My most recent blog post, some musings on issues of shomer negiah (boys and girls touching) in the Modern Orthodox community, segues quite naturally into a discussion of dating.
Dating is a bit of a sore topic for many students at here at Stern College, Yeshiva University’s all-women undergrad school. Warranted or not, there’s a huge pressure on young Orthodox women to get married. And when a thousand of those women are concentrated in one location, the place can feel a bit like a mad rush before the annual sale at a wedding dress store. Multiplied by a thousand.
You might have heard of the “shidduch crisis.” This is a term referring to the current situation where many men and women are remaining single past the age the Orthodox society deems appropriate. In my community, people start worrying when a woman is still single at 23. When she’s 27, all hope is lost. While other 27-year-olds in the world are still celebrating their birthday by drinking until they puke, Modern Orthodox women are getting put on the “older singles” lists (read: old maids, practically hopeless) and checking for wrinkles in the mirror. Men have it slightly more easy; people don’t start wondering if they’re secretly gay until they hit about 31, 35.
There’s the societal expectation for us to get married young — for a few reasons, like the Jewish emphasis on family and having children, as well as a practical way of solving the shomer negiah issue — but there are also the personal factors. Some fear that, since everyone else is marrying young, there won’t be anyone left if they wait until they’re more ready to get married. (I vividly remember one friend telling me she didn’t want to get married young. She waited — all the way until she was 22. It would seem 22 is no longer young. I’d also like to point out that I’m currently 22, and certainly do not feel very old.) Others just have a personal desire to begin building their lives with their partner.
Suffice it to say, getting married young is a big part of our lives. If 22 is old, then college years are the prime ones for getting hitched. This makes for a lot of very pressured young men and women here at YU. Some students have the aim to get married as well — they shidduch date, perhaps using YU’s own dating/shidduch site, YUConnects, or they meet in more organic settings. Others have less interest in marriage while in undergraduate school, and only just tolerate the focus on dating by making fun of it all. Still others (read: students at the men’s campus) make really bad jokes about Stern women’s obsession with marriage, which effectively pisses everybody off. Not everyone fits into one of these categories, obviously, but that’s more or less a way to divide the student body.
There’s a certain beauty to the system: Focus not on how many notches are on your bedpost, but on finding someone with whom to spend the rest of your life. College years become about dating with the goal of meeting your soul-mate, which in turn lends itself to a certain serious level of self-discovery.
But there are also definite down-sides. Many of us in college, possibly as a result of larger society, are not quite fully-baked. If we don’t yet know exactly who we are, how can we make the biggest decision we’ll ever make? How can we know what we want if we don’t know who we are? And this isn’t even taking into account all the stress this adds to an already-overwhelming few years of papers and exams. The pressure of getting married leads to a feeling that one must get married, even if one doesn’t have a personal interest in marriage just yet.
The college years are formative ones; it’s normal to want to focus on oneself instead of raising a family. There are tales of Stern students having a baby one day and coming back to classes the very next day. But not everyone can do that.
You know those old women who are somehow related to you and ask you every time they see you if you’re dating anyone? And they come over to you at weddings and tell you you should be next? Well, being in the ModOrth community — especially being at Stern — can sometimes be like having all those women around you all the time, pointing out every girl wearing a diamond ring, not taking into consideration that you might not want to be married just yet. And if you did, you’d probably not appreciate them pointing out that you’re still single.
