Living With Boundaries

Being a frum Jew is all about living with boundaries, living within the confines of halacha.

As an aside, I was talking to someone recently who told me that to a teenage boy it sometimes feels like Yiddishkeit is all about restrictions and confinement. It's sometimes hard to see how the 12 hour school day is fulfilling at all. I get that, and that's a whole different issue. (It's a topic for a chinuch blog perhaps...)

Even while what this person said is unfortunately often accurate, "Ein l'cha ben chorin elah me sheosek b'torah" holds so much truth. Without Shabbos and yuntif we would be even more enslaved to technology. It's super addictive as it is, is it not? Pesach and chometz. Music and Sefira/The Three Weeks. After Pesach chometz tastes so much better. After The Three Weeks I can listen to my same (only tens of good) Jewish songs and they aren't annoying to listen to anymore. Taharas hamishpacha keeps a marriage and a couple's relationship special (obviously among other benefits). There are so many examples within Judaism.

While the boundaries that we have that affect dating, specifically shidduch dating, sometimes feel counterintuitive, especially the ones that society has made up and aren't halacha, most of them exist for a purpose and are helpful in the long run. I don't think I want to discuss specific boundaries here, because everyone, depending on their circles, ascribes to different rules and regulations, and I won't pretend to understand them all. For that reason I don't want to nitpick and perhaps seem like I'm making fun of any.

I do want to say though, that in my own personal experience, I've seen the benefit of the lines that I haven't been so keen on toeing.

In one relationship with a guy that I dated quite some time ago, we talked and texted probably every day. In many yeshivish circles this is frowned upon. I don't really understand that, because to me it would make sense to spend as much time as possible trying to build a relationship and get to know someone that you will potentially be spending the rest of your life with. To make a long story short, he claimed that the fact that we talked so much clouded his judgement and had we only went on two or three dates a week and talked one other time separate from that, he would have realized sooner that he was purely infatuated but had too many marriage concerns... Whether or not this makes sense is a different discussion (and written about in many other blog posts probably), but it reflects the lesson of how sometimes boundaries seem annoying, but they're really for our benefit.