Obviously, dating sucks.
In large part, that’s because we are quite explicitly being judged. From the outside, it might look like you are talking to your Hinge date about your shared love for The Golden Girls, but what you are both really doing is assessing whether this is someone you want to see again, and auditioning is exhausting.
I’m a rabbi and counselor who works extensively with couples preparing for marriage, and one of the biggest challenges I see couples struggle with is learning to trust their love for each other.
Many folks can remember the first time they told their partner, “I love you.” Sometimes it was carefully planned out; other times it was blurted in a moment of inspiration. Less commonly remembered, but possibly more important, is when we really heard and trusted that our partner loves us, warts and all.
It’s hard to trust that love, because so many of us spend so much time – particularly in the first quarter of our lives – in “on stage” settings, where we are being judged. The road many of us take from school to our professional lives passes through a lot of checkpoints where we are absolutely being evaluated. Am I smart enough to take this AP class? Am I good enough to get into this college or graduate program? Do I have what it takes to get hired at this firm or that one? Does my supervisor think I deserve this promotion?
It’s no surprise that many of us struggle to trust our relationships. As adults, we have little to no experience being with other people “backstage.” Consciously or not, many of us believe that only the “onstage,” first-date version of ourselves are worthy of affection. The “imperfect” version? Not so much.
The strength of a relationship is not in how it looks “onstage,” but how it feels “backstage.”
Rabbi Sharon Klienbaum, the rabbi emerita of CBST, one of the oldest and largest gay and lesbian synagogues in the country, wrote:
“In 1981, some members of CBST used pseudonyms in the synagogue. All CBST mailings arrived at members’ homes without an identifying return address… Over time though, the synagogue became the place where these Jews were out of the closet. All else follows from this starting point. Out in the world, we may have to pretend. Here we can proudly assert that we are gay.”
This insight is powerful not only for LGBTQ+ folks who have wrongly and inappropriately been told their love is something to hide, but for everyone who fears that if others knew “our” secret, we would be denied the love and connection we need.
We all have things we’d rather not share on a first date or a job interview, and we all are worthy of love and connection. The cost of “being in the closet” is that all subsequent human relations, from the most mundane to the most intimate, have an element of misdirection and deception.
The theologian Martin Buber wrote, “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” To hide who we are means that the experience of the holy, which can only come from that place of authenticity, cannot be felt.
Becoming ourselves, recognizing the aspects of ourselves that are created in the image of the Divine, is the work of a lifetime. It is the hardest thing to search our souls with honesty and compassion, growing where we need to grow, and accepting ourselves as worthy of love, exactly as we are now.
Yet it’s even harder to believe that another person, a person who once saw my carefully curated dating profile and judged me favorably, really loves me, now that they have seen my backstage self.
We don’t get married for the picture-perfect, on-stage days. If life was only ever picnics and unicorns and perfection, we wouldn’t have to make promises to stick around: why would anyone leave that? Marriage is a promise to stick around precisely and specifically on the hard days, when we might want to check out.
Why get married? We get married when we are ready to stop evaluating and being evaluated, and are ready for a lifetime of discovering who we are becoming, who our partner is becoming, and loving what we find together – “imperfections” and all.
Rabbi Brent works extensively with couples preparing for marriage, serves as a member of the faculty at Pardes North America and is the emeritus rabbi at Beacon Hebrew Alliance.
He has been recognized by the Jewish Forward as one of the most inspiring rabbis in America, by Hudson Valley Magazine as a Person to Watch and by Newsweek as “a rabbi to watch.” He is a Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute and a Fellow of the Schusterman Foundation.
Previously, Rabbi Brent served as the Rabbi in Residence at American Jewish World Service and was a Rabbinic Fellow at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York.
Rabbi Brent holds rabbinic ordination and a master’s degree in philosophy from the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was the first recipient of the Neubauer Fellowship. Prior to entering the rabbinate, he attended Wesleyan University and worked as a daily journalist in Durham, NC. He lives in Beacon with his wife Alison, a professor of environmental chemistry at Vassar College, and their two children.