So many dates and so many rejections. Is something wrong with me, and how much longer will this last?different views

Each person must travel the path of searching decreed for his soul, and only after that does he meet his intended. Hence a simple practical conclusion: a failed shidduch does not set you back. Every time a shidduch does not work out, a person is brought one step closer to the one that will. The Chazon Ish began proposing shidduchim to his nephew Chaim Kanievsky at seventeen and went on for nearly seven years until he married at twenty-three, and in the overwhelming majority of cases it was the girl's side that declined, not he. He gave the explanation himself: when the search began, his future wife Batsheva had not yet reached bas mitzvah, and since she was his intended, Heaven arranged that the girls proposed did not want to continue. Their marriage lasted nearly six decades.

“every time a shidduch does not succeed, he has been brought one step closer to the right one”

To a girl who came to him in despair with this very question he answered with a parable. If you were asked to deliver a letter to the Cohen family at 2 Rabbi Akiva Street and there were no name plates on the doors, you would knock at the first door; hearing we are not the Cohens, we are the Yitzchakis, the Cohens live upstairs, you would not be indignant that they are not Cohens; you cannot find Cohen at the Yitzchakis'. So too here: every failed shidduch says nothing about your worth; you simply came to Yitzchaki while looking for Cohen. And when you meet Cohen, everything will fall into place very quickly.

“It simply means that you met 'Yitzchaki' when you were looking for 'Cohen.'”

He describes a man who searched for nearly ten years: good middos, pleasant company, learned Torah, good-looking, everything one could want, it seemed, and yet refusal after refusal, with the pain multiplying at every wedding of his peers. He was rejected many times over, and it was a very hard experience; with time he nevertheless learned to accept it. Whoever passes through such darkness without turning away from Hashem, believing that He does this out of love, rises to heights that cannot be reached any other way.

“they would soar to the greatest spiritual heights”

Someone else's refusal reflects not your worth but the other person's preferences and circumstances, which you do not control. So she suggests reading a refusal not as a defeat but as a redirection: now you can reset and channel your energy differently. Your worth does not waver with someone else's decision.

“It's not a reflection of your self-worth; it's a reflection of their preferences and circumstances.”

She lists the outcomes of her own year of searching: the boy who sounded incredible but was busy, indefinitely busy; the boy who sounded incredible and turned out to be a complete mismatch in hashkafa; the boy who sounded incredible but whose parents demanded eight hundred thousand shekels for the right to marry him. She presents this as the ordinary course of things, not the exception: ups, downs, tears, fears, setbacks, collapsed hopes; and the very knowledge that it is like this for everyone takes away part of the pain.

“The boy who sounded incredible, but was 'busy.' Indefinitely busy.”

He suggests looking in another direction. Most often, he writes, the cause is that the person has not truly resolved to build his home after the wedding on the foundations of Torah and mitzvos, and so Hashem waits a little longer, in case the resolve becomes unconditional in the meantime; when it is made sincerely and with genuine firmness, even if there are difficulties, Hashem will provide the right match. In another letter he writes more sharply still and apologises in advance for the tone: any matter can be approached in two ways, either believing that there is a choice to do it or not and that it can be put off again and again, choosing the path of least resistance, or believing that it must be done as soon as possible, and that the only choice left is how to accomplish it faster. It seems, he tells the addressee, that you have chosen the first approach, and hence all the difficulties.

“Most often, this is a result of one's failure to truly resolve to build one's home”