August 11, 2009
In 2000, I wrote an article called Single Jewish Female: Dating Within the Faith. The piece documented my quest to date Jewish men while not ruling non-Jews completely out of the picture. With tongue-in-cheek humor, I spoke about my unique struggles with both groups while dealing with parental pressure to date only Jews and living in a city with a small Jewish population.
Of everything I have written in my career as a freelance writer, this article has gotten the biggest reaction. To this day, I still receive e-mails from others dealing with similar dating dilemmas, including numerous requests to follow up with a "what's happened since."
What has happened since is a lot of the same. I still live in the same city, I am still not married and I still date non-Jews. Interdating is simply a fact of life for single Jews who live in cities with smaller Jewish populations. Edmonton has around 800,000 residents in the metro area. The Jewish community is around 6,000, and has remained at that number since I was a child. Do the math. Unless one avoids having a social life, intimate connections with non-Jews are going to happen.
I don't date Jewish men as often as I did in my 20s. Shifting demographics has a lot to do with this. Men in my age group tend to already be married. The Jewish men in my community have mostly either married or moved away to large Jewish communities. The lack of a decent Jewish social life and kosher amenities, combined with our near Arctic climate, really does not create a huge incentive for a Jewish person to move here.
I haven't been on the market for the entire time I've been dating. It is good to exchange what seemed like a never-ending series of shallow coffee dates and one-time meetings for longer-term relationships. And yes, most of these relationships have been with non-Jewish men. The pool from which I date comes from the circles in which I travel and the people I know, and that is just the way it worked out.
I still experience parental pressure to marry someone Jewish. Although we don't discuss it as much anymore, I know that if I marry a non-Jew, my parents will be deeply disappointed. I do not know if their views have mellowed with my advancing age. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I have avoided getting married. I'm holding on to that tiny glimmer of hope that I will meet someone who is stable and a good match for me in terms of personality, politics and interests, and is also Jewish.
At the same time, I want to make sure I am with a partner because I love him, not because we both happen to have Jewish DNA and I want to please my parents. I also want to make sure my partner is with me for the same reason. One of my semi-serious relationships in the past few years was with a Jewish man. I had actually met this man for coffee on two occasions some years before. We met again after someone had given him my business card and he contacted me out of the blue. Me, ever curious, decided to give it a shot. And we hit if off, despite the fact that he claimed not to have remembered our first encounters. In hindsight, this should have been my first clue.
Six months into the relationship, he expressed the intention to get married and have kids before, in his words, "he was too old." He was in his early 30s at the time. Things he said and did made me think his parents were pressuring him. Of course, he denied that he was simply looking for the first available Jewish woman--though I think he was. When it became obvious that I was not going to force the relationship to go beyond where I was comfortable at the time, someone in his family introduced him to someone else with whom he immediately got involved. They are now married and have a family. I have to give him credit--he got what he wanted more or less according to his schedule.
Although it has never really worked for me--I am just not photogenic enough to pique initial interest--the Internet has helped some Jewish people from small communities connect with one another. One man in my community met and married a woman he met through an online Jewish dating service after nine years of being on the website almost constantly. Every time I would log in, there he was. I wondered if he always kept a browser window open to that website, even at work. He was very specific about what he was looking for, and ultimately he found her.
Dating exclusively in a small community has its perils. Where I live, just about everyone is related to everyone else either by blood or marriage. If your relationship with someone inside the community ends badly, you risk much of the community hearing about it, which could have a dramatic impact on your datability status. If you do end up dating within the community again, odds are you are going to end up constantly running into your ex.
Lack of choices is what ultimately leads members of small Jewish communities to interdate, which often leads to intermarriage. Still, I seriously think that when a Jewish person ends up with someone from "another religious stream" (as the dating websites call it), we at least want someone with whom we can share our Jewish values and pass them along to children. This has proven to be a very effective filtering device in my dating life. If a potential partner is not interested in what is a fundamental part of my life, then I don't believe he can truly be interested in me. No huppah, no thank you.
I have also learned that being with a Jewish partner is no guarantee for a harmonious home. Judaism can be expressed in so many ways that just because two people happen to be Jewish doesn't mean there will be no conflict over matters of religion. For example, the disparity in observance level between my parents is so great that it has caused friction over the years. I always joke that my parents have a mixed marriage, even though both of them are Jewish.
So, in the end, even though I am still a "Single Jewish Female," for me it all comes down to love, negotiation, compromise and companionship. I have a strong personality and believe in standing up for my values, so I know at least some of that is going to be kosher.
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