The Chochmat Nashim Podcast: Women Talk Judaism · Jewish Coffee House

The Dating Game (Season 8 Episode 4)

·48 min·3 clips

Men can choose from multiple girls at once, while women may get one suggestion every few months.

The conversation opens with a brisk list of problems that keep coming up in the dating scene in the Datilumi and more Haredi Yeshivish system. One speaker talks about men making their lack of interest obvious by avoiding eye contact, staying on their phones, ignoring the other person, or ghosting instead of ending things directly. Another irritation keeps surfacing too: a date drifting into comments about what a woman orders, as if her plate has become the evening's main subject. The speakers do not treat these as tiny annoyances. They read them as part of a wider pattern of disrespect that women are expected to swallow politely. From there, the discussion turns to the imbalance in how choice works. Men are allowed to say no easily and set detailed requirements for what they want. Women, by contrast, are often judged for having requirements or for saying no at all. That pressure can make even a lukewarm offer feel like something to be grateful for, instead of a real invitation. The speakers keep returning to that dynamic because it shapes everything that follows. If every acceptance feels like a favor, basic self-respect starts to look like misbehavior. The hosts also slow down to define the kind of people they are talking about. They are not describing people with obvious social problems or hidden disasters. They are talking about well-adjusted, bright people from good families who should, in theory, be easy to date. That clarification matters because it narrows the complaint to the dating process itself, not some fringe failure of personality. The point is that the system can still produce bad behavior even when the people involved seem, on paper, perfectly suitable. In other words, the issue is not only who is dating. It is how dating is being done. A guest then starts offering examples from friends and from her own experience. The stories are familiar in the worst way. A date can go by without a single compliment, leaving a woman to wonder if she has somehow failed to register as a person at all. That silence is not dramatic, but it wears on people. The small incident that stands out most is the one in which a man notices her dancing to background music and calls it adorable. The compliment lands because it is so rare. It shows how little warmth is sometimes needed to make a date feel human. The exchange keeps coming back to the gap between what people could do and what they actually do. The speakers suggest that if someone knows a date is not going anywhere, they should end it cleanly. Say it plainly. Do not send mixed signals. Do not make the other person decode neglect as a message. That simple courtesy becomes a benchmark for the whole conversation. When people fail at it, the problem is not just awkwardness. It is the refusal to give another person the dignity of clarity. As the discussion widens, it becomes clear that the pain is not limited to the date itself. There is also the afterlife of the bad date, especially when the story gets retold in communal circles. One speaker describes the humiliation of hearing that a date became a topic of gossip back at yeshiva. That kind of circulation turns a private mismatch into public shame. The better response, she argues, would be to recommend the woman to someone else if the first match did not work out. The alternative is turning her into a cautionary tale. The episode keeps its eye on that ethical failure. The tone stays conversational, but the arguments are pointed. The speakers use frustration, example, and plain common sense instead of formal theory. They are interested in what a decent culture should look like at the level of behavior: how people end dates, how they speak to women, how they handle rejection, and whether they can stop turning embarrassment into entertainment. The result is less a dating guide than a critique of communal norms. It treats basic courtesy as something worth defending, not something to shrug off. By the end, the episode has built a clear moral frame around what might otherwise sound like a pile of dating anecdotes. Respect is not optional. Clarity is not too much to ask. And if a relationship does not continue, the least a community can do is avoid making it worse by humiliating the person who was already disappointed. That is the standard the conversation keeps insisting on, even when the stories it tells suggest how often that standard is missed.

As heard by us

A blunt look at dating etiquette, with basic decency doing most of the work.

It follows dating in the Datilumi and Haredi Yeshivish world with a dry kind of irritation: men avoiding eye contact, glued to their phones, or disappearing, plus the food policing that shows up on dates.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want the unvarnished rules of this dating world.

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