Happily Ever After Or...
Picture a young woman, four dates into the best shidduch she has had in two years. The families checked out. The conversation is easy. Her friends are already excited.
She gets in the car, and by the second traffic light she knows it is over.
Nothing happened on the date. She will spend the next week trying to explain the feeling to her mother, to her shadchan, to herself — and the honest answer is that there is nothing to explain. The date was good. The feeling came anyway. It always comes on the good ones.
By Thursday she has found the reason, because a reason had to be found. He paused too long when she asked about his learning. There was that comment about money. Her cousin heard something once. She calls the shadchan and says it with real regret — “I just didn’t feel it” — and the moment she hangs up, relief washes through her like a fever breaking. Everyone tells her she knows herself. She is proud of that.
It is the third time in two years this exact thing has happened. Different name, different reason, same drive home.
Here is what was actually in the car with her.
In 1944 a psychologist named Neal Miller starved a rat, taught it to run down an alley for food, and then electrified the food cup.[1] The rat ran, slowed, and stopped short — close enough to smell dinner, too frightened to take it. It just stood there, frozen. Miller’s student later put rats in little harnesses and measured the two forces in grams, and found the rule that has been running this woman’s dating life without her permission: the wanting grows as you get close to a goal, and the fear grows faster.[2]
The fear grows faster. That is the entire mystery of the drive home. The panic cannot show up on the first date, when walking away is easy, because far from anything real the fear is still small. It can only show up when someone starts becoming real — the fourth date, the fifth, right when everything is going well. It is not her judgment finally speaking up. It is her distance closing. The dead-end shidduchim never got close enough to set it off. This one did.
Which is why the relief after the phone call proves nothing. Of course she felt relief. The rat feels relief too, when it backs away from the food. Relief means the fear stopped. It does not mean the fear was right.
And her fear is louder than it had to be. When researchers measured people closing in on real goals, they found this spike is not universal — people reaching for something barely flinch, while people playing not-to-lose, don’t-make-a-mistake, don’t-miss-the-red-flag, produce fear that goes nearly vertical near the goal.[3] She has spent ten years in a system that trained her to play not-to-lose. Her résumé handed around like a listing. Reference calls about her. Her photo studied by strangers. She learned to guard, because the system guards, and now the guarding fires on the exact date it should have stayed quiet — and everyone congratulates her discernment.
She is not broken. She was trained.
Now run the drive home again, with one change: she knows all this.
The panic comes at the second traffic light, same as always. But this time she knows what it is measuring, so she does not call the shadchan that night. She goes to sleep. By breakfast the certainty has shrunk to a question, which is what happens to this kind of certainty when you add twelve hours and a few miles.
Her mother tells her to focus on how much she wants a home. That advice is eighty years out of date. Miller tried it — a hungrier rat did not reach the food, it froze closer in, shaking harder.[4] What she needs is not more wanting. It is less fear, and less fear is built in small moments. On the fifth date he goes quiet for ten seconds after a question. The old read: he blanked, there is no chemistry. The other read, which costs her nothing: he actually thought about it before answering. The ten seconds are the same ten seconds. She picks the second read on purpose, and the evening keeps breathing.
That is not lying to herself. It is a test, and it runs in both directions. UCLA followed 232 newlywed couples for four years. Two out of three couples had premarital doubt, and most of them married and stayed married — but the wives whose doubt was real divorced at two and a half times the rate.[5] So the doubt has to be tested, not obeyed and not ignored. The test: spend two dates honestly trying to kill it. If it dies — and most of the time it dies — it was fear, and by the sixth date somebody laughs at something unrehearsed and the panic of the fourth looks silly in the rearview mirror. If it survives — if the money comment from the third date shows up again on the fifth and sharpens into something she can say out loud — then the no is real, and she can give it with a whole heart, because she tried her best to talk herself out of it and could not.
One warning about the test. It is not white-knuckling. Sitting through two more dates with the alarm blaring and doing nothing about it makes everything worse — fear that is endured and never worked does not fade, it hardens into conviction.[6]
She still needs those two dates, and the system does not like giving them. “I need more time,” passed through a shadchan, sounds like a no warming up — the boy’s side pulls back, and the whole thing dies of misunderstanding. So she says the true thing instead: the nervousness means it is getting real, that is a good sign, give me two more meetings and I will give a real answer. Researchers who studied first-time parachutists found the jumpers who lasted did their fighting on the ground, before the plane door opened.[7] She decides those words at her kitchen table, in daylight. Not in the car.
There is another version of this woman, and every shadchan knows her too. She solved the panic a different way: she never lets anyone get close enough to cause it. Better screening. One more reference call. A no before the first date instead of after the fourth. It works — the alarm never rings — and it will keep working on every name they ever send her, because there is a flaw to find in every human being who ever lived. The only match with no downside is the one that never happens. Her door marked safe opens into a quiet apartment and another year.
Between the two of them they hold the whole story. One panics at the closeness. The other arranged her life so nothing ever gets close. Both are guarding against the wrong forever.
Losing your one and only forever should terrify you more than getting him forever ever could.
[1] Miller, N. E. (1944). Experimental studies of conflict. In J. McV. Hunt (Ed.), Personality and the Behavior Disorders (pp. 431–465). New York: Ronald Press.
[2] Brown, J. S. (1948). Gradients of approach and avoidance responses and their relation to level of motivation. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 41(6), 450–465.
[3] Förster, J., Higgins, E. T., & Idson, L. C. (1998). Approach and avoidance strength during goal attainment: Regulatory focus and the “goal looms larger” effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(5), 1115–1131.
[4] On resolving the conflict by lowering the avoidance gradient rather than raising the approach gradient, see Miller, N. E. (1959), in S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A Study of a Science (Vol. 2, pp. 196–292). New York: McGraw-Hill.
[5] Lavner, J. A., Karney, B. R., & Bradbury, T. N. (2012). Do cold feet warn of trouble ahead? Premarital uncertainty and four-year marital outcomes. Journal of Family Psychology, 26(6), 1012–1017.
[6] Foa, E. B., & Kozak, M. J. (1986). Emotional processing of fear: Exposure to corrective information. Psychological Bulletin, 99(1), 20–35.
[7] Fenz, W. D., & Epstein, S. (1967). Gradients of physiological arousal in parachutists as a function of an approaching jump. Psychosomatic Medicine, 29(1), 33–51.