In the Charedi community, people marry at a very young age, and all marriages are arranged. This makes navigating the dating scene a particularly daunting task for those who choose to leave. We spoke to three GesherEU members about their experiences of dating and finding love in the secular world.
Motti was not yet 17 – an age when most teenage boys are more concerned with playing football – when his parents started preparing him for marriage. “To get married earlier was considered a form of success,” he recalls, now aged 37. “The earlier you are married, the more popular you must be. So at the time, it was flattering and I didn’t see why I shouldn’t get married as quickly as I could.”
His parents set about finding a suitable bride. Less than a week after he first heard his potential fiancee’s name, he had travelled from Israel, where he was in Yeshiva, to London to meet her. He says it was a mere formality. “On Monday morning we were on the plane to London and by Monday afternoon I was engaged.” It was a few weeks before his 18th birthday.
“The assumption was always that the trip would end up in an engagement,” he explains. “It’s very rare for a boy or girl to meet more than one person or to meet more than once – it almost never happens. Nobody ever asked me what I wanted in a woman, and it’s got nothing to do with physical attraction. It’s about family status.”
Naomi* (name changed), 42, who was married at 20 – already on the ‘old’ side for a Charedi bride – agrees. “What happens in the community has no relationship to dating,” she says. “It’s vetting. There’s a list of names and the couple is put together based on the family’s reputation, how much money they have, things like that. And if both families are agreeable, the match will go ahead. It’s about whether someone is suitable – devout enough, with a good reputation and status – not about whether they’ll make you happy.”
At the time of his engagement, Motti didn’t speak any English, just Hebrew and a smattering of Yiddish, so he could barely converse with the girl his parents had chosen for him. When he arrived at the meeting, a celebration with drinks and food had already been prepared – which put him under still more pressure to agree to the match: “You just need to give the word, and everybody is waiting on the phone to hear the news of your engagement.”
He admits he did feel a flutter of excitement at the thought he’d be meeting the person he would be spending his life with. It was short-lived.“The conversation was, I would say, awkward. I had never spoken to a woman or girl since my early childhood. I didn’t even speak to my female cousins. I had no idea what to do, apart from the instructions I’d been given by a mentor at yeshiva. He’d told me I needed to tell the girl that I wanted to start a Jewish home, and have a Jewish family, following the rules of the Torah. Then I needed to ask her if she agreed and, if she said yes, I would say yes too. It was a verbal contract, agreeing to a certain lifestyle. What he didn’t say was that, if later, someone didn’t fancy this lifestyle anymore, they would be in breach of contract.”
“Breaking an engagement is seen as a bigger stigma even than divorce.”
Just 45 minutes after meeting, Motti and his intended bride had agreed to their match. But hours later, he began to feel he’d made a big mistake. It was too late to back out. “I felt like I’d signed myself into something I didn’t understand. I felt completely paralysed, a heaviness I couldn’t explain. I knew that breaking an engagement is seen as a bigger stigma even than divorce.”
Several years later, he learned that after the meeting, his intended had expressed doubts about the marriage to her parents, feeling a lack of connection, but had been persuaded to go ahead regardless.
He didn’t see or have any more contact with his fiancee for a whole year, until the day of the wedding. “You’re supposed to go back to Yeshiva and forget about it,” he explains. “A boy is not supposed to think about women or girls, even the girl they’re going to marry.”
“My father actually listened in on us, through a hatch.”
When Naomi met her future husband, it was the first time she’d ever spoken to a boy. “I had no experience. I just knew that my father was very keen on this guy. Trying to make conversation was very awkward and uncomfortable. My father actually listened in on us, through a hatch in my grandmother’s house.
“Afterwards, I felt, I don’t really know this person, and I didn’t feel sure. But my father dismissed my feelings. He said, ‘Everybody does it. It’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. It’ll be difficult in the beginning but you’ll get used to it.’”
But it wasn’t fine, and she didn’t get used to it, in large part because she wasn’t attracted to her husband. Naomi says her wedding night was a traumatic ordeal because she felt obliged to have sex with a total stranger. She had borrowed a biology book before her wedding, to learn about how children were made, but felt unable to talk to anyone about the intimate side of her relationship.
Despite going on to have four children together, the physical side of her marriage continued to be an issue: “I was angry that my parents and the community just expected me to live with my husband and never enjoy sex, ever, for the rest of my life,” she says.
“Love is not a Charedi thing,” states Pini, 26. “When people get engaged, the talk is never about the girl or the boy, but about the family.” He was 20 when he got engaged – by which time four of his former classmates were already fathers. “I was harder to match because I was always a bit of a weirdo – an artist,” he explains.
He remembers being excited about meeting his prospective bride, purely because getting married meant he’d be able to leave Yeshiva, which he saw as a prison. But when he met her, he wasn’t sure if he was attracted to her. “I was told that it didn’t matter because she was a good choice for me, and that after we’d got married and had sex, I would like her, that my feelings would grow. I was ignorant – I had no idea how things worked – so I agreed to go ahead.”
Pini’s instincts proved to be correct. The marriage only lasted for 18 months, until – no longer a believer – he left the community. By that time, he and his wife already had two children.
Motti’s marriage lasted for 10 years and produced three children. “It was very much a business partnership. It wasn’t a real relationship between a couple – there was no chemistry, no friendship, just two random strangers put together by external forces, trying to make it work. We shared a house, a bank account and children. But no matter how much both of us tried, it just didn’t work. We were not meant to be together.”
“Dating was trial and error – more error than trial.”
After Motti and his wife agreed to separate, he also left the community. He no longer believed in the Charedi way of life, or in religious Judaism. Still only 29 years old, he wanted to find love, but he had no experience, no knowledge of how the dating scene works, or how people behave on dates. He went on some dating apps – both Jewish and secular – looking for chemistry and a connection, and had a few ‘start-of relationships’, which didn’t mature: “It was trial and error – more error than trial.”
For Naomi, leaving the community was a difficult process, involving a long custody battle. It was several years before she felt ready to date. “I found the idea that you could actually choose who you wanted to date so liberating,” she says. “There was no pressure, no strings, and I was in control. I was like a kid going into a sweet shop – there was so much choice, I didn’t know where to begin.”
She admits she had no idea what normal romantic relationships entailed: “I had to change my mindset that I would meet someone, get married, and it would be forever. I had to learn that in the non-Charedi world you could just casually date, see someone, have a good time, and that’s it – it might not lead to anything. And as I got more confident I started to realise that nobody really knows what they’re doing. In the secular world, relationships don’t always work out, marriages don’t always work out. Dating in the secular world isn’t perfect either.”
After a few false starts, she met her now boyfriend on a dating app. “When I did start to develop feelings for him, I was scared – in a good way. I didn’t expect it to happen. But it also felt healing because I was in control of it and could enjoy it.”
“My first kiss wasn’t with a girl – it was with a Mezuzah!”
Pini says that when he first went out into the secular world, he embraced his freedom and was “quite a naughty boy” – a reaction to the restrictions of the community: “I just wanted to have fun with women, not to look for someone in particular,” he says. “Looking back, I think I had some trauma inside me, after getting married and my wife getting pregnant straight away, without even really knowing her.”
He recalls that his first date was a disaster. “It was like a job interview. After an hour, she ran away! It’s not surprising – the last time I’d hung out with girls was when I was seven, so I had no idea how to talk to them and no confidence. My first kiss wasn’t with a girl – it was with a Mezuzah! I also didn’t know how to dress; I looked like a grandma, a weirdo. Luckily, I’m a quick learner and I soon learned how to look cooler, and find my own style.”
Pini is now enjoying dating, although he’s not sure if he’s looking for a serious relationship. “I’m still dealing with a lot of issues, because I didn’t grow up in a normal environment,” he says. “Sometimes, I feel guilty. It’s only two years since I left the community – it’s all still really fresh. I’m on a journey.”
Motti met Siying, from Beijing – now his wife – while he was studying at UCL. “I was a member of the gliding club. When the next academic year started, I got involved in taking new students to the airfield at weekends to get them interested. My wife was one of these students. We ended up chatting the entire day. There’s a bit of controversy about who asked who for whose number. She claims she asked for mine, and I wholly disagree. After that, we became friends, kept messaging, kept meeting, and one thing led to another.”
The couple moved in together when the first Covid lockdown began. “If you can survive someone’s company for 10 months straight during a pandemic, you know it’s going to be fine,” he jokes. They got married in summer 2023, surrounded by GesherEU friends.
“Marriage in the community is about the group and the relationship of two people is just part of the survival of the group – it’s not about the two individuals. But outside, relationships are about two people making their own choices, deciding whether they want to be together.”