Friday, January 03, 2025
Inside the matchmaking crisis rocking the US Orthodox community
With their long marriages that rarely end in divorce and their large families, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's easy to find love in the Orthodox Jewish community.
As birthrates fall among the secular and rise and rise among the devout, it seems impossible to consider that chassidim would find their centuries-old system of matchmaking not up to scratch.
But, a recent study on dating among American Orthodox Jews by the Orthodox Union's (OU) Center for Communal Research has revealed the depth of the challenges faced by those in the community as they try to find a partner.
Rabbi Moshe Hauer, Executive Vice President of the Orthodox Union, told the JC that the impetus for the study came from the significant number of single Orthodox men and women striving for marriage but unable to find their appropriate match, a phenomenon which many in the community have already labelled a crisis.
"It's on the minds of the single men and women of our community. It's on the minds of all who care about them and all who care about the future of the Jewish community. What else should we be focusing on if not the issues that are weighing on people and are concerning them?"
Between 5 February and 6 March 2020, the OU surveyed more than 2,300 single Orthodox Jew from 18 to 82 years old who were users of eight Jewish dating apps or part of singles' groups. It also features interviews with 41 single Orthodox Jews, 25 shadchanim or matchmakers, and 21 communal leaders.
The report found that almost 90 per cent of respondents said they believe that marriage would make their lives happier and fuller. So, what's keeping Orthodox men and women from tying the knot?
According to the report, many of the singles surveyed don't feel like they can find a partner on their own and have instead turned to matchmaking services – whether they be apps or community matchmakers – to find their beshert for them.
"They've been told that they can't find a partner on their own," said Aleeza Ben Shalom, a shadchan (matchmaker) best known for her turn on Netflix's Jewish Matchmaking. "That's the message from the beginning, right? 'We need to do it for you.' 'We know you better than you know yourself.' 'You need to go to a shadchan.' And the community's not really set up for them to find a partner on their own."
Ben Shalom, who works with both frum and secular singles, added that the communal lifestyle of Orthodox Jews as well as the habit of separating men and women makes it that much more difficult for singles to take initiative and find their own matches – while the emphasis on families over the individual increases the pressure to pair up.
"Often, singles will share that they don't feel like a full-fledged member of the community or that their full value is seen unless they're in a relationship," Ben Shalom said. "Religious singles are very involved in their communities and have a communal lifestyle, so living single in a community is very difficult because the communities mostly cater to couples or families, so there's a tremendous amount of pressure on a single to move from single to community."
But the report found that many of those surveyed had negative experiences with matchmakers and Ben Shalom, who has trained over 350 matchmakers and dating coaches, is not ignorant of the potential downsides of her trade:
"I've had singles come to me and say, '[the matchmaker] tells me I have to change my clothes, change my attitude, change my job, change my location, I have to do all these things, or I'll never find a match, or they have talked down to me, or they tell me nobody will ever want me.' There's a lot of negative interactions with Shadchanam, where the Shadchanam, unfortunately, are pointing the finger and telling a single everything that's wrong with them as opposed to just saying, 'here's how I can help you.'
"We shouldn't be giving them advice to change who they are. We should be giving them advice to empower them to be their best selves and put their best foot forward whatever that is and I think that that's what's really lacking," Ben Shalom said.
Within the report's sample, more than a third (male 35 per cent, female, 36 per cent) of respondents met someone they dated in the last six months through friends and family, well over the 20 per cent who said they met through a matchmaker. Friends and family therefore play more of a pivotal role in helping single men and women find a suitable partner.
For Ben Shalom, the OU's report is just a confirmation of what she already knew to be true about the challenges of dating in the Orthodox community and, with the survey data having been collected back in 2020 and only being published last year, she's concerned it's too little too late – at least for those unlucky surveyed singles still waiting to find their perfect match.
"I'm interested in solutions. Questions and challenges, of course, always exist, and they've always been present within dating. I don't think that I'm terribly surprised about any of the information. I'm more curious – great, now we have this data – what do you want to do with it? Because I think that there's a lot of information that we often know, and we just don't know where to move forward with it," she said.
But Rabbi Hauer disagreed.
"The OU created the Center for Communal Research not for the purpose of academic research - it was in order to be able to really inform the community regarding issues that the community is grappling with, to provide them with data so that it's not simply just speculation, but that it's as driven as it can possibly be by real data," he said.
"The role of education is making people aware of and sensitising them to an issue and to its challenges. Education has a core role in helping people do things better."
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