A Valentine's Note: What We Can All Learn from the Shidduch Crisis

 I hope you had a happy Valentine's day. But if you are scanning the internet as opposed to waking up by someone then this blog entry is for you. In the mainstream press many different conflicting ideas circulate about singles. Some of the ideas circulating are culturally specific, such as the idea of leftover women in China. The Chinese press notes that women achieve educationally at the expense of marriageability. The picture is less clear in Anglo societies where there is a strong tendency for people to marry from their own social class and race. In America if you see a brilliant lawyer who also has a PhD in Physics married to a woman who is a part time nanny who barely finished high school, you start to wonder. On what planet would these two people meet? You see the reverse often- and everyone quietly chalks it up to the desperation of older women. Every society has it's own variation of the unwritten rules of love. Nonetheless miserable single people are as culturally universal as love itself.
 Following the "shidduch crisis" provides some insight into the failings of singles. In highly religious Jewish communities there are a notable number of single women. These women are viewed as a problem. On deeper examination, many have noted they are a result of how successful the community is. The religious community has tons of kids. The community also has a cultural pattern like many where men tend to marry younger women. In a mathematical sense, barring lots of divorce and remarriage, this means that some women will become single permanently. A backlog of aging single women has built up. Men, realizing there will be more than equal numbers of women in the age group they seek, realize they have the upper hand. Women suffer a lot. Although Orthodox Jews are a peculiar and small community, their problems and solutions give some insight into the whole modern world, even if they disdain it. Any sub population with a high birth rate will face some variation of this problem. The extreme solution is to simply kill all the extra women. A surprisingly high number of societies do just that. Honor killings. sex selective abortions to prevent the birth of females, female genital mutilation that is really butchering the genitalia of young women so brutally a few of them outright drop dead...it usually takes a war to cause androcide, but femicide prevails even in peace. Connecting the dots between demographic growth and femicide isn't hard to do in some populations. In many Arab populations an unmarried or even divorced female is the financial responsibility of her male relatives. Eager to get rid of a financial burden some families push women to marry well above their age range. The few women who rebel risk a lot of violence. The most humane solution for "extra" people is of course to just let them be. Perhaps if everyone understood that we are not entirely independent actors, but rather individuals constrained by the rules of the societies we interact with, whether they are written down , unwritten cultural codes, or demographic realities, we could make progress. Americans are raised to believe that with hard work, anything is possible. Countless people chastise singles for not working hard enough to get married. In love as in life, the truth is that with hard work in many cases the only outcome is exhaustion.