may have gathered from my post last week, I have been working through a lot of old stuff about what I am and am not “allowed” to want in a shidduch. I trace this stuff to a workshop I took years ago when I was a much younger dater and I wanted all the guidance I could get. The person giving the workshop gave us a list of specific qualities to look for and instructions to not look for chemistry or for anything else we thought we needed to be happy — because anyone with the qualities on the checklist would make us happy.
There are many older singles in my family and I was very motivated to “hack” shidduchim and not end up as an older single myself (SURPRISE!!!). Therefore, this list became to me like the word of G-d. I truly believed I could follow it and be fine. Then I met someone who checked off everything on the list…and my heart was heavy. I wanted someone more vibrant and expansive and alive, someone living in a bigger world. I dated this person for a long time and cried after almost every date. I was convinced that I was just anxious because we all know that singles are anxious and commitment-phobic (please read with sarcasm) and he was truly an objectively great guy. Finally, I put a stop to it. I felt sad but relieved after I ended the relationship.
Then I got hijacked by The List. I looked it over (like literally read it one night) and decided I had made a huge mistake and I had to get back together with the guy. And he didn’t want to, and then he got engaged. I almost fainted when I heard — the tunnel vision, the ringing in my ears…And for years the list continued to haunt me.
I took another dating workshop and we got to write lists of our own. We described the personality, hashkafah, life goals, and middos of the person we were looking for. It was liberating and I enjoyed it immensely.
But then that list started to haunt me, or rather, taunt me. Because I’d meet someone or hear about someone who matched the description on the new list, and it still wouldn’t feel right. I would drag my feet to dates (please don’t imagine I date frequently, by any means). And I’d feel crazy and ungrateful and like I was being too much for G-d.
And I cried about this a great deal, too. I stopped davening. I felt like there was no point because Hashem presented guys to me and time and again I just wasn’t feeling it (on or off paper). And I therapized myself up a wazoo. My therapist told me at one point, “I think you’re trying to excavate the reason you’re single and I don’t see any reason.”
I had a conversation about this with my roommate recently. She told me that the only thing Hashem gives us to help with big decisions is intuition. We don’t know the outcomes of our choices. And trying to know is playing G-d. We have to work with the way we feel about it now. And we can think we must be crazy and we can think we don’t make sense, but we can still decide whether or not we like something. And that doesn’t require an itemized list.
It takes tremendous courage to admit what we really want, you know, the stuff that doesn’t make it onto the list we write for ourselves. I’m learning it takes even more courage to live as if you can get those things, to not fall into scarcity mindset, to stop swallowing the zillions of old, tired clichés about dating and marriage and whatever. And even if when I am 80 I will be talking in clichés because of what life will have taught me — even if — today I am not there. Today I am here, thirty and thriving and wanting a life in a big world with an expansive and wonderful person. Today I know I am not responsible for looking under every rock and behind every door, on the chance — because Hashem is taking care of it. And today I am working on healing my ability to truly, deeply, fully want.
