Q&A: Unrequited Love
Unrequited Love
Question
Hello and blessings,
I am from the Haredi sector.
I was in a relationship with a young woman; we met, got engaged, and were in contact for three months, and there was already an engagement and everything.
And then suddenly, without warning or any sign, she decided to cancel everything.
Aside from the mental and emotional difficulty with everything that happened,
it is hard for me that there is no normal response from people in the community.
Answer
I am very sorry about what happened. It does indeed happen from time to time, and you should not take it personally. Sometimes people get cold feet, and sometimes there is a feeling that this is not it, justified or not.
But I do not understand what the question is. Is the entire community supposed to respond to something that happened to you? Or do you mean the attitude toward breaking an engagement in general? There is certainly an attitude toward that, and even a somewhat hysterical one. There are Haredi recommendations to get married and only afterward divorce, so as not to violate the engagement agreement. Absurd.
Discussion on Answer
I completely agree. But I do not see a question here—yes, criticism.
No, I mean that there should be open and honest discussion. There is no need to repress and ignore anything, especially something that sometimes happens. That is what I mean: the community needs to provide a response and not ignore it. Even when there is halakhic discussion—and there is quite a bit about the matter of breaking off a match—it goes so far as to prefer getting married and then divorcing, which is an injustice… even though I understand it, today it makes no sense to make a couple miserable through divorce.
What I also mean is that the community looks at someone who was left, or who left, as second- or third-rate—and in my opinion this needs to be kept in proportion. Fine, maybe the one who left, but the one who was left…
Also, there is this thing where people look at you as someone unserious and failed, like someone who went bankrupt, and that is simply not true. It is legitimate for a young woman to get cold feet, and in general sometimes the problem is with her…