Please Don't "Marry Off" Your "Kids"

A friend recently shared that she’d heard a respected shadchan talking about how important it is to “marry kids off” young and quickly, ideally to one of the first people they date, and to try to “get them engaged” after just a few dates. The rationale offered was that the more they know and think and analyze, the harder it gets. She wanted to know if Orthodox professionals share that perspective.

I told her that I don’t and can’t speak on behalf of all professionals, just as I’m confident that person’s opinion is not representative of all shadchanim, but that I strongly disagree with that approach.

Some parents, shadchanim, and other caring adults take pride in announcing that two young people dated and got engaged quickly. They view it as a bracha for them to have found a partner so easily.

And sometimes, it genuinely is.

But therapists often hear messy backstories or epilogues that others don’t know. We get calls and messages regularly like this one:

“Would you have any immediate availability to meet with my son/ daughter? It’s urgent because the wedding is in a few weeks, so we need to get things back on track asap.”

Or:

“Do you think it’s possible for you to help me? I’m married to a good person, but I don’t really like/ feel attracted/ connected to/ respect for my spouse. I was told that would come after the wedding, but it hasn’t.”

There is often social, familial, or communal pressure to marry young and within a specific time frame. When this proceeds smoothly and happily, everyone rejoices.

But when it feels rushed or pressured or in some cases even demanded… everyone rejoices.

Except, sometimes, the chassan or kallah, or both.

Sometimes therapists are called in to assist right before the engagement, sometimes during, other times once they’re married, or much later, and sometimes not at all.

Proponents of hurrying young people to the chuppah will confidently share their “happy ending stories” of those who were so nervous they almost didn’t go through with it, but “Baruch Hashem, we were mechazek them and got them where they needed to be, so mazal tov- all is well now.” Good thing we didn’t let them drag their feet or listen to those nagging doubts. 

And yes, sometimes, that loving encouragement from the parents, the shadchan, the dating coach, the Rabbi or Rebbetzin, or the aunt-who’s-not-a-professional-but-really-good-at-this-stuff was exactly what they needed, and they are indeed now deeply grateful and happily married.

But sometimes, more often than most realized, the story ends very differently, and hardly anyone knows, until they finally open up:

“I always thought there was something not quite right about how I felt when we were getting engaged, but I was told his Rebbe said we need to get engaged or break up by the next date, and he’s a great guy, so we should just go for it. Now we’re married but I wish I had just let it end.”

“I told my parents I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry her, but they reassured me that she was exactly what I needed, and that the feelings would come later, so I trusted them. It’s been a few years, but we’re both still miserable.”

These are the sort of painful confessions therapists hear on the regular.

Another justification some try to offer for hustling to seal the deal is:

“Well, if you look at the divorce rates in the broader population, it’s clear that dating longer doesn’t lead to happier marriages. Compare that with the chassidishe communities, who get engaged after only one or two meetings, or the Yeshivish world, who only date briefly, and their divorce rates are far lower. Clearly, when it comes to dating, less is more.”

This logic may sound compelling at first glance, and I believed it at one point too, but it’s a good example of how numbers don’t always tell the full story. Perhaps the divorce rates are lower in fast-dating communities because their marriages are genuinely happier.

But also, maybe it’s because the cultural stigma against divorce is a powerful deterrent, compounded by the prevalence of early pregnancies and financial dependence. It’s also possible that the communal values and messaging around honoring commitment and family-building are stronger than those of individual autonomy and relational well-being. Staying married and staying happily, healthily married are two very different criteria.

It would be difficult to get accurate and useful data on this phenomenon, how well the couples who were “married off” young and fast are actually doing by their own assessments, although I imagine and hope that some researchers will try. Anecdotally, we see some who present as proud and thriving, some who are doing varying degrees of “okay,” and others who are devastated and traumatized. 

So why challenge the protocol? There’s no perfect system anyway.

While examining outcomes is crucially relevant, examining the inherent value and ethicality of the process is worthwhile as well.

If a person is mature and old enough to get married, to be in an adult relationship, to start a family, and take responsibility for a home, perhaps it should be considered that this person is mature and old enough to make this decision in an informed, autonomous, and intentional way.

Choosing whom to marry is arguably the most impactful life decision we make. Whether this decision is made after one meeting or one year of dating (or longer), you can’t possibly learn or predict everything about the person or your future, and so at some point, making the long term commitment is a leap of faith. Yet there is a gargantuan difference between making that leap on the basis of having connected enough to feel ready personally versus being told “this is right for you; it’s time- just do it.” Marriage is not a Nike commercial.

I don’t believe there is a perfect, formulaic time frame, number of dates, or set of algorithmic compatibilities (yet) that we can give singles to guarantee their readiness. What they need will vary based on their personalities, worldviews, and cultural influences. But I do believe that relationships deserve to start with two people who genuinely want to be in them, by choice. And choice means feeling that they were able to get at least a baseline idea of what this commitment entails- both about the potential partner and what marriage is and expects of them.

The Gemara does list finding a marriage partner as one of the obligations that a parent has toward a child. This would indicate that there is an expectation that parents oversee and facilitate the process, and it can be accomplished through chinuch, affiliation with community and resources, helping the adult child with networking, and offering guidance along the way, either directly or through others, as well as helping to plan the wedding and set the newlyweds up for life together. There are communal and socio-cultural gradations regarding how involved the parents are logistically, and therefore how much people who are dating rely on their parents and other adults in this way. The goal of this article is not to disconnect or discourage parents from their role in supporting their children to chuppah. It's to encourage parents to empower their children with knowledge, information, self-awareness, free will, and permission to ultimately decide responsibly, once an option is in place, if this is the person s/he wants to marry. Or as we often say to clients: "I won't make this decision for you. But I'd be happy to help you clarify your own thoughts and feelings so that you can more confidently make it for yourself."

Having parents and mentors who are attuned and wise and can offer the benefit of their life experience and guidance can be a precious gift. But there is a profound difference between guidance and control.

It’s been explained to me that another prevalent belief among communities who practice marrying off their children to spouses they don’t yet know well, is that parents and other trusted adults “have the best interests of their children in mind, perhaps even have some form of ruach hakodesh or siyata dishmaya,” and are therefore more qualified to choose a partner than this young person who may have never even spoken to a member of the opposite gender.

“And anyway, Hashem makes zivuggim- you can really just put any two people from similar backgrounds together, and if they’re willing to work on their middos and be good to one another, they can be happy together,” some will confidently opine.

For many years, I respected this belief and practice as simply a cultural, philosophical difference that I couldn’t personally relate to, because of my own different background and biases. And while I own that I am absolutely still biased by my limited life experience and exposure, part of that includes having sat with the pain and heartbreak of too many relational casualties resulting from this approach.

Unfortunately, since generally, most of the people who feel empowered to speak and write openly about their married-off-young trauma are ones who ultimately divorce and leave the fold, these instances are often dismissed as outlier stories, the exceptions that prove the rule: “healthy, frum, well-adjusted young couples do beautifully marrying this way; it’s only the ’people with issues’ who ‘fail.’”

Yet it’s this exact assumption that leads some of these otherwise “healthy, frum, well-adjusted people” to remain suffering in painful unions they never truly chose, for fear of being considered a failure. (There are other variables as well, such as staying together for their children, concern about their siblings’ shidduch prospects, fear of being alone, family abandonment, and financial dependency.) And so many end up suffering privately and even feeling that they have no choice but to perpetuate this practice with their own children, despite desperately wishing otherwise. Even among those who divorce, if they hope to remarry within their community, they won’t necessarily feel comfortable criticizing the process.

When I’m referred a scared young person who is engaged or about to become engaged, I confess to the referring parent (or Rabbi, kallah teacher, mentor, etc) that I can’t and won’t promise to help them get their kid to the chuppah. But what I am happy to do is to try and help these young adults figure out whether they would like to get themselves to the chuppah.

When we offer a message like this:

“You know, you don’t have to go through with this if you don’t believe it’s right for you,” the relief is often immediately visible, and not even always because they want to call it off.

Often just giving someone permission to either take some more time to assess and make the decision, or to not move forward with a commitment, is exactly what gives them the space that allows them get to a place where they can then become emotionally ready to commit, if it does feel right.

And sometimes it allows them to be honest enough with themselves to say, “this really isn’t what I want” or “I’m just not ready yet” and find the clarity and courage to step away. Even if it’s uncomfortable and embarrassing in the short term, to break up or break an engagement, it’s far more painful to marry a person you don’t want to be with, or to be married to someone who doesn’t want to be with you.

To clarify: it’s not necessarily the case that people who choose a partner with more agency are statistically more likely to stay married or even to have more fulfilling relationships. It just means that the inevitable risks and unknowns that come with committing to marriage are a choice they were able to make of their own volition, on their own time frame, with “informed consent.” This way, when they bump into the normal difficulties of life and marriage, (or extenuating ones) they can own their decisions and feel empowered to strategize together. And even if it doesn’t end well, they can still look back and know that they made the best decision they could at the time, rather than feeling betrayed and confused by a reality that happened to them.

The point of all this is not G-d forbid to cast aspersions on whole communities or even just to criticize. It’s most useful and respectful to acknowledge a problem when at least suggesting possible solutions. One way that we practice love for others is by advocating to make things better for them and trying to alleviate pain when possible. I genuinely believe that the overwhelming majority of parents and mentors who “marry off” their adult children have noble intentions, believe this is right, and want the best for them. My hope in questioning the efficacy and describing the pathology we often observe afterwards is to raise awareness about some of the lesser known struggles and damage, with the goal of preventing some of the suffering, and setting more young people up for healthier, happier, holier marriages.

So what is the alternative?

One is a shift in perspective, and by extension, in language and process. Instead of parents viewing it as our obligation to “marry off” our “kids” to strangers selected for them based on hearsay, while they submit to passively trusting the process, perhaps we could consider a paradigm shift:

As parents, we can first take responsibility for modeling and teaching our families relationship skills over the years, including communication, self-awareness, life skills, and conscious middos work.

Then once they are old enough, mature enough, and emotionally ready to consider marriage, (which includes them wanting to get married) we can have candid conversations with them about what marriage involves, how they see and work on themselves, what their hopes, values, and plans are, and what to look for when dating.

Then we can help them network to find suitable partners to meet. Once they’ve met someone they feel could be right, we can deliberately not rush them, support their process, allow them to question, and offer them the option to talk to either a mentor or a professional if they’d like help or guidance beyond what parents can offer. We can make it clear that it’s more important to us to see them get married in a healthy way, at the right time, to someone they feel is right for them, than to see them married quickly to someone with the “right resume,” yichus, or externals based on communal criteria.

We can encourage them to assess and honor their own sense of emotional, rational, spiritual, and physical attraction and compatibility with the people they date. And instead of “marrying off our kids,” where they are the infantilized objects and we are the authoritarian subjects, we can facilitate and celebrate our young adults actively and happily choosing to get married when they are ready, to partners they choose, with Hashem’s help.

(In the meantime, we therapists understand that change is not easy, and we are still here to support and respect individuals, couples, and families, wherever they find themselves in this process. I would just love for us to be a little less busy with this particular, somewhat preventable phenomenon, with the hope and prayer of nurturing healthier marriages.)