Match-making and other bad advice

Houses in Pittsburgh don't sell very fast. The population has declined by half since 1920, and even when the economy is booming, finding a buyer who will pay market rate for your house can take a year or more.

There is, however, this company that puts up billboards saying "We Buy Ugly Houses." They'll enthusiastically take your house, but they won't pay you what it's worth. If you're desperate, you can get your hands on some cash that way.

This is the basic principle behind match-making for the single Orthodox Christian. Like you, Pittsburgh houses are elegant, but there just aren't that many people who appreciate them. Having failed to attract someone with your own charms, you succumb to the offers of some helpful social know-it-all who says in a saccharine enthusiastic tone, "You'll be perfect for one another." Of course you have this nagging doubt that this means that there is someone out there more messed up than you and this match-maker intends to unload her on you. Chances are, this nagging doubt is actually true.

We Christians are all about doing things in community, however, match-making is one opportunity for allowing the community to drive you crazy that I think you should avoid.

Traditional match-making

Now, I don't mean to slam an important custom of traditional societies. Formalized match-making has worked for centuries as a means of creating marriages that form a bond not only between the husband and wife, but also between the families of a community.

Some people think that arranged marriages are more traditional, and we Orthodox Christians living in the 21st century still like traditional things such as inhaling sweet smoke and abstaining from cantaloupe on days when people get beheaded, so we ought to take the more traditional path.

In centuries gone by, match-making was an important process in which two families would come together and form the necessary social support structure for a new couple starting a family. I don't know what to say about the virtues of choosing a spouse vs. arranging a marriage, but I'm glad I got to find Miri on my own.

Father Thomas Hopko was once giving a talk called God and Gender when someone asked him which system was better. He said that arranged marriages caused a lot of grief when people couldn't intermarry between classes, but said that in a spiritual sense, it does not matter how you meet your spouse. His answer went on for a while, as do most things that Fr. Hopko talks about (the tape set is four hours long altogether) but here's a compressed version:

Virtually until our generation here in America, marriages were arranged. My maternal grandparents literally met each other when they signed the marriage license in Binghamton, New York. They literally had only the vaguest knowledge of each other's existence. And they were matched, and managed to live together for many years and have six children....

Whether or not there's arranged marriages or whether or not people fall in love and get married, sooner or later, the command to love, to bear each other's burden, to become sin, to become cursed for the other, to take each other's faults, to have endless forgiveness and compassion day in and day out, whether it's arranged or whether it's not, that's what's gonna happen if you're going to pull it off in a Christian manner and find the peace and the joy and the righteousness of the kingdom of God.

So that's the Serious Theology part of match-making. Now that I've got that out of the way, here's what I can say about your over-eager, talkative friends and family members who seem to be planning your life out for you.

An insecure attitude will attract the wrong kind of help

In the Basic Rules of Being Single section of this blog, I said that your attitude will determine the quality of other singles whom you meet. If you're desperate, you'll meet other desperate people; if you're relaxed, you'll meet other relaxed people, and you might make a few friends along the way.

The match-maker generally assumes you to be desperate, viewing you like some kind of a romantic refugee fleeing, looking for anywhere to settle down. What you need to do is convince the match-maker that you're a tourist, enjoying your visit, ready to move on when it's appropriate.

I am convinced that most matchmakers take the worst elements of your personality and confuse them with your actual identity. For example, I am a socially inept nerd. There's a lot more to me than that, but that's what a few matchmakers saw in me and set me up with socially inept frumps.

An important question that you can use on a match-maker is how much have you thought this through? The answer will give you an idea of how much trouble you're getting in to, and whether you're going on a wild goose chase, or whether you're going to be chased by a turkey. It will also reveal what kind of match-maker is giving you advice. I believe there are four types of matchmaker:

The hobbyist. This is the least dangerous of the match-makers. The hobbyist is an outgoing chatty person who likes putting on parties and introducing people to one another. He or she views other people's romance as a casual affair but knows how to use the right kind of exaggerated language to make you both encouraged and nervous upon meeting this perfect person they've picked out for you. The hobbyist match-maker sometimes has an addiction to control or to being the center of attention and uses the lure of romance to keep you in his or her orbit. If this match-maker intends only to introduce you to people at parties, it won't be so bad.

The hobbyist is often clueless. One hobbyist match-maker whom I knew in San Francisco kept encouraging me to ask out one of the choir members in our church who "just hadn't been able to find someone." So, I called this girl's house. Her sister picked up.

"She's out with her boyfriend," said her sister.

This leads to another important question you should ask the match-maker about your "perfect one": Have you actually talked to her? I remember when I was in high school, some friends were trying to set me up with a girl who was tall. They figured that since we had that in common, it would work out. To which I shouted back, "Yes, and we've both got a lot of carbon molecules! Of course you're right!"

The desperate-for-grandkids match-maker. If a parent has only one shy child who is single and getting on towards an age when you'd call him "confirmed bachelor," this Mom or Dad going to get a little worried. So, Mom will find some lovely young lady in the parish whose family doesn't attend church, adopt her and stuff her full of food in the hopes her oblivious son will see her impeccable table manners and instantly fall in love.

The philosopher match-maker has gotten an idea of The Way Things Ought To Be regarding marriage either because of a bad experience he doesn't think should be repeated, or through Careful Study of Church History.

For example, in a church I attended, there was a father whom I'll call Zaccheus who had three beautiful daughters. Daughter No. 1 made her parents very happy by marrying a boy from an Orthodox family that they knew well. Then a shy Orthodox boy built up lots of nerve and wrote a love note to Daughter No. 2. Zaccheus did not approve of the shy boy and let him know this in a manner that left him fearing for the safety of his kneecaps.

Daughter No. 2 wouldn't have liked a boring church boy like that anyway. Shortly after, she ran away with her boyfriend, came back two years later and gave birth. Her boyfriend wasn't interested in taking responsibility.

Then Zaccheus decided to set me up with daughter No. 3, who was 14. I was 24. In all fairness, she was a very nice 14-year-old, but, uh... 14. Zaccheus was annoyed as anything with daughter No. 2 and her boyfriend, but was delighted with his new grandson, and had decided that teenage pregnancy was a good thing. Married teenage pregnancy, that is. After all, the Theotokos was 13 or 14 when she gave birth to Jesus Christ, according to some sources.

Talking to this girl was a little awkward. "Your favorite subject is algebra? Wow, I like algebra, too."

The matushka/presvyteria match-maker. When matushki get together at a clergy conference, they have to find some fun topic they can talk about with one another, and setting up their children is usually at the top of the list. (The priests' version of this is to opine about wrong things that bishops in other jurisdictions have done recently.)

Before she met me, several matushki decided that Miri was just perfect for their sons. Miri says that all of these PKs would have driven her nuts.

The matushka match-maker suffers from an inherent flaw in her thinking, which is...

The Parental Approval Piety Paradox

If you're male and you go to church and you don't have any tattoos, and you show up for church regularly in clean clothes, you're going to interest a lot more parents of girls than actual girls. The same thing if you're female and wear pretty long skirts and scarves and sing in the choir. I had this happen to me a lot -- parents would look at me and think, "Mortgage payment!" Girls would look at me and think, "Nerd!"

Here, an obvious temptation would be to say, "I can be a wild guy" and you go buy a leather jacket or something. Then, you can make all the girls look at you and say "Fake nerd!" No, be yourself and eventually you will find someone who loves you for the nerd you are.

On the other hand, when a girl's parents know you too well, you can have additional problems. For example, my spiritual father has three beautiful daughters. As I was coming in to the church and getting through my "crazy convert" stage, I asked him for a lot of advice. After a while, his advice began taking on a common theme of advising me to get the advice of Fr. Jonah Paffhausen, a classmate of his at St. Vladimir's Seminary who was thinking about getting married but decided to become a priest-monk. He is the Igumen of the Monastery of St. John of San Francisco. (I did go the monastery several times and really liked it.)

I took several messages from my spiritual father's nudging me towards the monastery:

• An experience with monasticism might benefit you.

• You worry too much and have exhausted my library of pastoral advice.

• You haven't got a chance with my daughters.

So that's match-making -- a way in which you can express your desperation, and a source of great amusement for your friends. Sorry this has been kind of a disjointed essay. (Trying to get it to flow has been the reason it's taken so long to write.) But, I want to end with a funny story, about how it is possible to get rid of an insistent match-maker. When I arrived in Ukraine to begin my Peace Corps service, I was placed with a host family. Galina, the 40-something mother, spoke English almost as badly as I spoke Russian, but one phrase she liked repeating to me was, "Ukraine girl, kiss kiss!" To which I'd respond, "Ukraine girl, nyet, nyet!" But she kept on with that until I finally said "Ukraine girl, da, da," and I kissed her. She responded with an unintelligible burst of Russian that I took to mean, "That's not what I meant, you goofball!" Anyway, that match-maker never tried again.