What can we do to get people to find their shidduchim quicker?
1. get rid of incompetent shadchanim
i agree, but that is certainly not the only problem. (as virtually everyone i know met their bashert not through a professional shadchan).
other problems:
1) finding all the boys and girls who are available. as many posters said, a guy in yeshiva has an easier time generally than a guy working. I don’t believe for a second that it’s because girls don’t want a working guy – many still do.
let’s go back to Dr. Pepper’s island analogy.
What if on this island there were a few big huts with tons of males, and other individual males were all over the island, like on some tree or in some little cave somewhere. A girl who wants to get married would be wise to look into the huts where there are 100’s of boys – thus those boys generally get found right away, and the boys all over will only be found by the ones who accidentally and/or the right shadchan matches them up.
the girls, because they have no hut to belong to are much harder to find. If their father, (even if he does not have money), is friends with some of the hut leaders or works in a hut himself, he can look around more easily and find the boy that’s right for his daughter. an unknown girl coming to the hut may not be able to easily get a guy to go out with him, because all the girls are going to the hut, so he is overwhelmed with all of the possibilities.
furthermore, some parents of the girls don’t know anything about shidduchim and are waiting for people to find their daughters – they don’t realize that it may be “easier” if they would actually go look at the huts, forge the proper contacts so the boys would pay attention, and learn how to successfully search and find the right boy for their daughter.
So, some of the problems are:
1. hard to find the working boys
2. hard to find the girls, unless they go and have connections with yeshivos. (a wealthy girl is worth a hut of her own, and boys do circle around such a hut, as they would like a hut of their own).
3. shadchanim will generally do creaming – getting the easy girls married off, not paying attention to girls who have more unique need, and then we have Dr. Pepper’s problem – the next batch of girls come, and the story repeats itself, exasperating the problem with each new batch of girls.