Herded like cattle headed to the slaughter.
That is how I felt walking into a room where, supposedly, I would meet my one and only. When I got there, there was not one and not only. There was everybody and nobody.
Every person corralled into this so-called shidduch event wore the same look: the hollow desperation of the hunted, dressed up for the occasion. Trying to save face, I hid my real face. I put on a mask — as everyone there did, defensively, instinctively — because showing yourself in a place like that is not courage. It is suicide.
In this masquerade, I did not show anyone my real self. I did not see anyone else's real face. I could not. The room was designed to make that impossible.
Sifting through a sea of faceless, impersonal singles — every one singularly alone and lonely in the crowd — I was choosing, or being chosen, for the most important decision of my life: building a Jewish home. Under conditions that would be inadequate for hiring an employee.
Nothing came of it. Nothing ever does.
The First Descent: Speed Dating
Adding insult to injury, I entered the speed-dating circuit. Here I got to talk to everyone for a few minutes, which meant I was humiliated every few minutes. Either I did not want to talk with them, or they did not want to talk with me. And the cruelest design of all: I was forced to sit across from people I had already dated. People who said no to me. People I said no to. And we performed this grotesque little theater of pretending none of that had happened, again and again, every few minutes, like a purgatorial loop engineered by someone who has never tasted shame.
The Second Descent: Eat to Meet
In my continuing spiral downward, I signed up for mixed Shabbos meals. Here I was trapped — not for minutes, but for hours — with people I knew from the first second of walking in that there was no possibility. The Shabbos table, which should be the most elevated space in Jewish life, had been converted into a holding pen. And I could not leave.
The Third Descent: The Profiles
Further down still, I signed up on the impersonal computer matching sites, where I was reduced to words and a picture. I became binary. Not male or female — yes or no. Based on what? Photographs where they never look like that in real life. And words — a word salad of marketing copy more designed to sell than to reveal an actual human being. I was now a commodity in a commodities market. Swipe. Click. Discard. Next.
The Bottom
After exhausting the entire pool of every possibility out there, my helplessness calcified into hopelessness.
I kept going. Because what else is there? I kept going to events with the desperate hope that "event"-ually, maybe this time. That event never happened. Nothing was happening. And at some point — I cannot tell you when — I crossed a line I did not see. I became that pathetic familiar face. The one everyone recognizes and no one wants. The fixture. The furniture.
I have not been on a date in over a year.
Am I doomed to become that fifty-year-old cringeworthy events addict, whose very presence at the table turns it into a creep-fest?
The Answer
Dear Sammy,
You are not broken. The system is broken. You are not the problem. You are the evidence.
What you have been subjected to is not shidduchim. It has never been shidduchim. Calling it shidduchim does not make it shidduchim, any more than pouring kosher salt on a pig makes it kosher. There is an old Yiddish saying: Fun a chazir's shvantz ken men nisht machen a shtreimel. From a pig's tail, you cannot fashion a shtreimel. The material is wrong. It will always be wrong. No amount of rebranding changes what it is.
Real shidduchim protects people. It shields their vulnerability. It guards their dignity and their privacy. The process is supposed to be confidential, carefully mediated by a real human being who knows both sides — not because these are nice ideas, but because without them, the entire thing collapses into exactly the wreckage you are describing.
Impersonal email blasts publicizing singles' information. WhatsApp groups circulating profiles like commodity listings. Women's meetings convened to "share" names. Mixed events. Speed dating. Zoom dating. Every do-it-yourself platform where you upload your life and browse other people's lives and reach out cold — every single one of these methods is the opposite of shidduchim. They do not merely fail. They actively destroy the conditions under which real connection becomes possible. They commodify human beings. They train people to evaluate strangers through the impoverished lens of a photograph and a paragraph. They strip away everything that makes a person a person and leave behind a product listing.
These are not Jewish methods with modern packaging. These are foreign mating practices wearing a Jewish mask. And the cruelest irony of all: they are self-defeating. They do not just fail to produce marriages — they make marriages harder to produce. Every cycle through the machine erodes something. Confidence. Trust. The belief that being known by another person is even possible.
A shadchan is supposed to be an agent who serves the people being matched. But the institution has been hollowed out and replaced by operators who ask to be "adopted" or "partnered with" — every outstretched helping hand with the other deep in the pocket. The incentives are so distorted, the exploitation so routine, that more and more real shadchanim have simply walked away.
Someone once asked a great sage: What is the core problem with shidduchim today?
Three words: Not enough shadchanim.
That was the diagnosis. It has only metastasized since. We did not just fail to produce more shadchanim. We systematically replaced the shadchan with machinery that cannot do what a shadchan does — and then stood around wondering why the machinery produces loneliness instead of marriages.
This dating and mating infrastructure is a hell of our own construction. We built it. We funded it. We attended it. We told ourselves it was progress.
"Abandon all hope, ye who enter."
Dante inscribed those words above the gates of Hell. Someone should have posted them at the entrance to every speed-dating event, every mixed Shabbos meal, every swiping app that promised connection and delivered isolation.
Sammy, the way out is the way it always was. A real person sitting across from a real person, with the dignity and the space to actually be seen. Not a profile. Not a product. Not a few humiliating minutes at a folding table.
A human encounter.
That is shidduchim. Everything else is the inferno.