Looking Over Your Shoulder

In every group of friends there is the person who is the listener. That person is me. Perhaps because I enjoy listening, and perhaps because I like helping people think things through, I often find myself on the listening end of dating quandaries. It’s not that I’m an expert at giving advice, I’m definitely not, but apparently I’m a good bouncing board for ideas. Right now I’d like to talk about one problem in particular that seems to come up with a bunch of my friends, with slightly different manifestations depending on the situation. Let me paint one sample scenario.

A girl is dating this guy. (Great beginning, I know.) At some point in the relationship the girl is unsure how she feels about this guy. She kinda likes him, but she kinda doesn’t. She notices that she find other guys attractive. At which point she’ll say something to me like, “Isn’t it a problem that I find other guys attractive? If I’m spending my whole date looking at the guy on the date next to me, doesn’t that mean I’m not so into my guy? Isn’t that a sign that this isn’t the right person for me?”

It isn’t always about attraction and looks. Sometimes it’s emotional instead of physical. If the girl is close friends with another guy (part of the reason that on principle I don’t have guy friends) she might ask, “Why is it that I really enjoy spending time with this guy friend and why do I have no problem making conversation with him, while things aren’t as great with the guy that I’m dating?” Or sometimes this question takes the form of, “While I was on my date, I kept thinking of other friends of mine who would get along with this guy who I’d like to set him up with. If I’m thinking about setting him up with someone else, doesn’t that mean that I don’t like him enough? If I really liked him, wouldn’t I not want to set him up with my friends?!”

Now that I’m thinking about it, this kind of situation actually happened to me once. I was on a date with this guy in a restaurant and seated right next to us was another shidduch date. They were situated so that the girl was next to me and the guy was across from her, so it was easy for me to just look over and glance at that other guy, who happened to be much better looking than my date, in my opinion. So I understand where people are coming from. And that is the point when the thought enters, “Why am I more interested in someone else’s date? This is a bad sign! It must mean I don’t really like my date, despite the fact then when it’s just us everything is great!”

I’m not a dating expert, and I definitely don’t claim to be. Usually my friends just come to me to vent, and I don’t give advice. I don’t tell people what to do for many reasons, firstly because it is their life and their decision, secondly, because I might not know enough to be able to give the best advice, and thirdly because if I tell them to dump a guy and they end up marrying him, they’ll always remember that I didn’t think it was a good idea, and who wants to have that hanging over them?

So when it comes to this topic I look at couples who have been happily married for many years. I remember when I was a kid, I heard this woman tell her husband that she thought a particular actor was “such a hunk.” At the time, I was horrified. Even though the husband didn’t mind and the woman could list all the actresses her husband thought were beautiful. I was still horrified. It’s one thing if she wants to think in her head such a thing, but to voice it to her husband? Isn’t she supposed to tell her husband that he is the best looking man in the world to her? This is an extreme example, and we can debate whether what she said was right or wrong a different time, but the point is, we’re all human. We’re all going to find other people in the world attractive other than our spouse. If you think you get married and then suddenly every member of the opposite sex who is not your spouse is suddenly completely unappealing to you, then you have seriously underestimated the Yetzer Harah.

The husband and wife in my story each knew that the other one would naturally find other people in the world attractive (especially actors/actresses/models!) and instead of pretending that they didn’t feel that way they chose to share it with each other. For them it was completely healthy. Many girls would be extremely offended if their husbands told them that another woman is beautiful (unless their husband is closely related to that person, i.e. sister, mother etc.), but this couple is so comfortable with their relationship, they are so open with each other, and they are so committed to each other, that by each of them sharing their personal preference in looks in other people, the other person did not feel threatened. They each had the attitude: Yes, I’m attracted to other people, and you should know that, but you are my spouse, and you are #1 in my life, so that thought of “that person is cute” means absolutely nothing to me. In case you couldn’t tell, after I got over being horrified, I realized it was only their deep love for each other that allowed them to share these thoughts, and I thought it was refreshingly honest and down-to-earth.

I’m not saying that having an interest of some sort in another person other than your date means absolutely nothing. What I am saying is that I think if you’re interested in another person- be it physically or emotionally- it doesn’t necessarily mean that your date isn’t the right person for you. Just because you think your date would get along with a good friend of yours, doesn’t mean that they are not for you. If it’s later on in the relationship, and the girl still gets along much more with her guy friend, then it might be a bigger problem then if say, it’s the first couple of dates, and she’s glancing over at the guy at the next table. If you’re at the stage before you’re really invested in the relationship, then of course your conversation isn’t going to be as good as it is with someone you know very well, and of course you’re still going to be attracted to other people.

I’m all for questioning, I’m all for thinking about why you feel a certain way and why you react to someone a certain way. But don’t assume that just because you’re looking over your shoulder, that the person right in front of you automatically isn’t good enough.

Platonic Relationships

This post is in response to Coralcap’s post “Just Friends” about whether it’s possible for a guy and a girl to be only friends and nothing more. My comment started getting long so I turned it into a post.

To quote Coral: "So what do you think? Is it possible to be just friends? Is it worthwhile to keep and/or form friendships with members of the opposite sex when on the Shidduch scene? Are there permissible boundaries or is the platonic relationship as mythical as the Tooth Fairy?"

My response:

When I was in 9^th grade, Rabbi Orlofsky came to my school and gave his famous speech on Platonic Relationships, where he states that such a thing is impossible because males think about sex a lot and therefore in the back of their minds always want something more. He advised all girls to “break up” so to speak with the guys who they are “just friends” with. The speech didn’t really affect me one way or the other since I didn’t have close guy friends, but I remember girls thinking he was extreme for telling them to write break up letters to male friends. Being the goody two shoes that I am, I believed most things my teachers and Rabbeim said in high school, and what he said made a lot of sense so I concluded that it was impossible for a guy and a girl to have a platonic relationship.

My views have changed slightly since then. In general I still don’t think it is possible to have platonic relationships, but there are cases where it is possible. Even in those cases, however, I think that both people at some point think about dating the other person. There is always that question of "maybe this will become something more?" hanging between the two people.

Also, from my experience (not personally, but witnessing friends' experiences), what ends up happening is that one of the two people begins to develop deeper feelings for the other person. I know plenty of people who would claim to be in platonic relationships, but the same way one of the girls on the video said that there are people who she calls "friends" who she would agree to date, usually one of the people involved hopes for something more. Unlike what Rabbi Orlofsky said, it is not always the guy who is the one secretly hoping to one day date the girl, just as often it is the other way around.

How does this affect shidduchim? I always learned in school that guys and girls should not interact because this may lead to friendship. The reason I was always told it is bad to become friends with a member of the opposite gender is that then it has the potential to become something more and if you are in high school, when hormones are crazy, it is difficult to keep the halachot of negiah. So, if this were the case then one would logically conclude that this does not hold true when one reaches the stage of shidduchim, because if the friendship becomes something deeper, then the two people can just get married. Right? Why not start becoming friendly with lots of members of the opposite gender when you’re ready to get married, with the purpose of marriage in mind?

My view on this relates to how I see relationships in general. To me relationships aren't something you can just start and end whenever you choose like turning on a song on your iPod that you can pause and play and stop and skip as you choose. I don’t think it is a good idea to have relationships with members of the opposite gender after marriage, because that possibility of it going further exists and that could potentially be a big problem. So unless you’re just going to give up all of your friends of the opposite gender after marriage, why start up these kinds of relationships before marriage just to break them off?

If you’re a girl and you start becoming friendly with lots of guys in the hopes that one day one of them will lead to shidduchim, what do you do when you’ve found the person to marry? I know of girls and guys who are close friends, and when the guy got married he invited female friends of his to his wedding. I find that somewhat awkward, for a few reasons, but on a practical note- weddings are very separate, so the female friend probably won’t even see her friend who is the groom, for more than a few seconds. She’ll dance with the kallah, who she probably doesn’t even know at all. That’s if the guy and girl who are not getting married to each other decide to continue being friends after one or both of them get married. It gets complicated. And if you decide to become friendly with one person at a time, then why not just date? Isn’t that the same thing? So, my biggest problem with becoming friends with guys just when you’re ready for shidduchim is that you’re starting and stopping relationships.

There is another category which I didn’t mention which is “being friendly,” but not “being friends.” This is when two people are more acquaintances, the type of people you have the “Hi how are you?” “I’m good B”H and yourself?” types of conversations with that never get further than that. In my opinion that is just polite and always OK, to just have basic small talk with the other gender. The trick is to make sure it doesn’t get past that, which if one of the parties believes in platonic relationships and the other does not, could get complicated.