Don't Single Out the Single

A couple months ago many of you and some random others helped to compile some thoughts from a singles' perspective about the "shidduch crisis," how everyone wants to help, but often they end up causing more pain to the people they are ultimately trying to assist. I stitched the ideas together and submitted it for publication to our lovely frum publications. (They are the ones that seem to be obsessed with sensationalizing the whole shidduch scene.) One of them nixed it outright. Another is still considering it, and the last, after a long process came back with how they aren't going to publish it, because they are working on a similar piece for a Yom Tov issue:

Thank you for sending your thought-provoking piece. It makes a number of excellent points, but it isn’t going to work for us at this time. We're writing an article about the realities of being a single woman in our family-oriented, motherhood-oriented society – what it’s like, coping skills, how we–as a community–could expand the role of a frum woman to be more inclusive and less family-dependent without minimizing our values of creating beautiful homes and families.

How does being single affect a woman today - socially, professionally, and on the communal level? What about hashkafically - how does the single woman deal internally with the fact that motherhood and marriage have always been idealized as the means to the ultimate goal? How can she remain vitalized, and cultivate an authentic, if different, sense of purpose?

I wonder if there's anything authentic really to write about their topic after all when the goal is to become a wife and mother. I understand why that seems a little less messy then baring the complaints from singles about how they're treated at simchos or in life in general.

A group of us was asked to come to a wedding of a friend out of town, which we did, even though we all had to pay our own way. Our friend asked us to stay for Shabbos sheva brachos, and despite some misgivings, we agreed to stay in town for Shabbos and to come to the Friday night meal. From the moment he saw us, the kallah's father made it clear that because he was feeding us, we were responsible for the singing atmosphere. You give a bachur meat, he sings on demand. There were guys there younger than us and/or our age, but because they were married and we were not, the “bachurim” were expected to make it leibedig.

Even so, many points were actually more upbeat and even thought-provoking.

Yuntif is always hard when it falls out during the week for those that work at jobs in secular

environments and need to take “leave time” to get off work. One year when yuntif was all weekdays and it was very stressful, well-meaning people offered support via comments like, “This is your s’char Torah. You’re working so you can support a husband in learning.” While that feels nice for the future, right now my life has to have meaning too. Someone commented to me, “This is your mesiras nefesh for yuntif. You know how in the past people lost their jobs to keep Shabbos? This stress of figuring out yuntif and time off, this is your mesiras nefesh as a Jew.” This makes so much more sense, because I have an avoda even as a single.

I thought everyone had good points to make, so I will figure out how to publish it one way or another. In the meantime, I'm curious to see what they will write about single girls navigating a mother/family oriented society.

I think the idea bothers me, because it seems like they're approaching it like they would what it's like to be deaf in a hearing world or blind in a seeing world. Why are we trying to find a different sense of purpose? Sure, we want to be acknowledged as a person now, for our accomplishments now, to fit into society as is, but there is a reason we don't. As singles, we don't want to accept this as an identity, as a reality. We're forward-looking, thinking about when we will be spouses, parents.

I think it's a lot about how people perceive and treat others who have somehow gotten off the conveyor belt that Judaism has become, anyone that whose yellow brick road had some detours, trying to figure out how to make sense of it. Being single isn't our choice, permanent, or a different identity. I think the answer is really just treat us like normal people. (There's a whole slew of ideas from so many different people in the article I compiled if they would just publish it.)

Sure, their article is going to be provocative, because that's what they're aiming for. They sensationalize contemporary issues to sell their paper, not caring whose feelings they step on in the process. If they really were sincere about figuring this issue out, I would suggest not publishing an article about how to find a different sense of purpose.