Husbands/Wives, Not Marriage

After this many years of living I can say without exaggeration that I've seen/met thousands of married couples. I can also say without exaggeration that the number of married men whom I have met that I, personally, would have considered as "husband" material when I was dating can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and not all the fingers at that. Now don't get me wrong--there is nothing intrinsically wrong with these men. Some of them are quite nice--their wives certainly think so. I can appreciate some of their finer qualities; in fact, I count some of these men as friends. Yet....

If all I had been looking for back in my single days was to get married, then almost any of these men would have been fine candidates. Clearly, from the number of years that many of these couples are married, they did just fine at marriage. I have, over the years, run into some of the boys I dated, all married now. I still mentally shake my head and say, "Nope, he was definitely not for me," while at the exact same time recognizing that these men are in strong marriages, loving marriages.

But you see, it wasn't marriage I was looking for when I was dating--it was a husband. And there is a world of difference between husbands and marriage.

Hang around any single people of marriageable age and you are sure to hear "I just want to get married!" Or you might hear "Why am I still single?!" Well here's the thing: if marriage is all these people really want, that's fairly simple to achieve. Yup, simple. Assuming you aren't carrying an axe dripping blood on a date, anyone can quickly learn to paste a fascinated look on their face. Anyone can learn to make the person they are out with feel incredibly desirable and desired. Anyone can develop a surface relationship. Anyone can find a person out there if all they want is marriage. A husband or wife is a different story.

Yes, someone out there will argue that as soon as you get married the male and female become a husband and wife. Maybe. But for many it is not husbands and wives that result from marriage but spouses, a far more generic term and one that simply indicates the married status of a male and a female. "Spouse" places the state of being married first and the unique relationship of the couple second. Spouses are not as much concerned with the state of their personal relationship with each other as they are with the concerns of a marriage--having and raising children, providing a home for the family, being a part of a community etc..

Here's how I see the order of importance. Those who search for husbands and wives, who are searching for the "other half" of themselves, and who continue the search until they find that husband or wife are automatically going to find themselves having a marriage as well. But it's going to be a marriage built on a diamond and titanium foundation. It's going to be a marriage that will be impervious to the sometimes rocky situations that husbands and wives can find themselves in. It's going to be a lasting marriage because the foundation of that marriage--the husband and wife--are rock solid. Because they complete each other, complement each other, husbands and wives take marriage to its highest level. Finding a husband or wife is the ultimate personal journey. It requires personal examination and answering truthfully the questions "What do I really want/need for myself?" and "What can I give/offer/provide to someone else?"

Those questions asked on Shidduch questionnaires? The ones whose answers people put so much stock in when looking for a shidduch? Those questions are about spouses, not husbands and wives. Like any other job application--and being a spouse is a job--the questions asked are more about revealing a person's fitness for carrying out the job of spouse, of producing a marriage, then they are about husband and wife characteristics. What summer camp someone went to or which seminary or yeshiva or which hechsher of peanut butter someone finds acceptable have nothing to do with being a husband or wife.

Here's the thing--finding a husband or wife is about feelings, not facts. Finding a husband or wife is about how you feel about a person, what emotions are engendered. It's about the deeply personal. A young woman I had redt a shidduch to was debating about going out on a fifth date with the young man. I asked her, "If you never saw this person again would you miss him? Would there be an empty space? Would you cry?" Her honest answer was "No." And the dating stopped. She was looking for a husband, not a spouse.

Sometimes, if you are really lucky, you may take a spouse and find yourself down the road with a husband or wife. Given the state of far too many marriages today, the escalating shalom bayis problems, the escalating divorce rate, there are far too many people choosing marriage and spouses over choosing husbands and wives and then finding they have a marriage.

So, maybe it's time for all those people in the shidduch parsha to do some introspection. Maybe they really need some self-honesty. Are they looking for marriage and a spouse? Or are they searching for a husband or a wife? If the former, then a change of technique and approach will have that marriage happening in short order. If the latter? I wish you the joy and exquisite happiness that will be yours, but patience is necessary, lots of patience. Hatzlocha Raboh.