I live in the UWS, along with many people who began dating only on shiduchim and after years of frustration and waiting for shadchanim or strangers to control their destiny moved on to smarter and more effective dating. I know many, many couples who are in very happy marriages and who would have never had a shot of meeting each other if they only relied on matchmakers. The singles on the UWS do more chessed than you could begin to imagine and most people I know here are very concerned with spiritual growth. Also, the fallacy that people move here, stay here, die here is just that, a fallacy. Most singles up here do get married, often to people they meet here, but new and younger people move in all the time, so the numbers stay high. The ones that don’t get lucky enough to find their bashert find other ways to contribute to the world and the community and they do it with all of their heart and soul. The concept of keeping boys and girls apart in every situation and then crying about a shiduch crisis is completely ridiculous. Are they children or adults? Adults get married, children should not. If you think they are old enough to get married and you’ve done your job as a parent and raised them right, trust them that they are capable of talking to each other and using their own instincts to decide if they met their other half. It makes no sense that at a wedding, when they all look great and are happy and it’s completely supervised they aren’t allowed to mingle. Also, to the woman who knocked the whole UWS, if you want to see shameful behavior, you need to see how people from a very strict upbringing behave after they get divorced. They blame everybody for the marriage but themselves, they claim they were young and naive or forced into it and they party like a public school teenager because they never got to be one.
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