Jordie Gerson discusses the difficulties of dating while attending rabbinical school:
“What do you want to do with your degree in religion?” he asks.
“Become a rabbi,” I say.
If I like him, or think that I might, I’ll do whatever it takes not to tell him that.
“Oh,” he says, and goes quiet. He’s now picturing the rabbi at his home synagogue, comparing me to the bald guy with a gut who dresses up as a baseball player every Purim. “That’s intense,” he says. The R-bomb, it’s fail proof. It always shuts them up...
But far worse—and more common—are the men who fall for me but won’t touch me. For many Jewish men in their 20s, you can’t just date a rabbi. You have to be serious about her. This Madonna-whore complex has wreaked utter havoc on my dating life, and produced more conversations with the word ‘marriage’ in it than I want to recall. (“Marriage?!” I want to say, “Are you crazy? I just want to date you, for God’s sake. Just relax!”). But too many Jewish men think that they have to be serious—on-the-road-to-marriage serious—to even casually date me.
Gerson is correct, but there is a deeper problem as well: As more and more girls are figuring out, it is hard to be a highly-educated, very-successful woman in the dating world. Men do not want to date women who are significantly more intelligent, richer, or successful than them. Men have an evolutionary impulse to want to be the one who provides and protects. We like this role; it makes us happy.
But as Gerson is discovering, most men quickly lose interest in by people like her. When the woman in a relationship is more successful and potentially independent, the man feels useless, redundant and unnecessary. And who wants to feel that way?
Related: The Battle of the Sexes
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