In last week’s Jewish Standard (the Jewish paper of note for Northern New Jersey which also has the distinction of having been the first place I had an organized encounter with journalism, as a summer intern), there is a series of articles about Jewish singles that I wanted to share.

The first one, “A Plea for Common Sense,” is just that, one author’s plea to the community to look at the singles crisis with a little more logic and a little less insanity (a plan that I’m totally behind, in case that wasn’t clear). But this extends beyond the regular insanity of asking for photos of the bride’s family so the intended husband can “make sure” that his wife isn’t going to get fat when she gets older. (Yes, that’s “regular insanity.” Stay tuned for “insane insanity.”)

The interview with Yehuda Salamone, author of The Shidduch Crisis: Causes and Cures, includes this gem…

“Shadchan to mother of a young woman: ‘Does she wear a seat belt in the car?’”
The answer is, as the law dictates, “Of course.” But, Salamon continues, “It seems that the young man’s family felt that if the young woman wore a seatbelt, the chest strap would heighten her physical attraction, causing the young man to lose control of himself. Of course,” he saturninely observes, “it would not be the young man’s fault but rather the fault of the young woman, who was behaving immodestly by wearing a seat belt.”

The article continues by quoting the mother of a young woman, presumably of marriageable age, who notes that once her daughters’ friends got married, they “no longer seem to know any single guys.” This is a phenomenon worthy of some sort of scientific documentation, how the wedding night seems to serve, among other purposes, as a single man eraser—I can count on one hand the number of times friends have tried to set me up, and usually even when I ask a formerly single friend of mine (male or female, it just doesn’t matter) to think of someone, they haven’t a clue. “We don’t know any single people” is sometimes the response, followed in second place by “we don’t know anyone good enough for you.” (The careful reader will note that these individual requests of an individual person are always answered in the “we,” and almost always immediately, as if the couple has some sort of mental database linkup that returns a 404 message: file not found.)


She correctly notes that these friends are the ones who have “the best chance at succeeding at making a shidduch, as single men and women trust their peers more than their elders” and know each other better. The mother issues an challenge to the young marrieds:

So, “friend,” wake up! Look around shul and see who has a guest for Shabbat. Check out the single guys at the wedding you’re attending. Ask your friends about their older brothers and cousins. Get together for the purpose of fixing up your friends. See who is learning or playing ball with your husband. You know what to do. It is time to be a real friend and earn that slice of heaven.

Then comes this piece about meeting people on JDate, wherein the JDate communications director notes that 20,000 people told JDate that they’d met their soulmates on the service…which does the rest of us the service of making us feel like losers that we’re not among those numbers.

And now, a special “Putting-Yourself-Out-There” Award goes to Josh Lipowsky, an editor at the Jewish Standard, who wrote “Operators Are Standing By,” a first-person piece about his single status:

[W]hen my parents asked me what I wanted for Chanukah, I asked for a surround sound system. Instead, mom bought me a three-month JDate membership. I guess she’d rather have grandchildren than for me to watch “Star Wars” in 5.1 surround sound. Go figure.

Josh continues in the article to report the local attempts to make him more matchable, and makes points about substandard JDate profiles and the process of living single in a community of mostly married people (Teaneck, NJ) along the way.

Would you or have you ever set up your friends? Did you just randomly pair people or match them based on things they shared in common? How’d it go? Did anything about the setup surprise you? And do you now, or have you ever, used a matchmaker?