"True to Me"

I was delighted to read this piece in Mishpacha Magazine by Avigail Stern, especially when it echoed my sentiments exactly. 

Stern describes her experience as an "older single," and when she finally reached her limit of "pretzel twisting." 

As a single, one is bombarded with "advice," and she was no different. She initially listened to it all, dutifully following their suggestions, until she realized that she was no longer dating as herself. 

She worked to rediscover what she needed, what she wanted, what her values were. She realized that hishtadlus doesn't mean doing everything and anything possible. 

She was discerning when it came to single events. She stopped sending out photos of herself, a step that she had disliked intensely (as did I, but my parents didn't let me). 

The experience of meeting her husband sounded so familiar: 

And at the end of our . . . first date, I walked back into my friend’s house shocked and confused. I liked him. And he liked me back. How did that happen? Wasn’t that weird? That’s not how this dating game usually plays out!

I’d been dating for 20 years. I knew how this was supposed to go. But apparently, the rules can change at any time, when Hashem wills it.

. . .  I knew I’d met someone unlike anyone I’d met before. I called my rebbetzin after that second date, just to make sure something wasn’t wrong with me. Is it normal to just like someone? To feel we connected so easily? To not have any doubts or worries about him as a person? Maybe I was missing something ominous that I just didn’t see?

She laughed and said this was a gift from Hashem called clarity. Barely four weeks later, still shocked but no longer confused, we drank a l’chayim. It had been the easiest, smoothest, calmest dating experience I ever had.

When I came home from my first date with Han, I remember walking through my door and thinking, "I like him!" Usually, it would be, "Well, he has this, this, and this going for him, but that, that, and that isn't really ok with me. People would say that it's not important. I guess I should go out again? But I don't want to . . ." 

Those "advisors" would have us think that choosing a spouse is merely a matter of tallying pros and cons. But it's more than that. I think of that scene in Fill the Void when they go to consult the rebbe, and he asks her what she feels about it. She briskly replies, "It's not a matter of feeling," but the rebbe begs to differ, that it is very much about feeling. 

It doesn't have to be about forcing yourself to become someone else. It doesn't have to be about ignoring your gut just because someone is good "on paper." It doesn't have to be analyzed to death. We meet the right people in our lives at the appointed times. 

Hindsight is 20/20, but I regret how nervous I was in those years, how I believed that "trying" meant being on active alert 24/7. It was exhausting, while the ending would be the same. I'm still a worrier, though. That hasn't changed. Work in progress.