Only One Wedding Picture

You got married?!", my friend says excitedly. "I didn't even know you were seeing anyone!"

I wasn't," I reply matter-of-factly.

I've had this same conversation dozens of times in the last four weeks and I expect to have it dozens more times in the next four weeks.

Here's how it happened. I was minding my own business in November of 2023 when a dating website I had long been ignoring sent me an email.

"Full Access for a Week - Free!".

"Fine," I thought, growling under my breath at the uselessness of online dating. "I'm not paying for this again, but I'll update the profile for the week and see what happens."

In the course of the week I talked to a scammer who was using a chatbot to translate to English, a nice but desperate fellow 20 years my junior and one guy from a neighboring state who seemed too perfect to be real.

"Here's my phone number," he wrote too soon. "We can text if you'd like."

I wasn't sure about this idea. Scammers swarm widows on dating sites like mosquitoes in Minnesota and their first step, if they can write English well enough, is to lure the widow off the site and onto her phone.

I said no, but he was still willing to write to me on the site and at the end of the week, I had to make a decision. I had no idea of paying for a subscription so it was text or nothing.

"Fine.", I said again, growling again. "What's the worst thing that could happen?"

We texted and I was reassured that his command of the English language was excellent, unlike the fellow using the chatbot. So was his knowledge of Torah and Jewish practice.

We graduated to phone calls.

"I'll get right to the point," I said a few minutes into the first call. "What do you think about marriage?"

People are a little shocked when I tell this part of the story, but I was a busy widow for 15 years. I have plenty of friends, an intense job I love and I didn't have time to waste kissing frogs. If a potential date couldn't answer this question to my satisfaction then I was not interested

Harsh? Maybe. Brazen? Yes, by necessity.

Do I recommend it? 100% yes!

Anyway, he answered the question to my satisfaction and thus began six weeks of phone calls, a tricky endeavor since he doesn't talk much. We would study the weekly Torah portion together and though the conversation tended to go off track into personal issues at some point, the calls always lasted much longer than I thought they would.

And I always hung up more content than when the call started. That was a good sign.

"So....would you like to meet?", he asked one day, before I expected it.

"I would!", I said. "But how would we do this? Meet in the middle?"

"I'll come to you," he said, much to my delight.

My girlfriends and I talk about dating a lot, as single women will and one thing comes up over and over again.

"He has to try," we repeat to each other, knowing how easy and unsatisfactory it is to drive a whole relationship on our own.

My phone friend from the neighboring state was indeed willing to try. He drove 8 hours to see if we were a good match.

I usually end the story here by explaining that we figured he would stay through Shabbat. If it wasn't a good match, he would go home on Sunday and if it was.... well, he left on Tuesday.

"When did you fall in love with him? Do you remember the moment?", asked my friend a few weeks after our wedding.

"I think it was the moment he protectively steered me out of traffic as we were taking a walk." I reply. "He just put an arm around my shoulder to steer me toward the curb and then took it back, but it was the first time he touched me and sparks flew."

That was the moment it became too late to ask questions and that's what this essay is really about.

It used to be that I would date like we learned in high school. I would meet someone with which there was mutual interest and we would talk about relatively trivial topics with no goal in mind. That kind of random exploration is appropriate for a 17-year-old, but not for an adult.

No, at our age we knew what we were looking for and had the courage to be forthright about it. We had a precious six weeks to talk to each other without the distraction of physical presence and we used it to talk about our goals, values and how we wanted our futures to play out. In the religious Jewish world young people who have been introduced usually get about 3 dates to do this before they are expected to know whether they are a good match for marriage. Why so little time and such laser focus?

You know why.

Once we had met in person, our focus changed quickly, as it naturally will when there is chemistry. My now-husband and I tried to never be alone before we married. We’re religious people and we wanted chaperones.

"Why do you need a chaperone?", friends would say when I asked them to play this role. "You're adults."

"That's exactly why!", I would reply. "No one cares what we do except us, but we care a lot."

As if self-control became easier in adulthood! I would assert that it’s actually harder, even with the enhanced ability to put off gratification that most of us develop in adulthood. Young people have the added pressure of a potential unwanted pregnancy, plus all the parental disapproval that would come with it. Without any external pressures on our behavior, it was completely up to us to live up to our values and believe me, it wasn’t easy.

We decided to marry 3 days after he arrived for that first visit and we carried out this plan six weeks later. We called it a "religious elopement". My new husband's rabbi did the ceremony after the regular Sunday morning prayer service. I wore my favorite blue dress. The cantor and his young son sang. Ten or 12 strangers smiled happily throughout the ceremony and ate bagels with us afterwards. The janitor thoughtfully asked if we would like a picture so we went back to the sanctuary for a moment and took the one picture of our wedding day. It reminds me of the simple pictures of the weddings of our immigrant ancestors. It was beautiful and simple and perfect.

We had to get married. Seriously, what were we going to do? We like to be together, that's why we wanted to marry. Would we suffer our way through two-week separations and 8-hour drives for months? Move him here to live down the street? Throw our values out the window and play “house”?

Of course not.

I’ll write other essays, no doubt, about the experience of marrying someone I had only known for three months and you can judge for yourself whether it was a good idea. In the meantime, I stand by the quality of our decision-making.

“So impulsive!,” you might say, but I’m actually not impulsive at all.

We knew what we wanted and we knew we had found it. I’ve rejected enough potential mates in 15 years to know it would be the height of foolishness to let this opportunity go by. I was not about to let fear get in the way where there is a high probability for happiness. Life has been abundantly clear that it does not hold up that imaginary bargain where I avoid risk so that it will not exact pain.

The future is always uncertain and the best anyone can do is evaluate the risk/reward equation, mitigate risks as possible and seize the day.

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