How old were you when you got married?

amother

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 9:23 am

Since reading the follow up to the article on the shidduch crisis by Mr. Rechnitz, I decided to post this poll. According to him women over 25 only have a 15% chance of ever getting married. So how old were you when you got married....?

Ruchel

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 9:28 am

OK I wanted to stay off because of RH but I had to intervene!!

THIS IS PURE CRAZINESS!!! not even in the most young-marrying circles. A 25 year old mega chassidish I guess would have more divorcees than singles to chose from, but she will NOT stay single. Unless he means a woman over 25 is so picky she is the one saying no to most? but then again, not what I notice.

I do notice "older singles" getting either real picky or real unpicky but much much later. 35, 40, 45 depending on circles...

Unless he says where this happens, I'll have to stand by "cray cray". This wasn't so in the 1880s, in the 1920s, in the 1950s... or today in any circle I studied or get acquainted with.
,

dimyona

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 9:34 am

I'm skeptical of any statistics that claim to represent frum Jewry, especially when it's narrowed down to such a specific niche. We're not dealing with a very large population here, yet neither I nor any of my friends have ever been contacted for any of these supposed surveys. Your poll here is the first time I've ever contributed to anything remotely related to gathering this kind of data Smile

dimyona

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 10:03 am

ITA with the above. Btw, I hope everyone reading this realizes that this poll is inherently skewed, since the question is only being addressed to married women, and the membership of this website is not evenly distributed between age groups.

doctorima

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 10:45 am

I just want to clarify that I think he was strictly referring to yeshivishe / right-wing dating circles when he gave that statistic, not saying that he's right or wrong, but just that if somebody who doesn't affiliate with that group and got married over 25 isn't a "kasha" on his hypothesis.

LittleDucky

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 12:02 pm

The way they come up with their numbers is they picked a school and looked at it's graduating class. Hence they haven't contacted actual people. They just went through class rosters. From those who graduated 5 years ago-how many are not married? 6 years ago?10?
Who knows how they picked their school. That's their "statistics". What about those girls who left for seminary a year earlier? Maybe another school has everyone married? What about taking BTs into account?
The 15% number. AFAIK They don't explain how they came up with that. Does anyone else know?

Maya

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 12:11 pm

amother wrote:

So, if you have a group of 100 yeshivish girls over the age of 25, fifteen of them will get married, and eighty-five of them will stay single forever? According to these numbers, there should be thousands of yeshivish women who are old and grey and single. Does anyone know of them?

Such fear-mongering propaganda.

dimyona

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 12:25 pm

LittleDucky wrote:

That is an extremely inaccurate method. First of all, I never notified my school when I got married. Are they ascribing marital status simply by word of mouth? Also, using just 1 school will get such flawed information. For example, in my class we have an oddly disproportionate amount of divorcees, while other classes have none. Same with singles. There is no way this data can be extrapolated to any other populations; the sample sizes are simply too small. And I agree with Maya that a lot of this is fear mongering and is used to push girls to get married at young ages.

greenhelm

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 12:38 pm

dimyona wrote:

I never notified my school when I got married either, but they still knew - they would send me letters to Myfirtstname Hislastname, even before the wedding happened. Spooky!

zigi

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 1:02 pm

I was wondering why the question was in the reading forum. 2 of my cousins yeshivsh got married older near 30

also what about the bts that enter the mix? or people who married out of their circles?

debsey

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 1:10 pm

I also wonder about those stats because they don't take into account girls who are not good candidates for marriage. Of the girls who never married in my graduating class, one has a catastrophic illness, two are mentally ill, and two were mainstreamed lower-functioning girls who probably would struggle if married.

I'm not playing G-d - of course mentally ill and lower-functioning people get married and are quite successful, but if you add them into the number and create a statistic that is used to panic people, then you are inflating the numbers. My point is that the pool needs to be made more specific before analyzing the data.

A well-adjusted, mentally healthy girl has more than a 1% chance of getting married. I have a niece who is 28 and I don't think it's fair that stats like this (which are both inflammatory from a polemics perspective, and wrong from a mathematical one) should be published to scare people like her.

There are lies, d*mn lies, and statistics, as Benjamin Israeli once said.

ElTam

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 1:26 pm

Look, this guy is trying to help people who want to get married get married. He's putting his own $$$ on the table to help with shadchanus gelt to try to make that happen. If it's 1%, 2%, or 50%, who cares. A yid saw suffering and he's working to end it. Applause

to him. Why does anybody feel the need to pick apart his statistics? Did he ask you to kick in money?

I can think of way too many fabulous young women over 25 who are not yet married. They are suffering. Their parents are suffering. It's heartbreaking. Why does it have to be above a certain percentage for it to be worth caring about?

debsey

Wed, Sep 24 2014, 1:29 pm

ElTam wrote:

No question, he's well meaning. I don't mean any disrespect to him. I just question the validity of the numbers, as well as the wisdom of putting it out there and further upsetting people who already feel beaten down.