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Mostly Cloudy Opinion: The Shadchan's role
By Dr. Michael J. Salamon
Issue of May 29, 2009 / 5769
Wedding season is upon us and I have been thinking about how people meet and decide to marry.
When Abraham sent his servant Eliezer to find a wife for his son Isaac, Abraham began by saying that he could not allow Isaac to marry any of the local Canaanite women. There are a variety of Midrashic interpretations as to why; one is that Abraham's family had very little in common with the Canaanites. Opposites attract in magnets, they do not attract in relationships. Eliezer, acting perhaps as the first shadchan, or matchmaker, understood this and sought a woman for Isaac to marry who was religiously, emotionally and personally compatible for Isaac. So Eliezer chose someone more similar to Isaac than a Canaanite woman could ever be and someone whom Isaac would love and in turn be loved by.
Both the role of the shadchan and marriage in general has evolved over the generations. According to researcher and professor of history Stephanie Coontz, marriages were made primarily for utilitarian reasons from the beginning of recorded history through the early eighteenth century. Few married for love until the 1700s. Most married for socio-economic reasons. To consolidate power a king might want his daughter to marry a duke. To guarantee that the fruits grown in his fields made it to a wider market a farmer might want his son to marry the daughter of the wagon driver. And, to ensure a religious lineage, a rabbi from one shtetl would like to have his daughter marry the son of a rabbi from another town. The shadchan was, in effect, the dealmaker for these marriage arrangements.
The system worked for a variety of reasons. Children were considered to be owned by their parents, in particular their fathers; therefore, all decision making was removed from them until they were out of their parent's home. The idea that they could get out and make their own decisions was likely a strong motivator to get married to someone, almost anyone.
But more importantly, life was hard. Until about 100 years ago, life expectancy was about half what it is today and primary concern was focused on making sure that there was enough food to feed the people at the table. Even in wealthier families, quality of life did not exist the way it does today. A portrait of life would include a view of children working both at home and in the fields with only limited time for education. Socialization, even recreation was mostly limited to holidays. Healthcare was not as we know it today. In towns where there were physicians, even in bigger cities, there was only limited, rudimentary healthcare. And travel did not exist as it does today. A three-hour flight in our time was a dangerous one-to-two-week stagecoach ride. In short, life was mostly about survival, protecting children and, to the degree possible, educating them.
Much has changed technologically, socially and economically. And our world has generally kept up. What has not changed, but actually regressed, is the widely increasing use of shadchanim that we have seen in the last 20 years. The use of a matchmaker, in effect a decision maker, is being increasingly justified as a way to make the dating process more efficient and easy. It does neither. Not only is it based on a clearly outmoded medieval system but even when modernized, it still remains highly dated.
According to Coontz, the word dating was not used to connote how men and women got to know each other until the turn of the twentieth century. Prior to that, in respectable medieval and Victorian era families, a young man would be invited to call upon a young woman at her home. The courtship was supervised by the girl's family, giving the parents total control over whom the girl could see and ultimately marry. This system existed for only about 40 years in the United States during the Industrial Revolution period, before rapidly falling into disrepute. Some would have us believe this is purely a result of feminism but that is only a minor factor. Increasing education, mobility, enhanced quality of life, and family changes all led to the growth of a more balanced dating system based on real attraction, not parental or matchmaker control. To be sure, friends, relatives, even matchmakers made introductions but the young men and women increasingly decided whom they would date and eventually marry.
Some point to these changes as the cause of the increasing fragility of marriage and a reason to continue the strict use of matchmakers. Their argument is that there was virtually no divorce when these systems were in place centuries ago. But as people lived together longer they had the opportunity to acknowledge when their marriage was not working. Those who support the matchmakers' role argue further that socializing and dating is immodest. Well, it can be, if young men and young women are constantly partitioned and not taught how to communicate with each other. Research is quite clear that the forbidden fruit component of socializing creates havoc in people in their teens and twenties when inter-gender socializing is at its most natural. If properly exposed to one another there is virtually no immodesty or socialization issue.
Some argue that an outsider has a better, more objective view of what a person might need in his or her life and a shadchan is just such an outsider. This argument is perhaps the most fallacious. There is a game that children play called telephone; in Israel it is know as telephone shavur or broken telephone. The game is instructive in that it shows that the more people involved in transmitting a message, the greater the rate of distortion. Introducing a matchmaker to control the proceedings increases distortion. When two people meet, they connect, if they have shared personality traits. This is not something that an outsider can determine; it is a biological process unique to those who are socializing.
As in the time of Isaac, there was nothing wrong with asking a matchmaker to make an introduction, just as there is nothing wrong when parents, relatives or others do so today. Anyone can and should be a shadchan when the role is defined as being someone who introduces people. There is something very wrong, however, when we attempt to bypass the reality of biology and intellectual honesty and take away all decision making from the couple. Perhaps that is why we see a steadily rising increase in divorces among those who insist on using shadchanim exclusively. Some argue that this divorce rate, high as it now is, remains below that of the general population. In fact, that may no longer be the case. Exact divorce rates in the general population and in the religious Jewish community are hard to come by but available data indicates that they are very close to being the same. What this does argue for is the rational use of social, emotional and religious systems for socialization and meeting for the purpose of marriage.
Michael J. Salamon is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and the founder and director of the Adult Developmental Center in Hewlett, NY. He is the author of numerous articles and several psychological tests. His recent books include, The Shidduch Crisis: Causes and Cures, published by Urim Publications and Every Pot Has a Cover: A Proven Guide to Finding, Keeping and Enhancing the Ideal Relationship, published by Rowman & Littlefield.
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