Guys or girls - who's tougher? | The Shadchan Shmooze - Episode 5

in your experience who do you find to be a tougher crowd working with the guys or with the girls and why i find the guys much much tougher to work with because they often um are not as self-aware and not as realistic about a shidduch they have certain things that they're very picky about and they don't often realize that it's um you know what they're looking for is not looking for them as well i think maybe probably lies it happens with a lot of the girls as well yeah i'm just saying from for my you know there are girls you know like let's say we were asked what what oh or you were just asked about i would say you know as far as being flexible flexibility um for our social workers in the group is a sign of mental health a person could be flexible and the you know for a girl who or a guy who um wants to say no after one day sometimes i think they should be flexible and try another two or three just to see if things are a little bit better you know not to date forever but give it a couple times that's being flexible and also girls should be flexible about height and hair oh yeah you know they just they're all gonna lose their hair most likely and all all the rest of shiva's were short so they should just you know not get so caught up in some of these things so girls over a certain age are tougher like up to a certain age they're more open-minded there's certain group of girls that hit a certain age and it's just no to everything it'll be like you know like i called a girl recently and it was like she started the phone call like well is he this is he this to see that and i'm like no and they're not things that you would you know that you would normally like his parents divorced are are you know she was going through like a whole list of things that i had to sell her to go on a date where i know that you know her mother had contacted me and said please can you try and find someone you know and i had a great guy and she just didn't give him a chance from day like after the first date she you know no i don't see any future um on the other hand there's certain guys that are you know very sought after and getting them to say yes is also very difficult but i think that i find an easier time with girls like between 21 and 26 um you know they're flexible they're in they're listening they're they're interested but i sometimes when they get over that they're they're a lot more difficult to kind of it's like i'm doing i have to sell them on you know on the guy i tend to work with older singles more often and i think that the biggest thing to remember is it's crazy burnout at a certain point i think we all know that intuitively intellectually but i don't know if we recognize the degree of burnout that these people really experience and it's really important to make sure that your singles know that you view them as people as strong individuals that you care about them as a person and they're not just the object of your uh shots and efforts like i had one guy say to me he was like i can't take it that sometimes just come to me and they like have a girl in my andre they don't really care what i want or who i am they just want to push the girl that they want to push so i think that if singles um realize that you really have their best interest at heart and you really care about them as a person as an individual i think that they'll be more likely to be interested in your suggestion because they realize it's coming from your heart and coming from a true desire to help them versus an agenda that you actually have uh well i'm going to give a slightly nuanced answer i think it's harder for the guys it's harder to get the guys initially to give a yes but once they start dating it's harder to get the girls to want to continue and give things a chance have you ever dissuaded someone from getting engaged and if yes do you feel guilty about that not really but i have recommended without actually pushing someone because i believe that the couple has to make their own decision but i would say i did not push a up because i didn't feel comfortable with it you know and i would just say like are you really sure you're comfortable with it do you realize this that and the other thing if i feel that they may not realize it or they're not open-minded to knowing it because they're too google for the person and they're not really seeing the real red flags sometimes it actually happens to me with a friend of mine from high school that i tried to dissuade her from dating a certain boy but i'll never i mean she's so happily married for so many years now she has married kids it's embarrassing when i see her so i am very careful to dissuade people from marrying somebody because just because i think that they need a certain type or that this might be better for them you know you do have to be very careful you know and especially let's say with an older single who's waiting around for so many years and you're like this is what you were waiting for like hello you know like what are you thinking but you just have to take a step back and and let them figure it out i feel like we have to give them room to figure it out unless like you said it was a mental health issue or something like that but your own you know just because you're invested in helping this particular single for the last 10 years and you're going to be disappointed you have to push yourself aside because it's really about the person maybe they're willing to settle for a certain thing maybe they realize everybody has some kind of handicap as long as two people have similar values and they can communicate and they're emotionally healthy and i would just be pleasantly surprised you know what i mean like i would just say like so the answer is the one time that i did it i was wrong so now i'm very careful i think all of us know of a couple that when they got engaged we probably said to ourselves what i never would have thought of such a thing so i think that it does you know it does happen i think it's more common than we think that there are like couples in our minds that we think might might have been like what kind of a match is that but i think it's very very out there it's very prevalent i think we all know couples like that i can't say i dissuaded anyone from getting engaged um i dealt with a couple where she just you know he was very frustrated and a lot of the things that she was doing was exhibiting a certain lack of sensitivity towards his place in the really you know the whole relationship was geared around her um and he kind of didn't know what to do with it you know and i i didn't tell him not to get engaged but i think he you know he stepped back and looked at the and looked at the full picture and realized that she wasn't going to be someone he wanted to go through life with because she wasn't going to be supportive but i've never dissuaded anyone you know the the way that i work in general is not is helping people find the answer themselves so i'm not the type to go out there and dissuade someone from getting engaged but you know i have been i have talked to people you know step back and look at the whole picture if there's somebody let's say that you felt was a great suggestion and the person didn't necessarily agree and think that it was a good suggestion for themselves is there any tactics that you have either used or you could think of that might be a good way to get them to actually try to consider going out with that person even though they don't think it's the best idea for them well i could tell you a story that happened somebody i know who's a pretty well-known shopkin in her city and she she's pretty tactful in general but she was trying to convince a guy to go out with a girl who wasn't a size two and wasn't um gorgeous and basically he said to her that she wasn't pretty enough so she basically said to him did you look at yourself in the mirror recently so i'm not i would never do anything like that honestly but i think it shook the guy up a little bit um i think um [Music] i mean i think oftentimes people are not realistic of what they want to get i don't know if this answers your question but what they want is not necessarily what they're going to get does that make sense so they're pursuing and chasing something that's not really for them and um am i hearing from your question that's that's good i've seen that often i'm thinking of a guy who's um grew up very very modern orthodox he's very open-minded to marry a seattle type of girl and he's constantly texting me names of girls from muncie who grew up in yeshiva homes went to the ciaco muncie they're just way too in a box for him i think he would love to see himself in a family like that with a girl like that but he's not being realistic so it's hard it's hard to know what to say i don't know if i have a direct answer honestly i'm just giving you case scenarios that i know but i'm not sure exactly how i could tactfully say it to somebody i would try to have them both for a shabbos meal if i could so they can meet each other and see that they naturally organically can meet and get and have things in common but oftentimes people are not pursuing what's realistic for them that's my experience anyone have any answer for chevy how to say this tactfully okay well well i've i've had uh i think situations where i had i had one situation where i was very convinced about a match that they were a match and the the girl was out of new york area the guy was in new york area and he insisted he did not want to have to start the match at all so i said at the time you know maybe just talk on the phone just talk on the phone and see what happens maybe in our environment that we're in now i might say why don't you zoom and see what happens i think those two are great things it's much less of a commitment than a date um and certainly if someone's out of town um and um so the happy end of the story with a lot of hoops in between is that it actually worked but the but i think that offering something less than an in-person date or a commitment to an in-person date just committing to a phone call or a zoom date that could be a great way to get past somebody's resistance to meeting someone what is your most frustrating part about your listen oh nothing it's so easy [Laughter] the most frustrating part okay um i think for myself um the most frustrating part of him is is when you're really trying you're really tr you see something and they're they're not they're not willing to give it a try um you see that something has potential but the boy the girl has decided has no potential when they're saying no but they're not saying no to the correct reason they're saying no to what they stole in front of them this girl is too quiet i don't want to go out with her again when really she just liked the boy so she shut down a little bit on the date because she was intimidated and she really liked him she's not really a quiet girl she's really very bubbly sweet outgoing fun girl exactly the type of girl that he wants but it's sort of like these premature no i'm not interested so that's frustrating because they're saying no to what they're looking for but they haven't yet given it a chance to see it through and i'm only saying that for the times where i know that the individual is the opposite of what they're saying no to they're saying no because of the certain media or you know they're very impatient they're not impatient they just or they interrupt a lot they were just they were talking and babbling on and on and on and on and on because they were nervous they're really usually a very good listener um so it's frustrating when there's a premature now if a girl came back after a date with feedback telling you that she felt that in her opinion the boy crossed boundaries what would you tell the guy it would depend on the guy it would depend if the guy has sail or not if i feel that i could talk to him and explain something to him or if i if i know he's not going to get it if he hasn't he wouldn't cross boundaries what do you call boundaries which boundary um if he comments on her hair if he sits too close to her on a bench that that's called crossing a boundary like at the beginning have you ever set up a couple and mix them up and the wrong people go out with the wrong people i i didn't do it that way but i did mix up either the date i told the girl thursday i told the boy tuesday or i told the boys going out with sarah and i sent him to rebecca's house but only a couple times so what happened one of them uh the girl said um she wasn't she thought he was coming for that car and said my father's not home he said no i'm here to pick you up and and then she called me up after he left and said that i'm not going out with him and she broke the whole up and the other one went out twice two other times they went out twice and that was it but no one ever got married that's funny um i don't think so i'm not usually dealing with multiple couples that would be such a high quality problem so no i have not had that experience but i do want to say about the dissuading thing just that i have had um a few times where people who were very serious in one case already engaged discovered they were in a complicated shoulda and things were coming to the surface and they didn't know what to do and just in case anybody else ever finds himself in this situation what i found worked very well and in in the three cases i'm thinking of they all did break it off but um mostly it was mental health stuff one was some deception but in all those cases what i did was instead of telling the person what i thought they should do i just with a lot of detail helped them see what was really in front of them that they had not been seeing and made sure they saw extremely clearly what the behaviors of the other person actually meant and that allowed them to make their own decision yeah that never happened to me but um but can i say a personal story i can say first of all sorry i one time dated a guy um and i gave him my address and he ended up going to someone else's address like i haven't seen a family friend's address and now this family's friend um has had like i think two dogs they come barging at the door and he's like hi i'm here to pick up rifka he's like and the dogs are like jumping on him and he's like freaked out and he's she's like oh she's actually down the block so you gotta mix up my address but i know thank god i never mix updates