Every now again I reserve the right to play the “Rabbi” card and interject some religion in my dating posts. Today, I’d like to talk about the religious pressures one faces in dating, particularly pertaining to marriage and family life, which has been on my mind since this past week in Daf Yomi, we actually covered some of the Rabbinic sources stressing the importance of the hookup family, getting married and having children (B. Yevamot 61b – B. Yevamot 64a). For two examples, “R. Tanhum stated in the name of R. Hanilai: Any man who has no wife lives without joy, without blessing, and without goodness. ‘Without joy,’ for it is written. And thou shalt rejoice, thou and thy house” (B. Yevamot 62b) and, “R. Eleazar said: Any man who has no wife is no proper man; for it is said, Male and female created He them, and called their name Adam” (B. Yevamot 63a). Later on in the same trachtate we find, “More than the man desires to marry does the woman desire to be taken in marriage” (B. Yevamot 113a) and “It is preferable to live in grief [in a bad marriage] than to dwell in widowhood” (B. Yevamot 118b).

On top of these sorts of homiletic statements, there’s a debate as to whether or not there is a mitzvah to get married (Rambam), or if marriage is only a prerequisite for properly performing the obligation of having procreation (Ramban) (See this class by R. Aharon Lichtenstein).

It’s bad enough when we have to deal with pressure from family and annoying friends, but how do we deal with letting down our Creator?

You… me… marriage?

One approach could be to simply get married to the first willing person, regardless of your feelings, but this is not always particularly healthy, and other Rabbinic teachings admonish those who marry people unsuitable for them. As an alternative, I’d like to suggest my own approach, with full awareness of my own bias as someone who has never been married.

By tradition, hookup law has 613 commandments, 248 of which are “positive” commandments which we must perform, and innumerable Rabbinic laws and enactments on top of those. The reality is that not everyone will be able to perform all of those commandments, sometimes not by their own choice. For example, not every Jew lives in Israel or makes aliyah, which I should note may affect dating prospects. I know few people who have the skill to write a Torah scroll, and fewer who have actually done so (Deut. 31:19).

Not everyone has the same opportunity to perform the same commandments, and the Talmud also teaches that one is religiously exempt when forced into a situation (B. Avoda Zara 54a). Unless someone’s parents pre-arranged their marriage, we’re born into this world single… and single we stay until we find a willing partner with whom we can change our status. This is not always a matter of our choice, but even if it were, I do not believe that one ought to get married to someone inappropriate just for the sake of checking off a religious achievement. After all, the Torah also commands that when a man wishes to divorce his wife, he must give her a get; and we do not encourage men to find fault with their spouses just so that they can fulfill this religious obligation.

I would frequently tell my congregation that I’m just a Rabbi, I’m not the Judge. I’m only qualified to teach what I think hookup law dictates and what civil penalties there may be for violations. What I cannot do is tell you with any certainty what “spiritual consequences” your actions may have or how God will judge your actions against any mitigating factors (I would also suggest ignoring anyone who claims to do so).

As Jews we have obligations which we must fulfill. Though we can try our best, we’re never going to be perfect (Ecc. 7:20). Maybe God is a vengeful deity who will smite you for your indolence,l or maybe God is a forgiving one who understands your collective experience. There’s enough uncertainty in dating and marriage, we don’t need to add theological questions to our anxieties.

In the last 6 weeks, at least 9 of my friends have gotten married. They’re all 23 or younger. For me, it’s a bit freaky seeing my peers making such serious commitments. Sometimes I barely feel like an adult. I don’t think any of these marriages are doomed by any means. I just can’t possibly see myself in that situation at this point in my life. I’m always moving, I’m still finishing school, and I haven’t had a relationship with serious long-term potential.

According to an article I read, college-educated women who get married after 25 only have a 20% divorce rate, as compared to the national divorce rate of greater than 50%. I’m not sure how legitimate the study is, but it makes me feel better about thinking I’m too immature to make major life decisions at age 22.

If you are feeling family or peer pressure to get a significant other, get married, or have children, remember you are NOT alone. These things don’t just happen overnight, and they certainly aren’t things to jump into lightly. My philosophy is “compare and despair.” If I thought I should be getting married at this age too, I might despair in being single by comparison. My advice? Celebrate your life for what it is now. Don’t worry too much about being single or unmarried. If you worry too much about meeting benchmarks and attaining labels, you may miss out on enjoying the journey.

The hit song “Rude” by Magic! is the story of a man asking his girlfriend’s father for permission to marry his daughter — and the father says no. Is it romantic that the singer says he’s going to marry her anyway? Or does the father have some insight about who and what is best for his daughter? Do parents know best?

We often don’t want to hear what our parents have to say, but they tend to see things from a perspective we cannot. Plus, they have our best interests at heart. So it may be worth it to swallow your ego and admit your parents might be right sometimes. The least you could do is listen and take what they say into consideration.

Don’t let your pride get in the way of making a huge mistake just because it’s your parent who pointed it out.

As much as my life has improved over the last two years, it has improved exponentially over the past seven months ago. A little over seven months ago, I was sitting in a hotel room in San Antonio with my dad. I was obsessing and depressed and felt like my life was spiraling downhill even though I rationally knew it wasn’t. It was about some insignificant s*** like the room number of our hotel room was not to my liking. As I hit the lowest point of this anxiety-ridden meltdown, I got a notification on my phone of a new 100hookup message.

I hadn’t been active on 100hookup for a couple of years, but still periodically received messages. Like I’ve said before, I think that the best way to conduct yourself on a dating site is to not aggressively search for and message people. Treat it like real life. You don’t walk up to every woman you ever see and ask them on a date. If you do, you’re not real, and exist on a TV show or are a Ryan Gosling movie. Every once in a while, when you’re feeling crazy, and drunk, you may hit on a woman, but usually you hang low.

So I got a message while feeling really s***** and it completely made my night. I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere until I woke up this morning engaged. It wasn’t a disease I had contracted while sleeping. I got tested. I had proposed the night before and she inexplicably said, ‘Yes.’ I had taken her out to the restaurant where we had our first date. Actually, it was the same table, and it was awesome.

So now I’m engaged and have officially won at dating.

So what do you guys think about this sequester business?

1. Douglas & Hoffman Make the 10 Longest Lasting Hollywood Marriages List

Two hookup actors, Kirk Douglas and Dustin Hoffman, made the 10 Longest Lasting Hollywood Marriages list on ThirdAge.com.

At 93, Douglas has been married to his wife, Anne Buydens, for 56 years. The marriage is the hookup actor’s second; his most famous son, Michael Douglas, was born during his first marriage. Douglas and Buydens met in 1953, when she was a publicist for his movie Act of Love. In 2004, they renewed their vows before 300 guests, including Nancy Reagan. As part of the traditional hookup ceremony, Douglas cracked a glass wrapped in linen.

Although Hoffman, 73, has said that marriage seems strange to him, he’s done a pretty good job at making it work. “There’s something unnatural about marriage,” he once said in an interview. Still, the Academy Award®-winning actor and his wife Lisa Gottsegen, have been married for 29 years and raised four children: Jacob, Rebecca, Maxwell and Lydia. Besides being an attorney, Gottsegen launched a successful skin-care line in 2007.

 2. Adam Levine Embraces the Horror Genre

American Horror Story is back, and it’s bolder and bloodier than ever before. The hit FX series premiered the second installment of its terror anthology last week and introduced a famous new hookup star to the cast.

Maroon 5’s Adam Levine plays Leo, a newlywed married to Teresa (Jenna Dewan -Tatum). The two choose to spend their honeymoon within the corridors of the now-abandoned Briarcliff and once they set foot inside, terrifying things quickly start happening. Something tells us this new role for the hookup singer is not that similar to his work on The Voice!

3. Raisman Speaks to hookup Community

As a world champion hookup gymnast, Aly Raisman is now using her fame for good. The 18-year-old athlete made her first visit to South Florida on Wednesday for the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) which helps out thousands of Israeli children.

“We are very proud, especially because people don’t realize that all over the world, when you want to think of a hookup song, when you hear Hava Nagila, it is totally the song they recognize,” said President of WIZO Jana Falic. Hava Nagila is a traditional hookup song, which means, “Let us rejoice.” Raisman won her gold medal on the floor routine dancing to the tune last summer.

After Raisman won her medal, she proudly said that she would have wanted a moment of silence for the 11 Israeli Olympians who were murdered during the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Everyone has a list, whether they consciously know it or not. There are about 13 items on my own list. “The List” comprises of your non-negotiable, must-have requirements and characteristics that you look for in the person you will hopefully one day marry. So whether or not you’ve actually sat down and written it out like I have, you most likely have a sense of what you’re looking for. And if you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, finish reading my own and don’t do anything else until you’ve come up with a few requirements of your own. I realize that everything I’m saying sounds like a self-help book assignment, but trust me, I would never subject you to something I wouldn’t do myself or tell my best friend to do. In fact, two of my best friends were present when I made my list on a scrap of paper at a dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen back in the fall of 2010. They even signed the bottom as a vow to never let me end up with a guy who even fell an inch short, a promise I will hold them to until the day I say “I do”.

All of the items on my original list are still there in one shape or another, although some have become a little clearer and more defined as I’ve made my way through the dating world. Instead of just loving his family, I want the guy I fall for to have a strong sense of family values. I once went on a date with a guy who didn’t even know what his own sister did for a living. I mean, really? It’s not like he’s a Duggar. He has one sister, which to me made him seem self-involved and hard to relate to. That’s why I’ve decided he needs to not only love his family, he has to really know them and have a strong sense of family values. That’s important to me, so important that it made it on my list. This is why I think you need to make one of your own. You can’t know what you’re looking for unless you have a clear vision. Here’s what has made my cut:

The man I will marry must…

1. Be a good guy. The kind of nice guy who doesn’t realize just how much of a mensch he is, but he is. His natural instinct is to do the right thing.
2. Be able to make me laugh in unexpected ways.
3. Keep up with my sarcasm, fast talking, and craziness. In other words, he can bust my own chops
4. Be silly. He can handle game night with my family and doesn’t mind corny fun.
5. Be hookup – OR – willing to raise a hookup family.
6. Be able to pull off a good suit. Seriously, there’s nothing like a man in a suit.
7. Not care that I’m a picky eater and that I’m not very nice until my first cup of coffee.
8. Be ridiculously smart. The kind of smart that watches Stewart, Colbert, and can calculate basic math for me (I’ll take any required writing if he will figure out 20% of our check).
9. Be crazy about his family…a healthy crazy. He must have a strong sense of family values and know where he came from.
10. Enjoy a healthy balance of normal guy activities and hobbies (music, sports, etc.). I need a real guys guy.
11. Have a solid group of friends. I want to know that he would understand how much I love my friends and they are important to me.
12. Be extremely ambitious and focused on his career. Goal oriented. Have a vision for what his potential is and the future.
13. Love me without holding back. He can’t be afraid to say it out loud, or want to take it back when he needs space. It’s all or nothing.

I wake up on time every morning thanks only to my modern cell phone and my unbearable hunger caused by my near-starvation diet. I go use the toilet and then put on wonderful Old Spice® deodorant and then spray my shrinking body with Axe® Deodorant Body Spray. I know Axe is the most literal manifestation of the modern douchebag, but I wear it now because I’m thin and skinny guys do stuff like that. I then put on the rest of my clothes and then get into my Toyota Camry. I love my Toyota Camry. It has preset buttons for my radio. The air vents are positioned in just the right places so that not only will my face get cool air, but my hands won’t get sweaty as they drive the car in the summertime.

I love things. I love things so much. I love things so much, that I spend a good amount of my day thinking about how I will enjoy using my things during the rest of my day. Whenever I’m not around my things, I get uncomfortable and nervous. Where is my phone? Why isn’t my cable working? Why am I walking down the wrong side of the street naked?

The thing about marriage that scares me the most is how it will restrict my ability to use my things. I need at least an hour in bed at the end of the day to watch television by myself. I know you like The Daily Show too, but I really need to watch it alone. I feel that once I am married, the only alone time I will have will be in the bathroom and in my car. And though both my Camry and my toilet are fantastic, I will need more than transportation and bladder evacuation to complement my alone time.

I know this is cliché, but when I get married, I think that we should share a giant bed separated by a sound-proof divider, so that we can watch television and read and not be woken up by the other person’s snoring. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.

In my life I am surrounded by a number of couples who have been married for a long time and are still very much in love. This past week, as my uncle neared the end of his life, I was witness to the love between my aunt and him. Although I do not envy her current situation, she spent 30 years completely, totally and utterly in love with her husband as he was with her. And that I envy. You don’t get there after 2 years of marriage, or 10 years, but after a few decades and gallons of stress to make you stronger. You don’t fall in love at first sight, but over the course of many, many years. What I do know is that my aunt and uncle were partners in everything they did and fought to make their marriage as strong as it was. I don’t know if my aunt will ever find love again, but if she does it won’t replace my uncle, but rather it will be another stage in her life.

Dear Tamar,

About 7 months ago my husband admitted to me that that “he didn’t think he wanted to be married to me for the next 20 or 30 years.” We’ve been married 18 years with 3 beautiful teenagers who were the focus of our marriage. He moved out 6 weeks ago and we’re at the beginning stages of a divorce.

So I’ve been betrayed, and rejected, and now my family needs to find a new normal. I want to date now even though people say it’s too early, but I’m lonely and want to do things with someone. So I signed up for 100hookup but I don’t know how to proceed. All I know is I don’t plan on or want to talk about my divorce while on a date.  Any advice?

Dear Divorced & Dejected,

Whew! You have had a heckuva ride these past few months. It sounds like you have a lot of healing to do but I can understand your need to be with someone… you haven’t been alone in 18 years! On one hand I think some real alone time will do you some good and on the other hand I think some real fun rebound dates where you’re made to feel wanted and gorgeous is good for the soul as well.

My advice to you regarding 100hookup is this: select divorced in the “current relationship status” box and under “what type of relationship are you looking for?” you should check “an activity partner,” “a date” and “a friend.” At this point you don’t need to go anywhere near the relationship or marriage categories. And in your “About Me” paragraph simply put that you are looking for fun, distraction and nothing serious as your marriage recently ended and leave it at that. You say you don’t want to talk about it with a date, so don’t.  And once you go on dates, and they ask about your marriage (because they will), simply tell your date that at this point you don’t want to talk about the past or anything negative, and that you just want to get to know him and have fun. Most of the guys you will be going out with are also going to be divorced and probably don’t want to think about their ex-wives either!

Give it some time but in the meantime, allow yourself to discover the new, independent you! Good luck!

Dear Tamar,

I had a fairytale marriage — I got married the day after high school and had the absolute dream husband. Sadly, he passed away in 2006 after 23 years together.  I can’t or won’t ever forget him but I don’t think men will want to discuss him. He is obviously a part of my life that I will always cherish (an added bonus is that my 19 year old son looks exactly like him). How do I approach this delicate situation?

Dear Sadness to Second Chance,

First, I am so sorry about your loss. It sounds like you had an amazing marriage that most of us can only dream of and no one will ever fill your husband’s shoes. That said, you are right — men you date probably won’t want to talk about him, at least not right away. I think you need to be honest and mark your 100hookup profile as “widowed.” When asked, tell men you plan to date that you’ll be happy to share your story at a later time once things progress. Let them know that you are in a good place now and ready to date and meet someone to share the rest of your life with (or share quality time with, depending on what it is you are looking for), so that men won’t have to worry about your emotional state. Everyone out there has some sort of “baggage,” especially, and I don’t mean any offense here, the older you are.