This is painful, because it’s real life, not theory. There are good young men and women who genuinely want to build a home, and for a long time they’re just not getting there. They go out, they try, they open up, and then it doesn’t work out. Sometimes it’s close. Sometimes it feels like it should have worked. And still—it doesn’t. Over time, it wears people down.

Part of what’s going wrong is the way we’ve started to think about shidduchim. Without even noticing, we’ve moved into a world of specifications. Lists. Requirements. Boxes that need to be ticked. Height, background, expectations, “type.” And the more precise the list becomes, the less space there is for a real person to enter.

Because a person isn’t a specification sheet. A person is a whole world. And no one fully fits into someone else’s list. When the list becomes the main........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)