Thirty Dates to Nowhere

"I counted: over the past three years I've gone on 32 first dates. Thirty-two times I put on my best clothes, traveled to the lobbies of New York hotels, smiled, drank tea, and carried on the same rote conversation about future plans, brothers' yeshivas, and levels of kashrut.

At some point a switch inside me simply turned off. Now, when a shadchanit sends me a new résumé, I feel neither joy nor hope — only a dull, heavy exhaustion. All the guys have blurred into one faceless face for me. I catch myself sitting at a meeting and subconsciously waiting for the obligatory hour to pass so I can politely say goodbye and go home. My friends celebrate engagements one after another, and I feel like a broken mechanism. They call this shidduch burnout. The most frightening thing is losing faith that behind the dry lines of a résumé there's any living, deep person left who's capable of understanding you. I've decided to take a three-month break and simply block the chats with shadchanim, otherwise I'll lose my mind."