Problems With Dating a Female Rabbi

Jordie Ger­son (not the female rabbi pic­tured) 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: Cri­tiques of Fem­i­nism: Argu­ments Against Fem­i­nism Essay