Date Long and Prosper

While walking on a Shabbos afternoon last year, I came across my neighbor, a sweet girl of about 21, with a boy. We smiled and wished each other Gut Shabbos, and continued on our ways. 

I figured, if the two are "walking out" together, then the engagement must be imminent. Time passed, to the point I thought maybe it wasn't my neighbor I had come across. But three months later, the engagement was made official. 

The family didn't do the usual three-months-or-less wedding; the invitations were for six months from the vort.

Since a couple wouldn't stroll about in public unless they had already reached an "understanding," I calculated that altogether, they would have been a courting or engaged couple for a year.

Her older sister had the same time frame. And it was by her wedding that I saw, probably for the first time ever, a couple having the commune of souls.

I did not see, as I usually do, any of the worries that often surface on the couple' faces under the chuppah. No rigid stances, darting eyes, nervous twitching, hand-wringing, clinging to the mother, or prostrate sobbing.

In her eagerness, the kallah took the aisle at a dead run. The chosson kept gazing at her, and her alone. They  smiled and laughed. I had never seen before such certainty in a chosson and kallah; they were free of any doubts. 

They really knew each other. 

(To clarify, I am not a romantic.)

Despite the family's financial comfort, they felt no need to rush the dating or wedding proceedings, and their daughters went to the chuppah knowing everything about their grooms, their likes, dislikes, their personalities, through and through. 

It is very possible that by the third date, they were definite: this guy is for me. Yet they still dated, holding off the inevitable; I think, for the better. 

It was their chuppah that made me think very differently of weddings. These two experiences remain the golden standard, in my view. 

Dating for some is like ticking off a box on a checklist, as though getting married should be done as quickly as possible to prove efficiency.

Perhaps I will be so bold as to say that some really want a party as soon as possible, and don't even think about  the fact that they will be spending the rest of their lives with this person. 

The party will happen; if they were willing to wait a little, how can that hurt?

I don't know what the future will bring, or how long my own courtship will take. But I would love to be able to achieve with my future significant other, before marriage, that true sense of friendship, ease in each other's company, and that definite assurance, to the point of casualness, that he is my bashert.