As a relationship coach who focuses on working with people to help them create a loving relationship, I get requests on an almost daily basis to set people up. To be their shadchan! I therefore feel the need to explain why I don’t do that. This article aims to summarize my response.
Many years ago, when I was a mere 21 year old, I was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and dating up a storm in search of the right man for me. Along the way, I dated many nice guys who weren’t for me, so I set them up with my friends with whom I thought were suitable. Fortunately, I managed to set up many couples, 7 of whom eventually got married (and nearly 19 years later, they all still are!).
That experience of helping people create relationships led me on my own journey of working in this area professionally. Soon after I got married, my husband and I moved to Melbourne, Australia where I decided to restart my career and study Marriage and Family Therapy. I had worked in the area of Nutrition and Public Health just prior to this, and found it less than fulfilling. I embarked on my new career with the goal of trying to understand the secrets of good relationships. For example, exactly what makes a great couple, and what lies behind the concept of “chemistry”. That sneaky elusive thing that no one really understands. I can now say that even after 15 years of working in the field, I don’t feel all that much closer to get to the bottom of all of these issues. What I do know is that there is a lot of deep, underlying, and inexplicable “stuff” (to use the technical term) that no one really has a name or a label for, but which underlies people’s ability to connect. It seems that what enables us to connect with people has very little to do with our jobs, our socio-economic status and our looks. It has much more to do with how we connect with ourselves and then how we choose to connect with people around us.
Once I started to work in the field of Marriage and Family Therapy, I quickly found out that most people only want to work on their relationship once the proverbial had hit the fan. This always appeared to me to be a rather back-to-front way to operate. I also saw that people appeared to think that attraction was enough to really seal the deal of their relationship. Many had the belief that if they chose the right partner, all would be well and good from here to eternity – that’s it, job done. They didn’t see marriage as a constantly evolving, dynamic entity. They were therefore completely at sea when their feelings towards their partners began to change and the way that they related to one another changed too. It was as if they had chosen someone in the hope that their partner would be able solve any problem they had and would just put up with their crap. Lots of people don’t realize that they need to own and work through their stuff sufficiently to the point that they could have a relationship with someone else.
After many years of working as a marriage therapist and relationship coach, I realized that helping people to “find dates” is, in principle, much easier than helping people create a relationship. Let’s face it, any person can throw two people together and get them on a date. But to really help a person to know themselves so deeply as to be able to go own and find their partner on their own is ultimately, so much more helpful, meaningful and empowering. In my career, there is nothing I get more satisfaction from than being able to help people to really “meet themselves”. To give people the tools to understand themselves in an authentic way so they can face any wounds from their past and prepare themselves for creating a the best possible union.
The work that I do enables people to become “their own best shadchan”. To see deep inside so that they feel comfortable to take the risk of opening themselves up enough to let someone else in. To accept and tolerate their own faults, and to accept and even appreciate someone elses. To enable them to be the masters of their own destiny rather than have to rely on someone else to try to create it for them. In my opinion, that’s got to be a far more valuable aspiration.