So…What Are You Looking For?

I am talking shidduchim, of course.

This has got to be the most irritating question in the world. Luckily, I am not as harassed with this as others are, thanks to my fierce glares at any attempt to ask me, you know, PERSONAL QUESTIONS, if one isn’t a close personal friend.

But some people are blissfully free from tact, intuition, or the ability to feel my displeasure, and so I get hit with the question every so often. Others aren’t as bad – they are actually trying to red me a shidduch and the ensuing conversation inevitably leads to the question: ‘so, what are you looking for?’

That is what happened today, when a very nice coworker tried talking me into dating one of two guys her husband knows (or both of them, if I so wished). ‘Look, they are Baalei Teshuvah. do you mind?’

I don’t, as it happens. But I do have reservations. ‘It depends how long they have been frum. Also, what they were doing in their life before’. (that wisdom was learned from my BT BFF who told me some guys redt to her, couldn’t report anything about their doings in their former incarnation – never mind that they only became furm at age 30. as she commented: ‘they had no job, no life, but, voila! Now they have a profession. They are BT!’)

Well, it turns out she didn’t know how/when they saw the light. She wasn’t sure about their frumkeit level either, or their hashkafa. She knew that one was either studying engineering or working in the field, and the other was doing ‘something with cameras’. Oh, and they were (or at least one of them was) ‘tall and handsome’.

Not looking for a decorative husband, I politely explained that I need to know more. And somehow, when she was trying to decipher from her post-it note what she wrote about their professions, I think I mentioned that the cameras guy didn’t sound too ‘intellectual’. Big mistake. Because then I had to face the dreary ‘what exactly are you looking for’, of course.

I have my stock of answers. ‘A good Jew’ (that throws everybody off) ‘a millionaire’ (with a straight face). But really, I find this so unbearably stupid. Besides the most basic and terribly obvious details, (healthy – duh! – nice, who would’ve thunk it! – intelligent…oh, the horror!), nobody has any idea, and that includes myself. And most people who can give you detailed and colorful descriptions of their desired spouses end up married to the exact opposites of what they described.

And don’t ask me which kind of guys I am attracted to. I once participated in a ‘literary crushes’ thread (I am weird like that, OK?) and my list included everybody from Mr. Darcy to Edmund Bertram to Remus Lupin to Pratchett’s Captain Carrot. And mine wasn’t the only list to feature extremely different (fictional) specimen of manhood.

I suppose I can try answering, the next time I get the WAYLF:  ‘I am looking for a cross between a regency gentleman and a complicatedly simple police officer’. I don’t believe I will get too many follow-up questions (or shidduchim suggestions, for that matter) after such a reply…

November 10, 2009. Uncategorized.