Susan Gold, who has JDated for 10 years but has yet to find a life partner, raves about online dating nonetheless. For a good number of Jewish women β mostly those in their late thirties and up who have never married β Internet dating has proved an embittering experience, making them feel isolated and at fault. Some women reported being online compulsively, checking dating sites into the wee hours, at work when no one is looking, alone in a Starbucks with a laptop and latte. Some female e-daters meet liars and predators online and abandon the whole enterprise in disgust.
Some women, largely those in their twenties, happily use the sites for casual sex or hook-ups; others β even those in their seventies β go online for cybersex, typing racy exchanges while masturbating in their darkened kitchens. JDate claims about , active members, 74, of them paying subscribers. An informal consensus puts the number of non-Jews using JDate at about 25 percent β a hefty number β but JDate says the number is 11 percent.
Internet date sites, however, remain a resource that arguably cause as much pain as happiness, and the question of whether they are ultimately good for Jewish women is a serious one. We remain, of all Caucasian groups in America, the ones least likely to marry female marriage rates correlate with educational levels, and Jewish women are the best educated females in North America , and statistical trends suggest that these numbers are growing. In the general population, the gender ratio disfavors heterosexual women looking for marriage partners; this disparity is heightened for Jewish women who want to date and marry only Jewish men.
Recent research by Columbia University economist Ray Fisman on what makes women romantically desirable to men sheds some light on the matter. Alex Williams, also of the Times, recently reported similar findings. Here, then, is what many single Jewish women told me: that most of the single men they know are single either by choice or emotional handicap; that more Jewish men than Jewish women seem to be gay in the general population, male homosexuality outnumbers female by about ; and that a not insubstantial number of men on Jewish dating sites pose as single β but are, in fact, married.
Interestingly, this is not the case with women. Some studies estimate that between one-fifth and one-third of all online daters are married. A marketing executive who has given up on finding the right Jewish man. A lot. While many factors come into play in our complex lives, Lilith notes seven primary reasons that so many heterosexual Jewish women today are having trouble finding men to marry.
