I would like to remind some of the posters here taht we no longer live in the shtetl and it is not 1,000 years ago. Maybe we should not use washer-dryers, either. After all, it worked very well for women to use a washerboard in olden days. Maybe they should put a kettle in the hearth, too, while they are at it. Get real – we live NOW, not then, and just because something was DONE in the olden days (and if it by chance worked, it worked for reasons OTHER than the fact that it was the right way to do things, because it wasn’t always the right way), does not mean it should continue to be done centuries later. People didn’t get immunized in those days either. LOTS of them died from illnesses that we laugh at today. OLD does not always mean better. It is not halacha that a man and woman must be set up by shadchanim. It was at one time the “done”
thing that a girl married whomever her father said she would marry. Al pi halacha, that is not even proper, because a girl has the right to refuse to marry a specific person. But in those days, what good Jewish girl WOULD do that???
We have to assess the situation in today’s world and by norms that make at least a little bit of sense today. Does that mean that we do everything like the non-Jewish world? No, of course not! But there is absolutely nothing wrong with a girl wanting to feel loved and cherished by the man she marries, to feel he is her soulmate, for lack of a better word. Do we not say that 40 days before a child is born a Bat Kol calls out that such and such a girl will marry such and such a boy? Do we or do we not believe this to be true? If we do, that is the soulmate. Hashem has already made that shidduch. I hope and pray that all those chassidic girls who are marrying boys they have barely met, much less know, do not someday resent their parents, their chassidus, and their religious upbringing, when they discover that there can be so much more in a happy marriage than being with their chevra while their husbands are with their own chevra.