Why surviving the system makes you unable to describe it
You are three years in. You cried twice this week — once when the no came back through the shadchan with no reason attached, and once Friday night, in the quiet after the zman came in, standing in an apartment with no candles to light, before walking to someone else’s table. Then you sat across from a married friend and asked her how she got through it. It was hard, she says, but it was worth it. Three years is normal. Everyone goes through this. You will find your bashert when it is the right time. She means every word. She is also wrong about most of it, and the reason she is wrong is the same reason her words feel warm: she survived, and surviving rewrote what she remembers about the gauntlet she came through.
The single most important fact about the people you go to for advice is that they made it out. The ones who didn’t are not at the table. Some of them left — stopped returning the shadchanim’s calls, stopped coming to simchas because every simcha meant a night of being asked, moved somewhere no one knew enough to ask. Some married outside the framework and were quietly written off. And some never got a yes at all. They davened for it at thirty and at forty and at sixty. They buried their parents and came home from the levaya to an empty apartment, and years later they died in it — no husband holding their hand, no children to say Kaddish, a shiva with no one sitting. The system never called any of them to ask what it cost. Whatever the married people tell you is the testimony of the ones it didn’t happen to.
In 1959, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills ran an experiment that has been replicated for sixty years.[1] Two groups of women went through entry rituals for the same boring discussion group. One got a mild initiation. The other got a humiliating one — reading embarrassing material aloud in front of evaluators. Then both joined the identical group. The harshly-initiated women rated the experience significantly higher. The pain became the proof. The harder the entry, the more they needed the group to have been worth entering, so they remembered it as having been worth it. The finding has held across hazing, military training, religious conversion, and dating systems with high friction.
This is what happens when a married friend tells you the years were worth it. She isn’t lying. The “worth it” is what her mind produced in order to fold three years of pain into a self that could keep functioning. She needs the gauntlet to have been good. So she remembers it as good. So she tells you it is good.
There is a second mechanism, and it is the cruelest, because it defeats even the friend who honestly tries. Pain does not keep. A person in a cold state cannot reconstruct the force of a hot one — not in someone else, and not in her own past.[2] Nordgren’s subjects underestimated the pain of social exclusion even when they had lived through the identical exclusion themselves; once the pain stopped, their access to it stopped too.[3] Memory finishes the job: negative feeling drains out of memories faster than positive feeling does, and whole stretches of life are recalled rosier than they were lived.[4] Your married friend is not refusing to remember her Tuesday nights. She remembers that she cried. What she can no longer retrieve is what the crying was — the heat is gone from the file. You are asking her from inside the hot state, she is answering from the cold one, and everything she hands across that gap arrives room-temperature.
Then there is the third mechanism, and its evidence is invisible by definition. You ask a hundred married couples and a hundred married couples tell you it worked out. They are not lying either. The sampling is broken. The destroyed do not testify — the woman buried last winter with a minyan of strangers is not going to tell you what three years feels like when it becomes thirty. The testimony pool says the system is fine, and it is guaranteed to say so no matter how many people the system grinds down, because everyone it ground down has gone quiet.
Put the three mechanisms together and you get the chorus. The married friends, the parents, the mentors, the shadchanim. All of them survived something, and that something needs to have been worth it for each of them to live with the years they spent inside it. Their testimony is unanimous, consistent, well-meaning, and structurally wrong. What comes back from the chorus is not advice. It is the chorus’s self-defense, dressed as wisdom and offered in good faith.
The parent who tells you to stop being so picky got married at twenty-two, in a community where the pool was smaller, the criteria narrower, the decisions faster. They survived it, so they believe the way they did it is the way it works. They are wrong about almost every variable of the system you are inside, and they cannot tell, because their own marriage is the standing proof that their advice was right.
The friend who says three years is normal is reporting honestly — for her, three years ended in a yes. For the woman whose three years didn’t, three years was the runway to leaving, and your friend doesn’t know her anymore, because leaving is exactly what she did. The shadchan who promises the right one will come has hundreds of yeses in her files. She has no file for the singles who stopped calling back, or the woman whose name simply stopped coming up. Her confidence is the average of her stored cases, and her stored cases are the yeses.
So you are in the gauntlet, crying on an ordinary Tuesday night, and every voice you can reach assures you that Tuesday nights like this are normal and temporary and worth it. The people who could say “I went through this and it broke me” — they are gone, or silent, or dead, and no one ever collected what they knew. You are alone in a way the chorus cannot see, because the only people who could keep you company are the ones it cannot hear.
This isn’t anyone’s fault. Effort justification is not a character flaw, the empathy gap is not coldness of heart, and survivorship bias is not a failure of caring; all three are standard human equipment. But the system runs on the chorus’s testimony, and the chorus, structurally, cannot deliver the truth about the gauntlet it survived. The people running the system are its graduates, holding the same survivor’s license as everyone else.
· · ·
These are the Nine Days. The calendar has already dimmed everything — no music, no meat and wine, joy cut back to its minimum — and the day it is all leading toward began, the Gemara says, with a testimony problem. Ten spies delivered their report; two disagreed; the assembly moved to stone the dissenters.[5] The nation wept all night over the testimony it had chosen to believe, and Hashem said: you wept tonight for nothing, and I will fix this night as a weeping for generations. That night was the ninth of Av.[6] The worst night in our history is the anniversary of trusting the wrong voices and silencing the right ones.
And look at what the day itself does. On Tisha B’Av we do not gather to hear from anyone who came through whole. We sit on the floor, lights low, and open the testimony of the destroyed — and the first breath of it is a woman alone. How she sits alone; the city once full of people has become like a widow. She weeps in the night, her tears on her cheek; of all who loved her, she has no comforter.[7] Weeping at night. Tears on the cheek. No comforter. The megillah of our national catastrophe opens on the exact scene playing out tonight in apartments in every frum neighborhood — and once a year, the entire community sits down on the ground and listens to that voice until it finishes. We own the technology of hearing the broken. We use it one night a year, about a building, and never about the people we are losing right now.
Eicha even names its audience. Is it nothing to you, all who pass along the road? Look and see if there is any pain like my pain.[8] The passerby is the one the catastrophe didn’t touch — walking on, busy, unstruck. Which means the pasuk is talking to the married friend across the table. She hears “still nothing” and something in her tightens. Part of what tightens is love. Part is harder to admit: the woman across from her is evidence that the system does not always deliver, and if it does not always deliver, it could have been her — her Friday nights with no candles to light, her at sixty in the empty apartment. “It was worth it” and “the right one will come” are how that thought gets closed. They comfort the speaker.
Tisha B’Av knows a different posture. On the floor, not on the chair. In a house of mourning, the comforters may not say a word until the mourner speaks first.[9] No theology, no timeline, no promise that it will all make sense. Sit down on the floor next to her. Let her Tuesday-night tears be as real to you as the churban is for one day a year. Do not reach for the sentence that makes you safe.
There is no fix. There is only whether she sits alone.
[1] Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). “The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. The foundational effort-justification study, replicated for sixty years across hazing, military training, religious conversion, and entry rituals of all kinds.
[2] Loewenstein, G. (2005). “Hot-cold empathy gaps and medical decision making.” Health Psychology. People in cold states systematically underestimate the force of hot states — in others, and in their own past selves.
[3] Nordgren, L. F., Banas, K., & MacDonald, G. (2011). “Empathy gaps for social pain: Why people underestimate the pain of social suffering.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Only participants currently in social pain estimated it accurately; having experienced it before did not close the gap.
[4] Walker, W. R., Skowronski, J. J., & Thompson, C. P. (2003). “Life is pleasant — and memory helps to keep it that way!” Review of General Psychology — the fading affect bias: negative emotion fades from memory faster than positive. Mitchell, T. R., Thompson, L., Peterson, E., & Cronk, R. (1997). “Temporal adjustments in the evaluation of events: The ‘rosy view.’” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
[5] Bamidbar 14:10 — “And the whole assembly said to pelt them with stones,” after Yehoshua and Kalev spoke against the spies’ report.
[6] Taanit 29a — on the verse “and the people wept that night” (Bamidbar 14:1): that night was the night of Tisha B’Av. Hashem said: you wept a weeping of nothing, and I will establish for you a weeping for generations.
[7] Eicha 1:1–2.
[8] Eicha 1:12.
[9] Moed Katan 28b — “The comforters are not permitted to say a word until the mourner opens first.” Codified in Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De’ah 376:1.