Shidduch Series #4: The Goal of Marriage (Ep. 118)

hi this is deborah lafsky and welcome to the rabbi yolovsky show and whether you're listening with our friends over at or anytime whoever you watch or listen to your podcast it's certainly nice to have you along for the experience um if you uh if you haven't been following and what's one of the great things about a podcast is that you can always go back and listen to the previous ones we are in the middle of doing a series on um marriage dating marriage uh all the steps that go into it yeah and um as i mentioned there's not many people giving hyderaja in how to get married once you're married lots of people tell you uh how things are a mess but you know okay so let's get into it and uh we've dealt now with we're only talking about relationships where we're talking about getting married we're not talking about boy girl relationships were you just friends we're not talking about uh anything like that we're talking only about a person wants to get married and this is a very important point very important point that not everybody appreciates when we're starting the process we're saying i want to get married sometimes people aren't ready to get married they got to be honest yeah it was a young lady i know who started dating when she was 19. and when she turned 38 she said i think i'm finally ready to settle down and she got married a few months later um you got to know for real if i'm if i'm really ready to get married or not right so i started telling you a story about these guys who were learning in the mirror who asked me to give them a vote on dating so they came in and i said first there's no no recording devices because sometimes when you record things people get a little self-conscious people recognize their voice when the recording makes the rounds and uh you know i says they're recording you could take notes if you want and everyone had their notebooks and they all had they were ready to take notes and i started them off with a trick question which i do often i i have trick questions um we have more or less established already that i am the little boy who notices that the emperor has no clothes and so i'm the one who asked the question that maybe not everybody else will focus on i remember once i was doing a seder and people came in with lots of notes and i started with a trick question i said why do we have a pesoda you know not one person could give me a coherent answer i got answers but none of them were coherent [Laughter] so uh so i started over the trick question why should you get married now before we go because uh i do try to speak uh as clearly as i can to enunciate to make sure that everybody can follow in fact i remember there are certain people who are from the hearing impaired community who follow this and they do the [Music] captions and uh and they say you know usually it's pretty easy with you because you you know you speak uh speak pretty clearly so i try which is why i want to go to this week's sponsor naftali fifa i listened to most podcasts and shirum at double speed the theme song sounds like not much in wisdom instead of knowledge and wisdom playing on double speed i think you would enjoy that nugget sponsored in honor of my wife who makes me slow down my podcast speed so uh thank you very much naftali for this sponsorship anyway which is pretty amazing because uh the problem that has plagued me for most of my life is that i speak very quickly people uh often complain that i speak a little too fast in fact i give a number of missiles to sharm shirum online and one of them i gave and i really just ran through a lot of material very quickly because it wasn't really the main focus i just wanted to get through the example he was bringing and it's now taken me two weeks to fill in uh all the material that i said people like i you you just threw out so much information what did you mean so i had to now go back at double speed it's almost amazing to think what i must sound like but anyway so i have these uh young men together in a room and i start him over the trick question why should you get married so the first guy without even hesitating he says to give all the guys look at him forgive must have gone over very well on a date girl would say why do you want to get married to give forgive and uh he was very proud of himself he must have read a book or something i don't know [Music] i said you have to get married to give you can't give to anybody in the mirror you can't learn with a younger buffer you can't clean up your apartment for the other roommates you have to get married to to give he was very disappointed he really liked that uh that idea it was it got over really well so another guy says well you know to have children i said okay so you're not looking so much for a girl as much as for good breeding stock now you don't really want to see a resume you want to see a dna script you know want to find a strong peasant girl very many strong children so another guy says well there's too much in life for one person i said well hire a personal assistant in pain by the hour it's definitely going to work out cheaper who's that uh somebody else said it's a mitzvah i said great great you'll have the easiest time first goal you go out with anybody yeah give me the ring go back to the basement mitzvah anyway there were more answers they were they weren't as good as these these were the best dances and finally someone said the real answer my mother's making me i appreciated that right so finally a guy said okay what's the answer i said i'll tell you but i want you first to reflect on the fact that um all of you were in shidduchim already yeah the fact that you haven't found somebody that interested you was just luck and that one of you can tell me why you should get married and i said don't feel bad most married people can't answer that question either because everybody gets married because everybody gets married that's why you get married because that's what you're supposed to do you get married why do you get married what's the underlying purpose so safe before you can set out to do anything you have to first know what it is you're trying to accomplish i was at a shabbaton once i i'm sure i must have told this story before and the fellow comes over to me at charlottesville and he says this is a very successful shabbaton and i said really why he says we have a lot of students and they're all having a great time so i said well is the purpose of the shabbaton to get a lot of students to make sure they all have a great time and he said well what's supposed to be the purpose of a shabbaton i said child shoot us at the wrong time to ask that question when you first set out to uh to make your um uh to make your ship a tone that's when you have to ask yourself what will define whether or not this is a successful shabbaton because sometimes you could have things that people mark as success i'll give an example when i used to run ncsy i used to have two types of shopper tuning i had the regional troubles and where we'd get hundreds of kids so everybody could see it's a really important uh organization there's a lot happening it's very exciting but that's not really where work took place the real took work took place at the smaller shovington m that we would have throughout the year where there were less kids and we were able to really deal with issues and concentrate on different things and that's where a lot of personal growth actually took place but but i knew what the purpose of each chapter tone was i didn't have any other expectations but you have to know what it is that you're setting out trying to do the way that you make decisions is first you need definitions first you have to define what's good and what's bad and then you can decide whether or not this fits into my definitions but if i don't have definitions so everybody wants to have a good marriage but what does that mean i used to write a column in the hamadiya and after a number of years they wanted to take all my articles and put it together as a book and i said that's not a book i know people do it and i'm not here to judge yeah but to me that's not a book it's a collection of articles find somebody who has an old collection of muhammadi and read my articles but but uh 30 articles does not a book make a book is safer is is sipur saf it's an edge it's a border it has to tell a story it has to have parameters it has to go from a beginning middle and an end so i sat down to rewrite the things that i had written in the form of a i've been working on this for many years because as i started working on it i realized that there's no way to talk about things without talking about marriage because that's such an important part of what goes in when we are makhanesh mechanical children and then i realized there's no way to talk about marriage without talking about life so that became the working title life for users guide and i keep uh rewriting it my first book wrote itself i never published it but it wrote itself it wrote very quickly it's an introduction to judaism for people who don't want to read a book on judaism it's called the last book you read before you assimilate and uh i never published it because uh i i have a very particular vision of how i want to see this book and it never happened so i still have it it's great every now and then i i read through it and laugh it's a great book but anyway but it literally wrote itself for this one i keep rewriting it but the last beginning i was working on is i said okay let's talk about marriage and i ask this question why do you get married what's your goal in a marriage so like i said everybody wants a successful marriage you just have to define that for me what is a successful marriage what would you consider to be a successful marriage and people usually define it in the negative i know what not successful marriages my father got married 1949 to my mother whatever his other considerations were he his his goal was very clear he wanted to marry a jewish girl and he wanted to bring up a jewish family that was a priority now a lot of people will tell you i get married because i was in love i remember i used to do this once a particular audience i'd say how many people here plan to get married almost every hand went up i said how many of you planned to get divorced no hands went up i said listen approximately two out of three marriages end in divorce so i should have seen two thirds of the hands go up somebody here is not being realistic why do you think you won't get divorced and they say because i'm in love i'll be in love i said everyone who gets married is in love you don't spend that much money on one night unless you think you're in love they believe they're in love and in the secular world they may have been living together for years and yet it ends in divorce so obviously saying i'm in love with the person is not enough if i have a definition how do i know if it was a successful shepherd tone i don't know why he made the shabbatan how do i know it's a successful marriage if i didn't define beforehand what a marriage is and i'm prepared to say it might be different things to different people i'm okay with that but do you know beforehand what you want and so uh very often two people meet some enchanted evening you will see a stranger you will see them calling across a crowded room yeah you see somebody and it's uh [Music] you just find this person fascinating right i don't know what you can see that makes a person fascinating more likely it's just attraction yeah are you start dating this person if there's just attraction then it's unlikely to continue i was uh i was teaching a nurse samantha when the guy comes back is i went out with a girl she is the biggest ditz i ever met i mean she is just an airhead she is the dumbest girl i said why'd you go out with her she's beautiful i said so you're gonna break it off because not right away but eventually because that's just not enough but you see somebody well what what what's obviously there is that they're attractive now you sit down and you have a conversation and it turns out that not only is the person attractive but they're personable and they're easy to talk to and whatever whatever and now you find yourself in a relationship every now and then i've been called into uh to deal with uh you know a um uh people were gonna get into married i had a i had a mother called me up and said listen i have a daughter [Music] and um you know she's she's gonna get married can you do anything i said when's i mean is it when's the wedding it's a sunday i said what do you want me to get on a horse and i would pull up from the altar and right off with her into the suspect what do you think i said where were you when she was in high school i could have brought her in dancing is why i could have worked with her we could have done something now she's she's you know a few days away from the altar and you want me to to do something you know i'm good but i'm just not that good but sometimes i have a little more lead time you know and uh and most of the time the person says to me look i wasn't planning to get into married i wasn't planning to er it happened i met somebody i found love and you know okay sarasara now if you knew beforehand that you didn't want to get into married why would you date non-jewish people i used to reclass and into marriage when i used to teach in discovery and i'd be halfway through the class and i said how many people now would get into married none of the hands of him and then i said how many of you will enter date and all the hands went up i said could you explain that one to me they said it's just a date i said do you know anyone who got married without dating did any of your parents get married without dating all the years i'm doing this one time my hand goes up i said your parents got married without dating says i said what are you doing in an intermarriage class do you five-ish danish thank mary o'reilly what are you doing here you know i said for the rest of you yeah nobody nobody uh although not every date ends in a marriage every marriage starts on a date and when you go out you might find yourself falling in love nobody plans to fall in love nobody jots down 3 15 fall in love what do you do if you fall in love now you're stuck here you're telling me i don't want to marry and now i fell in love with someone who's not of my faith so what am i supposed to do now one of the guys in the room because guys are you know a little more emotional said if i find myself starting to fall in love i'll break it off i said that sounds great i want to i want to watch this merry christina yeah um i could never see you again why i'm starting to love you when this was just a fling and you were some chicks that i was going out with that's fine but i'm starting to develop some actual emotion here so bye i said i don't think even you're that shallow his friend says you don't know like i do [Laughter] but that's what people would tell me i wasn't planning on falling in love but why are you getting involved in a relationship nobody knows when they're gonna fall in love any two people can fall in love don't believe it when people say you can't fall in love any two people can fall in love so so you're dating this person do you really think you're going to find someone intelligent and attractive date them for a year and then grow to despise them you have to at least recognize the possibility so if you're going to date non-jewish people then you can't be surprised when you know you suddenly end up with uh with a situation like that okay that's dramatic i've met at least three families where one spouse is shown a shabbos and one is not what happened and they were in college going to the hillel whatever it was they started dating someone they weren't from [Music] but they weren't planning on getting married to them and then they fell in love and they said we'll work it out i get involved usually because of the kids because the kids are totally messed up dad comes home from school and says does anybody want to eat shabbos lunch with me and mom is jingling the car keys we're going to the mall i'll put your face on a mug dead is it okay if we go yeah yeah sure go ahead i'll sit here by myself yum my two little hollow rolls my little glass of grape juice some cold cuts are you gonna do you get divorced over this get divorced but why'd you get married i i wasn't planning on falling in love then why'd you date someone who doesn't have the same values as you okay there are environmentalists they really care about the environment very important to them they meet somebody and they fall in love and strange thing that it never came up my environmentalism and it turns out that this fellow likes to pollute likes to dump uh barrels of toxic waste into our natural waterways so what do i do now i break up over the environment okay so i go downstream and i clean it up how did you end up in this situation [Music] you should have been dating people from the sierra club i mean like if this was important to you but you don't realize what's important to you you divorce the relationship from the goal of what i want in a marriage and part of that is because people haven't really thought about what they want from a marriage i got a number of letters after our last podcast discussing um uh you know this came out just the right time i was involved i met this boy we were developing relationship and then and because of that i broke it off you know and it's very hard quiz is very hard you're forming an emotional bond with somebody i it might not be the person that i should marry but i can fall in love will fall in love with everybody it happens we've seen it yeah i mean sometimes there are indications you know when charles and diana announced their engagement and someone said you look like you're very much in love they had to say yes and charles says well what's love that was a little hint oh hindu while was the gum but uh you know you gotta you you gotta decide beforehand who am i going to allow myself to fall in love with because i can fall in love with anybody when you're and you're foolish if you think not you're foolish so i have to sit down first and say what is it that i want and that is the hard part the hard part is but sitting down right now and say what kind of a home do i want sometimes you have one spouse that wants an open home with a lot of nurses or and the other one guards their privacy and doesn't like people around sometimes you have people who i'm something they're happy they're happy with a little bit and other people are grossly materialistic and they have to be honest about that it's okay embrace it look for a rich guy who will keep you into the style of which you become accustomed but don't pretend that that i'm i'm ready to live a life of sacrifice if you're not so yeah a girl who uh goes to seminary and she comes back and she knows that she's supposed to marry a colo boy because that is what a seminary education is designed to do to teach you that you have to marry uh call a boy and if you don't then you're basically a failure um not just as a jew but as a human being i mean basically there's no reason for you in this world you know you want to work working boy working boy i want you to marry a horse not a horse i heard one father say marry a horse already yeah i've got to marry a woman so she really wanted to marry a learning boy and she had the most important qualifications uh her family was rich and was willing to support so there was this boy who was a real serious learner and he went out with this girl and she did not fit the bill but the parents were so nervous about having to support him so they pushed him into this marriage and he got married and he learned for a year and then she realized this isn't what she wants and she drove him crazy until he dropped out of issue and got a job because she thought that's what she wanted she really did she thought she wanted to marry point learning but she didn't that's not what she really wanted you got to be honest with yourself don't marry the boy that you're supposed to that you think you should marry marry the person you want to marry when i first moved to arizona i remember there was something i was doing i remember what it was somebody wanted me to do something you know and they said don't you want your daughters to marry the best boy in the yeshiva and i said no i want my daughters to marry the boy who's going to be the best husband and father that's my goal what am i rush yeshiva i got i have my to turn over to my son-in-law i'm looking for a son-in-law if he knows how to tell funny stories i'll get him a few gigs you understand but uh you know i'm looking i'm looking for a son-in-law then i guess oh turning over my voice [Laughter] you gotta be real so so what is your expectation in marriage what do you want from a home and most people never think about this don't think about what i want so we have we're very good at externalities now i had a girl one of my first years when i was teaching in seminary and uh she took my merciless for charming class and after the first semester she met with me and she said when i came here i had my whole life planned out i knew i was going to live what kind of boy i was going to marry i know what kind of i was going to buy i had my whole life worked out and now i'm disgusted by the person i almost became and then she said and the odds are i'll probably do it anyway because if we're not clear what we want so he seems like a nice boy she seems like a nice girl uh pretty easy pretty simple but what do you want from your home now i'm going to give you aspirations and you don't have to follow these aspirations i'm just giving you aspirations because i'm an aspirational sort of a person yeah i'm inspiring and aspirational sometimes i listen to myself and even i am moved that's how that's all that's not effective i am yeah why does a person get married that's the question i asked these young men and i said we all know this one esha is a good and isha has a hate together they spell hashem's name okay what is the ish represents shamayim and hey represents arets and it's a joining together of shaman virus because there are two stories one is hashem separates the shaman virus and the other one is he creates a human being male and female and then he separates them why so they should join back together and where do shamayim join back together yaakov avinu goes to sleep in the arabias and he sees a ladder going up to shamayim and he says this is the shara shamai says the baal turin he says how awe-inspiring and he says the word nara spelled backwards is arom where the oron goes that's where the or goes it's awe-inspiring the bass in mikdash is the the connection between shamayim barrett's youth k in gematriad equals 15. 15 steps going up to the base to the base of big dish going up to the ozone coincidence i think not because this is in isha is what's so essential we're building a bias and that's why when [Music] when mela built the base of mikdash he decorated it with drawings of men and women embracing says the gemaran human don't try this in your show even if it's very liberal it doesn't go over the same way today why because trying to explain that the essence of the basa miktash is to be able to bring together us like a husband and a wife there were a lot of ways of relating to know he's our king there's a sense of or yeah years ago decades ago i used to i would go to england i don't know if they still have these kind of shows there but i have one of these shoes somewhat cavernous everybody wore top hats yeah and every now and then someone would get up and say you're in a house of the lord lord lord and there's a sense of like more inspiring then yeah we're a child relating to our father and that's good but it's not the ultimate the ultimate is share hashirim as two lovers it's too graphic frankly sure was just too graphic i was uh 15 16 years old i was an fbt most people are familiar with the term bt balchuba i was an fbt flaming balchumber anyway so i remember shabbas khalomori pesach the elaine cherisher and we had the uh suncito translation and this 30 40 something fellaboz sitting next to me gives me a little nudge and he says hey here's a great line i bet a girl would like this i said sir we are in synagogue this is scripture please show a little respect and he says well i can't believe they allow this in the shawl and he was right because i'll tell us that they wanted to hide away sheer hashirum because it was just too much akiva says if all of the suffering [Music] or kodosh this is the kadash hakudo shim the the holy of holies you know what the culture condition was that's where yeah we would come together with the krishna isha in the in the bedroom says rashi that was the kodashika doshi that was the bedroom that the place where us on the coast are most intimate the intimate moment you read shi hashem so baruch hashem art school translates it homolytically they have made sure i'm safe once again to uh to read because you have no idea what it means you know you don't want people reading sukim like i grow drunk on your kisses you understand nothing good is going to come from this is that but it's so graphic because that's the passion we're supposed to have for kurdish and the only way you can learn that passion is through marriage and that's why eliezer comes back and says oh do i ever shut up for you she's beautiful she's got great medos she's smart you know and the mother killed your father-in-law so you don't have to worry about him that great what a and niece him the water came up to greet her you know and yitzchak says very nice time to go into my mother's tent and see if there are the nissim of the basa mikdash the cloud over the tent the the bread stays warm from from shabbos to shabbos the candles stay burnt stay lit sorry that's the correct word can't stay lit yeah i'm looking for a girl who i'm going to build a mishkan with bill and one of the curses out of existence and he looks at our tents and he says israel every jewish home is a mishkan [Music] if the if it's just the base of mikdash i can destroy the base of mikdash but every home is a mishkan and that's why when people get married that's rebuilding the basement there's a bias when the comes to redemption [Music] because come together and build a new home that's a mishkan so you have to ask yourself i'm not getting married for i need somebody who can take care of me cook and clean and you know take care of my things filipino as one israeli woman put it to me or am i looking for someone who's going to be the cohen guddal and my base of mikdash that i'm going to build now what does that mean what does that mean to build a home that's a michigan we're going to have to talk about that but be honest with yourself am i just looking for someone who i can have a good time with i'm not we're going to build anything as this one guy in yeshiva said to the masjid i know what you guys want from me i just want to marry a beautiful girl go into my father's business make a lot of money go on trips buy your jewelry drink the finest wine drink the frying scotch you know and i'll dive and i'll learn but you know but what am i looking for in a marriage is what i'm looking for in a marriage okay i used to tell this story over and girls used to say do you still have his number i could uh i could see that and that's okay you know i've heard people wax poetic about about uh you know uh you know a new couch that they bought or how they fixed up their house or you know or whatever it is okay so be honest look for that i'm looking for i'm looking for uh where there's gonna be money we're gonna live comfortably okay some people want to live a life of herself some people are cured of monsters you're going to be careful if you marry a kid with monster they want to have people over all the time and be mashed it's my friend very redman who just made a hasanah he used to say he says people want to be my big gobs of hashboya on you and i should okay i hear that but don't just meet somebody and say oh this looks good that's what you ask people why'd you get married i don't know why did you get married to this person on those rare occasions when i have to do marriage counseling and i have no idea what i'm doing i have no degree no but sometimes people say to me listen we've been to three therapists two rabbis a capitalist we're on our way to based into right to get so you can't really mess it up you know so okay but there was one time i sat down with a couple and i said i can save a marriage but there's no marriage here you guys don't like each other you have absolutely nothing in common i said to him what do you what's good about your wife it was this long long pause i said she's pretty okay okay anything else another very very long poison she's a good cook okay i said to her didn't have much more to add i said people have nothing in common what do you do so we watch movies i said okay so if you're cisco and ebert you can build a relationship on that but that's not a marriage we can't just do movie reviews there's nothing there but they didn't know where they were getting married in the first place so first you have to do the hard work and decide what do i want out of a marriage what are my expectations where do i see myself in 50 years mitch hedberg the comedian he says he went in for a job interview a woman said where do you see yourself in five years he says uh celebrating the five year anniversary of you asking me that question [Laughter] okay all right that's an but what what would you consider a successful marriage when you turn around 25 years 50 years from now what do you want them to say had a couple ones said that they worked well together they didn't need anybody to solve their problems you know they worked things out among themselves they you know they they were efficient you know i said that's not a marriage that's a business partnership yeah maxie and sami they always work together maxie did the buying sammy did the selling you know maxie took off the last two weeks of july sammy took out the first two weeks in august you know when they bought the building they didn't even need a lawyer they did it among themselves they were able to work everything out i said that is that that's a marriage so we're going to talk more but first you have to sit down and do the really hard work and say what would i consider a successful marriage if i turn around and i say okay okay i want to get married what would i consider a successful marriage what do i want what are my dreams and my aspirations not just i found a nice boy and he's so cute and uh and he dovens nicely and they tell me that he learns well and i found a nice girl she's very good she knows how to cook and you know and she's pretty and uh you know and she went to the right seminaries you know and her family's willing to support me we're done now maybe that's good i don't want to say no but you got to do the hard work first that's it for this week if you want to find out more about the podcast you can go to rubyalovsky.com you can leave a comment you can send an email you can sponsor an episode and you can download the uh the theme song and uh you can um join one of my online shi urum da fiomi masil sushan and that's it for this week i'm devin dorolowski and this is the ravriolovsky show it's the rabbi orlowski show ready to go the rabbi orlovsky showed knowledge and wisdom will help you grow lots of fun in every episode and we don't have to rhyme [Music] show [Music] show till next time till we meet again throughout my orolovsky show it's the rabbi olavsky show it's the ravioli