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A PSYCHO-SOCIAL-SPIRITUAL INTRODUCTION TO THE SINGLES SITUATION

Approximately one out of three American Jews in the '90s of marriageable age is single. Not only is this an alarmingly high number of singles - which impacts Jewish life today, this also impacts upon Jewish continuity into the future. Further, upon analyzing the statistics, one notices that if a single does not marry by 24 - whether because of diminished impetus, momentum or practical opportunity - only about a dozen percent more make it to the chupa by 35. It's as if there's a cut-off point (around age 24) after which the likelihood of marrying (or relinquishing independence? or acquiring marriageability?) significantly drops.

This has to frighten and concern every responsible Jew, especially when we add to our consideration the high divorce rate and the emotionally damaged children produced by dysfunctional homes. As if these weren't enough, Jewry currently faces high rates of assimilation and intermarriage. As of '94, approximately 64% of all American Jews who marry, marry a non-Jew. This is up from 54% in the previous three years! Today's Jew has an inordinately hard time finding, selecting, marrying and staying with another Jew.

The questions and issues involved are numerous, serious and complex. And, each person is an individual story with his or her own unique cluster of details.

As a major part of my professional work, I deal with Jewish singles in several ways. I speak in front of audiences of singles. I teach relationship and personal growth courses. I run workshops which explore personality, relationship issues and behavior patterns that do and don't work in people's lives and relationships. I do counseling for individuals and couples, I do matchmaking, have a series of Torah Tapes (many of which deal with spouse-seeking and man-woman relationships). I've been interviewed on radio and have been published in numerous publications on relationship issues, problems and remedies,ass well as about programs I have run. I have training in two forms of psychological therapy and my rabbinical ordination specifies that I am competent in counseling. I have been studying human relations and personal development from a Torah perspective since '77.

Over nearly two decades of involvement in the field, I typically and recurrently saw very destructive behavior and relationship patterns. I saw a lot of senseless pain. I saw people making themselves impossible to be with. I saw vicious, vengeful, irrational, spiteful fighting over property and children. I saw emotional and physical violence. I saw small-minded meddling by parents bringing engagements and marriages from bad to worse. I saw singles who sabotaged their mate-search. I saw protracted and draining legal battles. I saw spite, cruelty and harassment. I saw human lives in degeneration. I saw the damaging effect of all this on countless children from broken or hostile homes. All of this is because of serious problems in the man-woman relationship sphere.

Shortly before this writing, I did one of my multi-week relationship programs. It ran once a week on a given night of the week. Let me give, as a vivid example, a nutshell of what came out during that series.

From the advance publicity, I received a phone call from a man who has personality and relationship difficulties. Since the synagogue in which the series was located was near his apartment, he engaged me for therapeutic counseling for an hour before the program each week in the synagogue. He was not even in the program, but he called me for steady therapy when I would be "local," to make it easier for him to start.

Two people who were in the program held me for lengthy, emotional personal questions (about a half hour each). The next day, I received three phone calls from attendees. One call had a woman crying for two hours on the phone with me. Another call had a woman on the phone who was so emotionally overwhelmed by her problem that she was speaking in a choppy voice for 3/4 hour. The next day (the second day after the first session) another woman came over for an hour and a quarter in a shadchan (matchmaker) context and, later, yet another woman from the class called me for 3/4 hour about an emotional problem which was seriously interfering with a relationship. Another call came that week from a convert to Judaism who asked for my help in establishing whether the conversion was kosher (to assure that the person was Jewish and could marry a Jew).

After the second evening session, one woman made a counseling session appointment and a second needed to keep me for a half hour, talking, with tears in her eyes, about the guy who just broke off with her.

A few days after the third session, another woman from the series phoned me in utter anguish and depression over her guy breaking off with her. She was in such bad shape that she was suicidal and my day was tied up with getting her into a psychiatric hospital. I was stuck by the phone receiving phone call after phone call from her, arranging admission and kosher diet, and communicating with a psychiatrist to arrange medical formalities. It was life and death.

After the fourth session, a young man in the program kept me to talk for 3/4 of an hour about his problems in a relationship that had progressed to near-serious, but had insurmountable obstacles that were prompting him to break it off. That week I received a phone call in my capacity as a rabbi. I was asked by a recent baalas tshuva if she could date a "real nice guy, as friends." There was no prospect for marriage but he was very pleasant to spend time with. Of course I told her that the Torah way is to only go out for "tachliss (real marital prospects)."

The Saturday night after, I received a phone call from a man who saw a write-up about my Simcha Singles program in Brooklyn and called me in my capacity as a relationship expert. His wife weighs 100 pounds more than him and she physically and emotionally abuses him! He wants to leave her and can neither decide at what point it should be truly over nor muster the courage to walk out. She had been in therapy which has not helped enough. He had me on the phone for a half hour and wanted me to get involved in navigating the course of the unacceptable and unchanging marriage relationship.

You get some idea of what is going on from this recounting of things that happened during one series. [to be continued]