Pashuteh Yid Wrote:
Mod42, Thanks for the hesber on the frum dating sites. As far as the math goes it is very tricky, and every time I think about it, I get dizzy. What we know is that biologically there are the same number of men and women in every age bracket until retirement years.
Thank you. I get dizzy too but I once thought about it for awhile and it seemed that AZ was right with the numbers claim and how closing the age gap can alleviate the problem. There was an ad in one of the frum newspapers with a graphical representation of the way it is and the way it should be. If you study the ad for awhile you might understand. Having a brain for learning gemara helps too 🙂 Of course, if you read all these threads here people have ways of refuting the whole age gap thing but I don’t want to get into that now as it will just get both of us more dizzy.
The tricky part is that AZ’s claim is that each younger bracket is slightly bigger than the next older bracket because frum families have lots of children and this causes population growth. So in some town, in the 20-25 bracket there may be 105 men and 105 women, while in the 25-30 bracket there may be 100 men and 100 women. Now because guys like younger girls, the 100 guys in the 25-30 bracket may swoop down and take 100 girls in the 20-25 bracket, leaving 5 of these younger girls with no men. These remaining girls then get older and have less and less chance of finding guys.
It is very confusing because sof kol sof there are the same numbers of each in each bracket at any time, so it basically boils down to a preference issue, not an actual physical shortage of people.
According to your numbers, when the 20-25 year olds become 25-30 year olds there will be 105 boys (assuming that they start dating at 25 for this example so none are married yet). But, let’s say there are 110 girls in the new class of 20-25 year olds and we add in the 5 from the previous class that didn’t get married so there are now 115 girls for 105 guys, 5 of those girls are older so will probably be part of the 10 who get left out so they will just get older. With each passing generation the numbers get further apart. So in a higher age bracket, let’s say 35-40, there will not be the same number of single boys as girls. There will be more single girls than boys because of what I explained earlier and AZ has been trying to explain. So even in your goral system some girls will be left out. But as I said in my previous post, at least some will get married that wouldn’t have otherwise.
Also, wouldn’t the guys from two brackets ahead (say 30-35) swoop down and take the 5 remaining 20-25 yr old girls and claim a major prize. (Like the old joke goes, my wife just turned 50, so I traded her in for two 25 yr olds.) So I literally get dizzy every time I try to evaluate the merits of AZ’s claim.
In theory this could happen but people are picky even at an older age so the five 25-30 year old girls will not want to marry the guys from the older bracket, they will only want to go out with guys in their age bracket. And even if they did go out with the older guys it would just exacerbate the problem because in the 30-35 bracket there are already fewer boys then girls and now 5 of them will be marrying girls from the younger bracket – exactly the problem that NASI is trying to solve by having people date within their bracket.
But my goral system would theoretically be immune from this since there must be the same numbers of singles. The only thing it could not do is to create guys in the 20-25 year old bracket because they may not be going out, and they would not enter. This may create an imbalance in the total number of available singles.
As I said above, no there will not be the same number even within the bracket becasue of what happened in the previous years. Your imbalance by guys not going out until they are older is exactly the problem NASI is trying to solve.
One thing to keep in mind is that by the non-Jews, it seems they are always having trouble getting women to attend singles events, so they always host ladies nite at bars and ballgames where they go for free to get them to show up. Non-jews also like younger women, so that is a bit of a kashya on AZ.
Non-Jews don’t have as many children as Jews so there is less of an imbalance between the older and younger generation. Also, non-Jews don’y necessarily date for marriage. When they finally do settle down and marry many times it is with someone closer in age (I am guessing here)
Another thing to find out would be how many of each gender show up at the usual frum single’s shabbatons and get-togethers. That ought to be representative of the number of available men, as well. I don’t think they are swamped with women only, but I could be wrong.
I think that these events are usually planned to have the same number of boys and girls. I guess it depends on the event but many will require reservations and they will only take X number of boys and S number of girls. I don’t know the mitzius with these events so, like you, I might be totally wrong.