I don’t know if this will be allowed, but I’ll try posting the article and a link, and I’ll leave it up to the mods (as if I have a choice 🙂 ).
Ariel Halpert, Ph.D.
Posted Jan 23 2008
It is the best of times and the worst of times in the world of shidduch dating. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most single men in the various circles of Orthodox Jewry today have long lists of potential shidduchim and continuous dating opportunities. At the same time, many single women struggle with short lists and relatively infrequent dating. This imbalance represents a looming tragedy within the community as ever-increasing numbers of women are marrying later in life or not getting married at all. But what’s behind it?
The problem cannot be explained by other oft-cited causes of the shidduch crisis, such as the lack of suitable venues for singles to meet, the failure of friends and family to be sufficiently engaged in matchmaking, singles’ own unrealistic standards, etc., since none of these explain the imbalance in dating opportunities.
Rather, the problem stems from demographic trends of a growing community coupled with a widening age gap between husbands and wives. Though age differences of up to about three years within a marriage have always been common, today we are seeing men marrying women 5, 6, or 7 years their junior with increasing frequency.While an expanding Jewish population is a good thing, the widening marital age gap is having devastating consequences on the ratio of single men to single women within the shidduch pool. Ideally, the ratio should be 1:1, with equally as many single women as single men. Lower ratios, as demonstrated below, mean fewer men than women, so that in any matching of men to women, there will necessarily be women without a match.
The mathematical discipline of combinatorics uses the term “matching” to describe a situation in which elements of two distinct sets (think of single men and single women) may be paired in a one-to-one manner (think of marriage) in such a way that all pairs are appropriate or allowable (think of some shidduchim that are traditionally not appropriate from the start, e.g. a very tall girl with a very short boy). A perfect matching is one in which every girl is paired with a boy, and every boy with a girl, or in the language of mathematics, every vertex is incident to exactly one edge. Thus, the term “perfect matching” refers not to the merits of any individual match but to the pairing of all the elements of the two sets.
The Marriage Theorem of 1935 (attributable to mathematicians D. Konig and P. Hall) gives a necessary and sufficient condition for a perfect matching. Using the language of shidduchim, the condition can be stated as follows: For every group of single women (call such a group G) within those people in the “parsha” of shidduchim, the number of single men who would make an appropriate shidduch for at least one of the single women in G should be at least as large as the number of women in G. I will spare the reader the mathematical statement of this condition, but will posit that some reflection on the condition leads to the conclusion that the widening age gap between marriage partners is creating a situation in which “perfect matching” is not possible.
Data from the U.S. Census of 2000 provides supporting evidence that our community is growing in size. From the mid-1970’s to the early 1980’s, the number of children within the New York frum community born in a given year as compared with the number born in the previous year increased by just under 1% per year. So for example, if 10,000 children were born in 1975, then approximately 10,100 were born in 1976. Then, from the early to mid-1980s, this rate increased to nearly 1.5%, and by the mid-1980’s the rate was over 2%. These numbers may not sound like much, but when viewed within a demographic model, the results can be significant.
Using the above numbers along with a simple demographic model, and assuming that the age gap between husbands and their wives averages around 3 years (with a range of 1 to 5 years), we can estimate ratios of single men to single women who are 1 to 5 years younger than them.
For single women age 20, the modeled ratio is approximately 90%, which means that for every 100 single women at age 20, there are only about 90 single men who are 1 to 5 years older in the pool of potential marriage candidates. For single women age 25, the modeled ratio is only around 80%, and for single women age 30, the modeled ratio drops to around 60%.
In other words, the ratios decrease with increasing age, since as more men marry, there are proportionally fewer remaining single men to pair with the remaining single women. For example, with a ratio of 80%, there are 80 men for 100 women. If, say, 20 of the 80 men marry 20 of the 100 women, then 60 men and 80 women remain, reducing the ratio to 75%. In the extreme case, if all 80 men marry, then there remain 20 women with no possible match. Practically, this forces the age gap to widen further as the single women must consider even older single men. In general, wider age gaps decrease the ratio, which magnifies the problem.
Shadchanim, parents, and rabbis must recognize this demographic trend and prevent it from causing an ongoing tragedy in our community. This can be done by fostering an environment that encourages men to date and marry women closer to their own age. To be clear, on an individual level, each shidduch should continue to be pursued based on its own particular merits. But it is important to reverse the trend among shidduchim in general. In doing such, the balance between what may be good for the individual versus what is in the best interest of the community must be sought.