Then flip a coin
Joseph’s response: Pretend every coin in the world has been destroyed. 🙂
Wolf: She won’t know how either looks until and unless she dates him. (There are no shidduch pictures as many families eschew them as inappropriate.) Many frum families use a traditional shidduch process where the parents do almost all of the legwork and the child will not date anyone not recommended by her parents. In the not distant past, for millenia, often the parents themselves would select a shidduch for their children with the child at most simply giving a yes or no when first meeting the mate. (And yes was the norm having reliance and trust in their parents.) Nowadays the paradigm has shifted but nevertheless in the frummer families the shidduch process is still parent-focused.
You asked how we would do things. I would never get involved in a shidduch situation like this for my kids. It’s something that is so alien to us that I couldn’t answer the question. I can’t imagine ever being so presumptuous as to tell my kids whom they can and cannot date, that they must do so without knowing anything about the perspective date (to the point where they cannot even see a picture) and where I would intentionally shut my son/daughter out of the process completely before the first date. To me, this whole scenario is just as absurd as the one I jokingly made at the top of this post (where every coin in the world is destroyed).
I told you what I would do in shidduchim. I’m not going to play along with your scenarios as they do not apply to me and my family, and I’m not going to presume to attempt to answer what I would do if I were in some bizarre alternate universe where I was so close-minded and controlling where I was, essentially, no longer me.
The Wolf