Prenuptial Agreement: think of it as a time saving gestureRabbinic Courts in Israel are looking at a new possible solution for the problem of Agunot, or women whose husbands won’t grant them a divorce. The controversial fix-it: A prenup.

It’s funny that this should garner any controversy at all, since an integral part of a Jewish marriage, a ketubah, is already one big step towards a prenup. A ketubah is basically an insurance statement for a woman, making sure she won’t be left penniless if her hubby runs off or drops dead. If we’re already talking about unpleasant stuff like abandonment and death at the wedding, what’s a little financial negotiation?

A Jerusalem Post article summarizes some of the anti-prenup feeling in the Orthodox world:

The use of prenuptial agreements to facilitate the divorce process is a controversial issue among Rabbinic Court judges. Some rabbis oppose the use of most prenuptials, claiming the agreements make it too easy for one side to end a marriage. They are concerned that making divorce too easy will endanger the Jewish family institution.

They also argue that the use made in prenuptials of monetary incentives to encourage a recalcitrant partner to acquiesce to divorce is really a form of coercion prohibited by Jewish law.

Bullshit and bullshit, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not the only one. Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Dahan, administrative head of the Rabbinic Courts, is on board for prenups, and so is Marc Stern, who wrote an article called ‘A Legal Guide to the Prenuptial Agreement for Couples about to Be Married’ published in a book called The Prenuptial Agreement - Halakhic and Pastoral Considerations by Rabbi Basil Herring and Rabbi Kenneth Auman.

Prenups aren’t romantic or fun, but neither is being stuck in a marriage you can’t get out of. Let’s save everyone some grief and legal fees down the line.

Addendum: Check out this post on the Hatam Soferet blog about a woman scribe writing her own get.  Simultaneously sad and empowering. (Hat tip, Jewess).

Muslim women: in search of believersNothing highlights the difference between the Muslim and Jewish attitudes about marriage better than this article in the Washington Post. There are some new resources in the Muslim community devoted to helping new couples get to know each other before and after they’ve married, and the expected matchmaking services. That stuff is nothing new to Jews. But I was fascinated to hear that Muslims share the problem of way more single women than men in their community, and the reason is that Muslims are allowed to intermarry as long as the spouse is “a believer.”

Interfaith marriage is a huge topic with wide cultural ramifications. Because Islamic tradition, not law, holds that a Muslim man can intermarry but not a woman, a substantial gender gap in the dating pool has opened as children and grandchildren of immigrants have grown up.

The Koran says for Muslims to marry "believers," the meaning of which has long been the source of great debate but has been widely interpreted to include Christians and Jews. Although the Koran does not address the gender issue directly, tradition has held that women are more easily subjugated, and therefore a Muslim woman in an interfaith marriage could be forced by a Christian or Jew to live and raise her children outside of Islam, while a Muslim man in an interfaith relationship would be able to control the household's faith.

 

Of course, intermarriage in Islam doesn’t have the pall of death that it has been given in Judaism because there are a billion Muslims in the world, and no one’s worried that they’re dying out. Still, it’s fascinating that in both communities it’s the men that are marrying out, and the women who are mostly staying in. 

Clearly both the Muslim and Jewish communities are waking up to the realities of dating challenges, but I wonder if it’s too little too late. What’s going to happen to the hordes of single women left at the end of the dating game? Something tells me they won’t be running to the synagogue or mosque for comfort.

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Okay, Ben, I am now writing to you once again with my physical address present, because I am going to explain to you about the Birkin bag, which is nothing like the Birkenstock sandal. This website has some pretty nice pictures of Birkins, which are named for Jane, and you can also refer to the Wikipedia entry for further information. And then you can feel free to order one from wherever you like and send it to my residence, as is written out below, should you feel inclined to do so. I shan't complain, and indeed will be quite grateful, and will even feel it necessary to pay you tribute, to compose haikus and do ceremonial dances in your honor--in fact to show you gratitude however you see fit.

Actually, I guess I'm not going to explain anything about the Birkin bag, just let you know that it would be nice to have one. I'd prefer the Hermes orange color, but I'm not fussy.

But enough about that. Glad to hear you don't cheat on your wife. Or at least not that you're going to admit to me and everyone else. That's wise. Of course, if there's anything you want to put out there, this might be the way to do it.

So you're working on a movie, and you're doing something more with television. You're busy! What's the TV show?

Worse than Kabul: Yuppie-hipster BrooklynI myself am not so busy. I finished law school in January, although I am still working on my thesis, which is about intellectual property and the Constitution and the invention of Hollywood and the commercial nature of American creativity and how much it sucks to move and how bicycles improved courtship possibilities in 1818. It's about other things too, it's pretty much about whatever is on my mind as I'm working on it, because Yale Law School encourages its students to think expansively. Pat Robertson, for instance, is a graduate of this institution, and he makes diet drinks.

There are many graduates of Yale Law School we're more proud to cop to, but Pat Robertson is a funny one.

So I've been living in New Haven for the last few years, but once I finish studying for the bar I'm moving back to NYC. Where do you live? Please don't say Brooklyn! Everyone lives there at this point. It's become so impossibly hip that my motto is now Kabul before Cobble Hill.

Do you wear Birkenstocks?

Have you already ordered me a Birkin bag?

Do you think anyone reading this will?

Next: Telling your life story in six words

Life lessons: Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me Not long ago, Ben Karlin quit his job as producer of The Colbert Report to edit a book of confessional essays about breaking up, Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me. Karlin began his career at The Onion and worked at The Daily Show before helping to launch Colbert. He was used to occupying a position behind the scenes, riffing on current events and the world around him. But confessional writing reverses those polarities. Suddenly his job was to direct the jokes inward—to wring comedy out of his own life, and encourage a bunch of other writers to do the same.

Elizabeth Wurtzel knows a thing or two about confessional writing. Her 1995 memoir, Prozac Nation, took an almost masochistically candid look at her experiences with depression. It made her a household name, equally beloved and reviled. She published several more books and then, inspired by the chaos that immediately followed 9/11, applied to law school at Yale, where she’s currently finishing up her thesis.

We thought Wurtzel probably needed a distraction, so we sent her a copy of Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me and set her up in an e-mail conversation with Karlin, who now heads a production company called Superego. To say it got confessional quickly is the understatement of the year. If you’ve ever wondered what Elizabeth Wurtzel’s dog looks like, read on.

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Why superego? Why not id?

From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

Well, the id comes up with the better ideas but is pretty shitty at getting things done.

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Getting things done is so overrated! For every brilliant idea, there are a million shitty executions. Have you been to the movies lately?

Sorry...this is not what we're supposed to be talking about at all! I think we're meant to talk about dating, another nice concept that often fails when acted upon. But I guess that's not news.

How are you? And while I'm asking questions, the author blurb on your book says you live with your family, which would seem to suggest that you have a family to live with. Correct?

We are family: A 1979 Pittsburgh Pirate From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

First of all, has any one pointed out how odd it is to have a physical address as part of your electronic signature? Is that like saying, “In case this whole revolutionary form of communication that is changing the face of humanity as I type this doesn’t work out, drop me a note”?

Anyway, I do, in fact, live with my family, if wife and child constitute family. I guess that does, though I tend to think of family in more pluralistic terms – like multiple children or at the very least the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates.

I am winding down all my book stuff, which has mostly been fun and fine, and am back to working on content to put on the TV.

This is like an internet first date. All awkward stops and starts and I am already convinced it is going terribly. Like me! Why won’t you like me!

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Yes, it is odd to have one's physical address attached to an email. They tell you to do that, though. Don't know why. I guess if you're a girl there's always the secret hope that someone might send flowers or something even better, like diamonds. Or a Birkin bag. Or a really good vacuum cleaner. Or, in my case, I could use a new sofa.

Gossip girl: You never know when a third party might be listening I could go on.

But enough small talk.

Let's start our second date.

And truly, since you are married and I'm not, it's more like an affair. Right?

Do you do that? Have emotional affairs? That seems to be the new thing--to not bother with the whole mess of physical intimacy but just get deeply intellectually or otherwise entangled with a person you're not married to or going out with as a way to relieve the tedium of foreverness. Not that marriage is necessarily tedious. Of course, I'm sure yours isn't...

Forgive me for being so forward. I just don't know anything about the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates. I know a fair amount about the 1986 Mets. And the Red Sox of that same year. Who could forget the Bill Buckner fumble? Probably not Bill Buckner. My guess is that he still occasionally wakes up screaming over that snafu.

Anyway...

As much as you want me to like you, I want you to like me too--after all I'm Jewish, with all that implies. But I must admit, I have a few vicious tendencies. Like it occurred to me that this is the perfect forum for gossip, because we're having a conversation that's sort of being overheard, so I could say something mean about someone who irritates me and pretend to have forgotten that I was speaking to anyone besides you. Which would be a vicious thing to do, but only sort of.

Girls are so tricky...

Next: Married people have three kinds of affairs. One can't be forgiven.

Not So Fast, You Two: You've still got some hoops to jump through Here at Jewcy, Izzy has been keeping us in tune with all the gruesome details of wedding planning, from how to not look like a total square in front of your Indie-rock loving hipster guests and how to pick up a dress that gives you a Jewish amount of cleavage.

However, it wasn’t until this article was released by the New York Times that we realized an additional check box must be added to every Israeli’s wedding to do list: prove that you and your spouse-to-be are both Jewish. Okay, so it’s a little unusual, but totally doable, right? As it turns out, not so much – especially if your mother is American.

In his essay “How to Prove You’re a Jew?” reporter Gershom Gorenberg documents one woman’s struggle to get married in Israel, her country of origin. Even though the woman, a thirty-something named Sharon, was raised on a kibbutz, has a Jewish mother, and has “Jewish” printed on her birth certificate, it was not enough to satisfy the demands of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. Before any wedding was to take place, the rabbinate wanted some proof that Sharon’s (Jewish) mother was actually Jewish.

The problem? The Israeli Chief Rabbinate expected Sharon to produce her mother’s birth and marriage certificates as evidence for her membership to the tribe. But since Sharon’s mom was born in America, where nationalities are not printed on birth certificates and people can be married by a court official rather than a rabbi, Sharon and her hubby were left royally screwed. They were told no ketubah, no dice.

So Close, Yet So Far: All that stands between these two is a ketubah

Lucky for Sharon, a few phone calls led her to Seth Farber, the Veronica Mars of Israeli marriage. Seth, rabbi and founder of Itim, the Jewish Life Information Center, an organization dedicated to making Judaism as accessible to all Jews as possible, worked his magic on Sharon’s case and came through in the clutch, digging up (literally) an acceptable link to Orthodox Judaism for Sharon’s mother.

But the article definitely raises questions, and eyebrows. Between the old-world mentality of the Israeli rabbinate, growing rifts within the Orthodox movement, and increased skepticism as a cause of people falsely claiming to be Jewish, it seems that without a change in policy, it will be impossible for many Jewish couples to be married in the holy land. As Arnold M. Eisen, chancellor of Jewish Theological Seminary points out, this situation is especially discouraging for young American Jews, who will not be able to ever develop a passion for Israel when, if they ever decide to live there, will be treated with discriminatory and insulting policy.

So save your ketubahs and start lobbying. The future of your children may depend on it.

No Babies: until I'm good and ready. And any rabbi who disagrees can stick it where the sun don't shineThere has been a lot of talk recently about women in the Jewish community feeling bullied into having kids. Here at Jewcy Izzy noted that a lot of the desperation and frustration that comes out of JDate is a result of communal expectations that good Jewish girls will have lots of kids to help populate Israel and stick it to Hitler. Much as I love Israel and hate Hitler, those are not good enough reasons for me to want to bear children. If I have kids, it should be because I feel able and ready to take care of someone else, provide for them, and love them unconditionally. And anyway, it’s not like women make babies all on our own—there are men involved, and it’s ridiculous that they don’t seem to be getting the same pressure as women.

Some of the best analysis of the push towards baby-making in observant Jewish communities is over at JSpot, where Hannah Farber has a post titled “I’m Going to Count to Three, and Then All Rabbis Need To Get Out Of My Uterus.” She writes:

I say: if the rabbis are so committed to making this a communal issue, the rabbis should raise the children. In fact, given their comfortable salaries and high communal status, they have no excuse: they should be adopting and converting children by the dozen. Given the impressive recent developments in medicine that prolong human life, I wouldn’t excuse any rabbi under sixty from performing this mitzvah. Wouldn’t that make a fine statement of commitment to the Jewish future?

And even when men are included in the directives for having kids, I’m still offended when a bunch of rabbis want to tell me how many times I have to grow a person and then push that person out of my vagina.  Did you know the Conservative Movement’s law committee (the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards) recently published a position paper that says any couple capable of raising more than two children, should do so, and Conservative rabbis should all be pushing this on their congregants? The extra children should be called “Mitzvah children” because they’ll ensure a Jewish community well into the future.

Rabbi Jason Miller notes on his blog that he’s heard Rabbi Elliot Dorff tell young people they should get married and start having kids in their early twenties, and they should have more than two kids. (I’ve heard Dorff say we should have a minimum of four kids, so I guess he was being a softy when he spoke to Jason’s class.) All of this when day schools are rising well above $15,000 a year for tuition, not to mention the inevitable college costs, and all of the other expenses of being an observant Jew. And what about those of who hadn’t found our soulmates in our early twenties? In the past year I’ve dated an obnoxious Israeli guy, an incredibly self-righteous administrative assistant at a Jewish political organization, a boring hedge fund manager, and a med student who didn’t have time for me. Should I have just picked one to marry so as not to waste any valuable time on my biological clock? Something tells me that would not have been a good plan.

I love babies, and I bet I’ll have one someday. But if my rabbi mentioned to me that it was high time I got hitched and knocked up, I’m pretty sure I’d stop going to shul.

Everyone loves JDating: But not everyone finds love there Is JDate a feminist issue? The Jewish quarterly journal Lilith certainly thinks so -- their winter issue devotes over eight pages to a package looking at the negative effects of Internet dating on Jewish women.

Trying and failing to find love online, writes Susan Shnur, makes women (especially those in their thirties and older) “feel isolated and at fault.” Male-female ratios are roughly equal on dating sites, but women don’t get nearly as many responses as men. When they do find likely candidates, those guys often turn out to be self-centered, married, or both. And online dating promotes a shopping mentality, wherein it’s easy to click past the pretty-good profiles in search of more perfect acquisitions.

I buy all of these facts, but I’m not sure it helps to blame JDate for the unhappiness of unmarried Jewish women. Love was unfair long before the rise of Internet dating, and while sites like JDate definitely encourage non-empathetic behavior, I don’t believe that breaks down by gender. (Shnur inadvertently backs me up on this -- all of her quotes about dating-as-shopping come from women.)

To me, it seems like that sense of isolation and personal failure felt by older single Jewish women might be less about the beastliness of the Internet and more about our culture’s unhealthy emphasis on making babies. Mainstream American culture is baby-crazy to begin with, but the amount of pressure on Jewish women is drastically increased because we’re not just supposed to be fulfilling our womanly destinies – we’re supposed to be ensuring the survival of our race.

No one ever says it outright, but if intermarriage is 'finishing what Hitler started' (as the trolls like to point out in our comments section) because it produces insufficiently Jewish children, then what about those Jewish women who don’t produce any children at all? Are they, like, Goebbels's little helpers? And isn't that adding insult to injury -- taking women who already feel rejected due to their unsuccessful JDate profiles, and then telling them nothing they accomplish in life matters if they don't have kids? If that's the case, maybe we Jewish feminists should be less worried about the fact that online dating is an impersonal experience, and more worried about how even in this enlightened age -- a time when egalitarianism is utterly the norm in some strains of Judaism, e.g. the female-rabbi–dominated Reform movement -- we’re still haranguing women to work those wombs.

No time to read The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the Sunday New York Times, Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, and New York Magazine during your morning commute? Don’t worry – "How To Sound Smart This Week" will provide the Cliff's Notes.

Pre-bris, he was a baby Schwarzenegger: Everyone's favorite wimpDoes counting superdelegates put you to sleep? This week, the big-idea magazines are all obsessing over the presidential campaign, but it won’t be that hard to change the subject while still sounding respectably erudite. Just bring up one of the following eye-opening essays.

In The New York Times Magazine, Annie Murphy Paul looks at the distinct possibility that fetuses can feel pain. This has major implications for the abortion debate, so you shouldn’t be at a loss for discussion questions, but there’s also a Jewish angle. Scientists think that people who are exposed to pain as babies might grow up to be more pain-sensitive:

Anna Taddio, a pain specialist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, noticed more than a decade ago that the male infants she treated seemed more sensitive to pain than their female counterparts. This discrepancy, she reasoned, could be due to sex hormones, to anatomical differences — or to a painful event experienced by many boys: circumcision. In a study of 87 baby boys, Taddio found that those who had been circumcised soon after birth reacted more strongly and cried for longer than uncircumcised boys when they received a vaccination shot four to six months later.

Is it possible that one of the central tenets of Judaism causes male wimpiness? Does that explain, like, all of American Jewish pop culture? Dazzle your audience with this possibility, and they’ll forget about Obama’s performance in Maine instantly.

Meanwhile, in The Atlantic, Lori Gottleib takes advantage of the Valentine’s Day season to propose a deeply romantic idea: If you’re a woman over the age of 35 and you’re still single, maybe you should lower your standards. “Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics,” Gottleib advises – otherwise, you’ll never be able to organize a stable family life.

Mention this article in the vicinity of anyone male or female, married or single, and you're bound to provoke a strong reaction. It makes everyone involved look terrible: women are either demanding, men either shallow or, if it’s possible that their wives married them out of desperation, pitiable. Also, halitosis is so much worse than bad taste – isn’t it? Actually, that’s another direction you can take the conversation: Would you rather marry someone with perpetual coffee breath, or a collection of Cosby sweaters?

Last week: Super Tuesday

There was a time when a Fat Old Jew (FOJ) like Harvey Weinstein marrying a Skinny Young Gentile (SYG) like Georgina Chapman would have caused a perfect storm of cultural anxieties around sex, power, and religion. Today, it's just another small gossip item.

The nuptials of the conniving, overeating, materialistic Hollywood mogul – the flesh-and-blood quintessence of the kind of crudely drawn stereotypical Jewish male who equates acceptance into the broader American culture with the acquisition of a hot shiksa – passed without so much of a media peep. More interestingly, the Jewish chattering class (a wild generalization referring to my friends) barely found it worthy of cocktail prattle.

Beatles Wrong: Money Buys Love: Beauty and the beast Such a high-profile FOJ triumph would once have tweaked all sorts of anxieties. Some Jews would have worried what it meant for the future of the people; others would have been scared at what gentiles thought about it. Jewish and non-Jewish feminists alike would have been horrified at the way a prominent man was so shamelessly using power and wealth to win such a “yummy mummy,” to use a phrase wielded by Maureen Dowd.

Chattering away about this curiosity with my friends, editors at Jewcy, and others, I realized that none of them interpreted the union as a suppressed lust for inclusion, but instead that less psycho-dramatic, nonsectarian lust…for a hot piece of ass.

 

What’s interesting is how that particular lust is no longer the sole province of the male beast. The enfranchisement of males at the expense of females (particularly Jewish males and Jewish females) is coming to an end. Firmly ensconced in the middle and upper classes, our generation of Jewish women find power, and its application (sexual, or otherwise), far less problematic than their predecessors.

Hot Piece of Ass: She loves this gentleman for his mind

Unlike the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd -- who came of age in the late 1960s in male-dominated universities and workplaces, and has become known for bemoaning a perceived return to 1950s courtship rituals -- our generation of women are achieving unlike any other. They’re used to female-dominated universities, and, soon, workplaces too. And with that equality, they’re becoming a bit beastly themselves.

Edith Wharton's single woman's ambivalence toward marriage has given way to fearless casual sex (with only a smidgen of ambivalence about getting herpes). Women are marrying later. They’re marrying twice, sometimes three times. And like Harvey, their second and third marriages are occurring from a place of greater social stability and financial prosperity.

That particular place – successful women of an advanced age reveling in their single-dom – has been fertile fodder for pop culture, with TV and film glorifying its wonderful lusty freedoms. There’s Sex and the City, The L Word, Cashmere Mafia, The Real Housewives of Orange Country, and on and on.

Get the Get: If at first you don't succeed... Being a “pig” no longer has a gender, or for that matter an age. It’s hard to condemn Weinstein for being shallow after watching A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila, in which 16 men and 16 women competing for the right to “love” Tequila, who is known mainly for having 2 million “friends” listed on MySpace.

Tila first entertains the men, interviewing some of them and making out with others. Then she does the same with the women. That’s the show. It might not have the novelistic complexity of The Wire, but it does prove you can be young, female, and utterly unaccomplished and still get a place at the trough.

Maybe I’m just a cynic. Maybe Harvey swoons over the way Georgina thinks. Maybe Georgina just loves portly men with prominent noses, liberal attitudes, and discerning taste in films. Maybe it’s not “love” Tila is looking for but love. Or maybe, when it comes to relationships and sex these days -- casual, matrimonial, queer, straight, and everything in between -- we’re all allowed to be pigs.

It’s always easier to argue that we should limit someone’s choices than to argue that we should let someone decide for themself, simply because we all know tons of people making incredibly bad choices every day. The rise of leggings alone could stand as an example of why people should not be allowed to do so much as dress themselves without consulting a panel of experts. But making decisions is a part of being an adult, and the more we blanket our lives with across-the-board restrictions the less responsible we become.
Shomer Negiah Panties: the last reserve
As a result of it being easier to tell people not to do something than to tell them to do it carefully, it’s really hard to talk about not being shomer negiah without sounding like you’re just trying to come up with an excuse to have sex. I know because I’ve had this conversation about five hundred times in the last five years, and though I’m confident that being shomer negiah would not be the right decision for me, my reasons don’t sounds as sexy as the shomer negiah advocates’. But I’m okay with that, because my reasons, though perhaps lacking in sex appeal, are legit. Allow me to explain...

The first reason to question the whole shomer negiah movement is the lack of halacha backing it up. 'Shomer negiah' (a term that occurs nowhere in rabbinic literature) is a technical prohibition against lustful touch (Rambam & Shach on Shulchan Aruch) between a guy and a girl who is considered ritually impure as a result of menstruation, or with a guy and any other forbidden relation. That’s it. Contemporary teachers and overreachers have been teaching that shomer negiah is actually a prohibition against touching someone of the opposite sex at all, but as far as I know, there’s absolutely no halachic basis for that. Presumably, if I got myself to a mikvah, there would be no halachic problem with me kissing my date.

Now, that’s good enough of a reason for me, but not for almost anyone who has read The Magic Touch or I Kissed Dating Goodbye, so let’s look at some more ideological concerns.
Hammer Says: Can't touch this!
One of the things that appalls me about a lot of the shomer negiah rhetoric is that it belittles how important the physical aspect of a marriage can be. Example: I recently went on a couple of dates with a really great guy. He was nice, cute, smart, funny and generally excellent marriage material. But there were no sparks. And neither of us wanted to be in a relationship that was purely cerebral. I want my husband to be nice, cute, smart, funny, and also incredibly sexy. He has to have some quality that makes me anxious to spend every night in his bed for the rest of my life. That’s not a minor thing, and though I might have an okay sense of whether a guy has that without running my fingers through his hair at some point, I’d really rather check before I sign up forever and ever amen.

Sometimes what I hear from people pushing shomer negiah sounds like a fancy way of advocating delayed gratification. Essentially, if you wait until you get married then it will be so so amazing when you finally do get to touch/sleep with that person. But the obvious problem with that is that it might not be that great. I mean, the holding hands part might be awesome, but as soon as you have a slimy tongue in your mouth for the first time and you don’t know what to do with it, I imagine the charm is somewhat less potent. And yes, of course you’ll learn and adjust to what you and your partner want, but the beginning is unlikely to be all violins swelling in the background and fireworks sparkling over the bed. So the delayed gratification argument is, as far as I can tell, ridiculous.

But the real reason I touch the men I date is because I’m an adult, and I deserve to have a physical relationship with whoever it is I’m in a relationship with. I really don’t believe that kissing someone has a detrimental effect on that relationship if we’re not married, nor do I think that having kissed someone else will mean that whatever relationship I have with my future husband is somehow less special.

Sex is a different issue. Being shomer negiah today doesn’t mean being a virgin, it means not touching anyone of the opposite sex, which is a much bigger thing than just waiting to get laid until you get married.

I have a lot of respect for people who decide to wait for sex until marriage, but at the end of the day I’m a lot more concerned that my husband and I share views on how to raise the kids, or how we’re going to observe Shabbat than that we’re both virgins on our wedding night.

Sex is a serious thing, and anyone who tells you otherwise is kidding himself (or herself). But it’s not the only serious thing, and I worry about the amount of emphasis that being shomer negiah puts on sexuality. I’m all for encouraging people to be really careful about the decisions they make in relationships, but being a virgin when you get married doesn’t trump everything else. If you marry the wrong person, it’s still the wrong person no matter how little experience you have in the sack.
Here I Am: not being shomer negiah. Scandal!

Which brings me back to my original point. Being shomer negiah treats the symptoms, not the problem. Preaching a hands off/all-virginity-all-the-time policy isn’t the way to make sure that people think before they jump into bed with someone. And it doesn’t teach anyone to be particularly good at recognizing good and bad relationships when they see them.

 

It’s important to guard your touch, and the touch of those in your life. But that’s not the only thing that goes into a successful relationship, and claiming anything to the contrary is dishonest.

You know what makes me a little nauseous? This article from the Columbia Spectator:

Students Balance Homework, Husbands
By Laura Schreiber

Grades Aren't That Important: it's all about the dress

In October 2003, first-year Miriam Casper, BC ’07, hit it off with a guy she met at a friend’s party on the roof of Woodbridge Hall. A year later, she married him and moved to Queens. After 18 months, she gave birth to her son Benjamin.

One week later, she graduated magna cum laude.

Most students at Barnard and Columbia College will spend their undergraduate years exploring varying levels of relationships and intimacy. But for a number of orthodox Jewish students, tying the knot while in college is the norm.

“I always hoped by the time I graduated college, I would be married, be engaged, or be dating someone I knew I wanted to marry,” said Molly Elkins, BC ’08, who married last month and moved to Washington Heights with her husband.

For Yael Hall, BC ’10, who is preparing for her January wedding, marriage came sooner than expected. “I was the last person anyone would think would be getting married,” Hall said. “I got really rude responses from friends who knew me like that, saying, ‘Wow, I really didn’t think you’d be one of the first ones to go.’”

While living in Cathedral Gardens may seem like a trek, married students commute from as far as New Jersey. According to Hillel Rabbi David Almog, marriage presents a disruption of a student’s college experience.

“In college ... friends really do become your family,” Almog said. “There’s a severe rupture that happens, when somebody gets married, of that bond.”

Rachel Fischer, BC ’08, who married last year, agreed that one of the hardest parts of matrimony was giving up campus connections.

“I definitely miss ... that environment where you’re always with people doing the same things,” said Fischer, who lives in New Jersey. “Everyone has midterms, everyone has finals, everyone’s in library.”

Elkins said she accepted that marriage meant giving up certain aspects of her old social life, including spending less time with her friends.

Marriage was a possibility she kept in the back of her mind from the beginning of college, though it did not dictate her plans.

“On some level it focuses you,” said Michelle Friedman, BC ’74 and a psychiatrist who counsels observant Jewish women. “If you’re a pre-med person you know what courses you take. If you want to get married, you focus on that. Finding a spouse is like finding a job.”

For Fischer, who is currently applying to law school, her time at Barnard was often a tough balancing act between family obligations and career aspirations.

“There’s always the constant temptation of ‘forget school, who cares? I’m married. ... What would be the difference?’” Fischer said. “But I can’t give up that aspect of my life. I couldn’t give up those goals.”

Yet some students feel no qualms prioritizing family life over college. “Marriage is much better than education and academics,” Elkins said. “I wasn’t going to push off my wedding six months to do a little bit better in all my classes. I live life and go to school, but I don’t let it conflict with celebrations or anything like that. That’s the wrong perspective for school.”

Friedman said it could be tricky for college women to balance the more traditional values of the orthodox community with contemporary careers, noting that going back and forth between traditional gender roles and modern college life is sometimes confusing.

Full story

Because I know one of the people quoted in the article I’m not going to go into what parts in particular test my gag reflex, but as a rule, this whole thing is grotesque.

It’s cute that the spectator assumes that all the girls who get married in college will continue to come to classes and be enrolled. I bet there are a reasonable number who pretty much drop out after their wedding and/or the birth of their first child. And hey, I think it’s fine if that’s what these women want to do. I mean, they’re not my priorities, but they’re certainly valid ones.

What makes me crazy, though, is the idea that these guys are concerned about women who want to have careers. What is scary about that? Does extra money for vacation really intimidate people that much? Or savings to pay for day school? Or a nicer apartment? I don’t actually think Orthodox men are as shallow as this article makes them out to be, but man, this really makes me want to smack something.

If you fall in love with someone, and they fall in love with you, and you happen to be 19, or 20, or 21, I don’t have any problem with you getting married. But when girls are rushing through school to get to marriage, or are dropping careers that they’ve spent years training for because the community is pushing people to get married young, we have seriously fucked up our priorities somewhere. Not cool, people. Not. Cool.

It's all too easy to fall into the trap of demonising our enemies, so as a corrective, spare a thought this afternoon for Osama bin Laden, whose son Omar is getting divorced from his English wife after just two months of connubial bliss.

Jane Felix-Browne, 51, from Moulton, near Northwich, married Omar Osama Bin Laden, 27, in July, after romance blossomed during a holiday in Egypt.

At the time the ex-parish councillor said she married him for love and did not care about his family's background. But she said there were now "two very very serious issues that have threatened our lives and our liberty".

"We have had to get divorced because of threats from two major sources in Saudi Arabia," she said. "I know from who the threats have come but I'm not prepared to say.

"The threats are not from the general public, not from the government."

After five - count 'em, five - previous marriages, Jane obviously thought that this relationship, with the young scrap metal dealer whom she met whilst horseriding near the Great Pyramid, would be different. Alas, having the world's most wanted man as your father-in-law has not been easy, even if the relationship between bin Ladens I and II is somewhat strained. Sources tell me that Osama didn't even front up for the wedding bash. 

More disturbing, though, is the possibility that the couple face death threats as a result of their union. It's unclear why - Felix-Browne was married to another Saudi man at the age of 16, takes the Muslim name Zaina Mohammed, and appears to all intents and purposes to be a Muslim - but either way, it's clearly a miserable situation. After all, their marriage is based on such strong foundations:

"We have an awful lot in common," she said. "We love the deserts. We are both pretty religious."

Kinda like the Jews and the Arabs.

"It is against Islam to be forced into any divorce and as far as I am concerned this divorce will never stand up in a Sharia court. [...] The threats have put an end to my marriage but we will re-marry."

All very strange. Anyway, here's hoping, Jane, that your seventh marriage is happier than your sixth. Osama isn't getting younger, and that vast underground complex of caves must get awfully lonely sometimes without the sound of grandchildren playing in the dust.

As Borat Would Say: "Very Nice. How Much?"There have been quite a few recent posts here about issues regarding ketubot. In April, the lovely Laurel posted about problems of aesthetics and wound up discovering some pretty awesome options. Earlier this month, titillating Tamar took it a tad further with a conversation about the actual language in a traditional ketubah, and how the document mainly functions as an outdated legal and financial contract. A commenter on that post noted the "lack of a woman's voice in the traditional ketubah."

As a woman, a writer, and a Jew, I am deeply affected by words and symbols. When I first heard that the wedding tradition of breaking a glass might have been meant to symbolize the anticipated breaking of the bride's hymen, I was more than a little distressed. Likewise, when I learned that the traditional Jewish wedding is a legal ceremony in which the man purchases the woman I found myself looking for more evolved alternatives that might still satisfy my taste for tradition. The incredibly inspired and creative Rabbi Jamie S. Korngold led me to a book by brilliant author and professor, Rachel Adler, titled Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics.

Engendering Judaism considers how women's full participation can transform Jewish law, prayer, sexuality, and marriage. Chapter 5, "B'rit Ahuvim: A Marriage Between Subjects," concerns itself entirely with the "unresolved tensions between woman as possession and woman as partner [that] are embedded in the classical liturgy upon which all modern Jewish wedding ceremonies draw." Adler calls the traditional legal language for Jewish marriage "fundamentally incompatible with egalitarian relationships," and demonstrates how we may "engender a truly covenantal marriage" with "a lovers' covenant, b'rit ahuvim."

These texts depict the marriage of a young virgin as a private commercial transaction in which rights over the woman are transferred from the father to the husband. This commercial origin is reflected in the relational terminology. The word for husband is ba'al, the general term for an owner, master, possessor of property, bearer of responsibility, or practitioner of a skill. No specialized relationship term exists for wife; she is simply isha, woman. The owner of a house is ba'al ha-bayit, the man responsible for an open pit is ba'al ha-bor, the owner of an ox is ba'al hashor, the owner of a slave is ba'al ha-eved, and the husband of a woman is ba'al isha. The sole signifier for marital relationship is the grammatical form of the construct (semikhut), which binds man and woman as subject and object of an implied preposition: ba'al isha, the master of a woman; eshet ish, the woman of a man.

Rabbinic espousal -- kiddushin -- bridges the girl's passage from her father's hands to her husband's. This transfer procedure is designed to prevent the anarchic and world-disordering expression of autonomous female sexuality that could occur during the dangerous hiatus between these two statuses of daughter and wife, when a girl might consider herself in her own independent domain.

In the Mishna, there is only one approved method for appropriating a wife: monetary acquisition.

At the same time, the rabbis etherealize the commercial transaction of biblical bride purchase into a symbolic act in which, at the ceremony at least, only a token sum of money changes hands. This sum, as little as a penny (peruta) according to the academy of Hillel, represents the biblical bride price, now transformed into a marriage settlement, written into the ketubbah document and paid not to the father but to the woman herself in the event of divorce or widowhood. It is as if the woman were purchased with an annuity due to mature at a future time. As for the token sum used for kiddushin, Ze'ev Falk explains, "the amount was then returned to the husband together with the other items of the wife's property, so that the 'purchase' had become a mere formality."

Adler says that "some apologists argue that marital acquisition is merely a figure of speech and bears no relation to its literal meaning." Of course, modern brides know that they're not actually being purchased, even if that is what the ancient text implies. Why, then, with this intellectual knowledge, can it prove to be so emotionally and spiritually troublesome? I decided to ask my friend, Dr. Jennifer Kaplan, a Jew, a woman, and a practicing psychologist.

"You wouldn’t sign a contract for a house with terms that you didn’t agree to. Seeing is believing. When we see what’s in the contract, it has an affect on us. There’s a part of us that’s offended, and there’s another part of us that says, “Yeah, it’s okay, it’s not literal.” But there’s still that part of you that signs your name to something you don’t subscribe to, and that doesn’t feel good."

Adler argues that women have good reason not to "feel good" about the ketubah, and the ritual of kiddushin. She explains that while "the purchase of the bride may have dwindled to a mere formality in the rabbinic transformation of marriage, her acquisition is no formality. The language of acquisition still accurately reflects a relationship in which the woman has been subsumed and possessed."

So, how do we reconcile our love of tradition with our desire for evolution? Adler has been kind enough to conceive of an alternative ceremony and contract, all the while working to ensure that as many elements as possible from the traditional ceremony were preserved. Here's a description and outline:

The b'rit ahuvim section that replaces the elements of kiddushin (the erusin blessing, declaration of acquisition, giving of the ring, and reading of the ketubbah) is both preceded and followed by traditional words and traditional melodies -- and, of course, the ceremony is performed under a huppah. The order of the service reflects this "frame" of traditional elements:

1. Mi adir 'al ha-kol (traditional invocation of blessing for the couple).
2. Officiant's speech (traditional). Following the invocation is a traditional time for the officiant to speak briefly, outlining and explaining the ceremony and its meaning and speaking personally about the couple. The officiant should take this opportunity to explain what a b'rit ahuvim is and to distinguish it from kiddushin.
3. Blessing over wine (analogous to the tradition, but distinct from it). In the kiddushin ceremony, this blessing would be followed by the erusin blessing, and only the couple would drink from the cup. Here, the officiant should explain that a blessing over a cup of wine is a way to begin a holy celebration. To distinguish this cup from the erusin cup, it may be passed to all those around the huppah.
4. Reading of the b'rit document in Hebrew and in English (analogous to the reading of the ketubbah but clearly distinguished from it by its contents).
5. Kinyan, acquisition of the partnership by placing symbols of pooled resources in the bag and lifting. This will be the most unfamiliar part of the ceremony, but it may also be powerful precisely because it is new. If the partners have put in distinctive personal objects and intend to talk about their significance for the partnership, they should do so before lifting the bag. Wedding rings can be placed in the bag at this time. The partners then lift the bag together and recite the blessing. They could then put on their rings.
6. The Sheva Berakhot, Seven Blessings (traditional).
7. Shattering the glass (traditional).
8. Yihud (traditional). Immediately after the ceremony, the partners go into a room to be alone together.

Adler's approach is deeply respectful and truly inspired. You can check out an example of a b'rit covenant in PDF form, courtesy of Rabbi Korngold, who chose a b'rit ahuvim for her own wedding.

B'rit or no B'rit, women ill at ease with the idea of being symbolically purchased can take this dilemma even further, turning it into an act of Tikkun Olam. The way I see it, we are the lucky ones. We get to question and debate the symbolic meanings of ancient rituals, then we get to choose what we want, dance the Horah and eat wedding cake. Our concerns are linguistic and theoretical. Not so for the thousands of women and children who are sold into slavery around the world each year. According to the Not For Sale Campaign, an estimated 27 million people around the globe are the victims of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation from which they cannot free themselves. Perhaps the best thing that those of us who are uncomfortable with the idea of being commodified can do, whether we choose a ketubah or b'rit or neither, is take that passion and emotion, and funnel it into working on behalf of those who truly have been sold.

A while back Laurel wrote a couple of pieces about ketubahs, and notably about how to find one that isn’t ugly. But what Laurel neglected to mention is that ketubahs are kind of a problem for some of us Jewcy Jews.
Would You Frame This: And hang it over your bed?
People seem to think that ketubot are marriage contracts, and that they contain some kind of written agreement to love and cherish each other until death do us part. But actually, ketubot aren’t so much marriage contracts as they are prenuptial agreements. The original Aramaic text goes something like this:

On the ___ day of the week, the ___ day of the month ___, in the year 57__ since the creation of the world as we reckon time here in ___ (city, state), the groom, ___ son of ___, said to the bride, ___ daughter of ___, "Be my wife according to the laws of Moses and Israel and I will cherish, honor, support and maintain you as is the custom of Jewish husbands who cherish, honor, support and maintain their wives faithfully. And I have given the settlement of __* silver zuzim that is due you according the dictates of the Torah* and [I will provide] your food, clothing and other needs and [I will] live with you according to universal custom." And the bride consented and became his wife. And the dowry that she brought, whether in silver, gold or jewelry, clothing, furniture or linens, is accepted by the groom for the amount of __* pure silver pieces. And the groom chose to add from his own pocket an additional sum of __* pure silver pieces for a total of __* pure silver pieces. And thus spoke the groom: "The responsibility of this contract, the dowry and the additional sum, I accept upon myself and upon my heirs after me to be guaranteed with the best of my property and possessions that I now own or may hereafter acquire. All my property, real and personal, shall be mortgaged to secure the payment of this contract, the dowry and the additional sum, during and after my lifetime, from today and forever." And the groom accepted the responsibility of this contract, the dowry and the additional sum, in accordance with the substance of all marriage contracts and additional sums provided for the daughters of Israel according to the dictates of our sages of blessed memory. This is not simply a forfeiture without consideration nor a mere form of contract. And we have observed the symbolic delivery carried out between groom and bride with regard to all the above in a manner that is legally valid and binding.

Basically the text says that if at any point the groom dies or wants to get divorced his wife gets the cash discussed here so she’s not destitute. It’s really more to obligate his kids to pay for her in case he dies and they don’t like her. And if you’re wondering how many pieces of silver (zuzim) it costs to get hitched, the deal is that each family kicks in a hundred pieces if the bride is a virgin (there’s no examination--if you’ve never been married it’s assumed) and less if the bride is divorced or widowed.

These numbers are fixed now, but it used to be that there were heavy negotiations leading up to the writing of the ketubah. In part this was a function of families trying to give a new couple some kind of nest egg, and in part it was simply a business deal. It’s only in the past couple of centuries that we’ve gotten nervous about assigning monetary value to people. Before then people weren’t shy about insisting that they were being lowballed in a ketubah. It was, after all, a legal agreement that could have very serious ramifications for a woman, so she wanted to make sure she was covered if her husband headed for the hills or bought the farm.

I’m probably not alone here in thinking that this particular agreement is somewhat devoid of romance, right? Certainly there’s nothing about eternal love going on in the original text. It’s an insurance agreement more than anything else, and while I think insurance is really important, I don’t generally hire an artist to render a watercolored interpretation of my All State claim.

For whatever reason people have decided to really embrace this particular claim, so you can find ketubahs of all shapes and sizes to go with every kind of marriage, from Sephardic, to Interfaith to Reconstructionist to Commitment ceremony. In a way I think it’s cool that people want to write their own texts and be engaged with this legal tradition but I also find it puzzling. Why is this particular tradition of signing a document at a wedding so important?

I think it’s because we understand how tenuous love and relationships can be, and there’s a part of us that wants something in writing. We want words on paper, something tangible, to be framed and put up on a wall, to be reminded of when things are tough.

It is sometimes helpful to see something that obligates you to another person, even if it’s mainly a financial obligation. I’m not sure I would hang a traditional ketubah over the bed I share with my husband, but I have some sense of why one would do so. And I do feel an attachment to the original text, if only because it’s what has been binding Jewish couples together, for better or for worse, for thousands of years.

If you think Jewish marriage customs are complicated and bizarre, check out this list of things you didn’t know about Musim marriages according to Shari’a law.

June is almost over, but the Jewish wedding season is just getting started. I have a number of friends with weddings almost every weekend from now until Labor day. I only have to buy one blender this summer, but it seems like wedding talk is all over the place, so I thought I’d give some tips on what to expect at different kinds of weddings, and some customs to consider if you’re thinking of tying the knot sometime soon-ish. This is obviously not a comprehensive listing, just a few helpful tips. There are about a billion books about wedding planning, and even Jewish wedding planning (most notably The New Jewish Wedding by Anita Diamant of The Red Tent fame), so I’m just going to list some things those books might overlook.

Planning

If you’re not already aware of it, ask if there’s a gemach for wedding dresses, bridesmaid dresses, mother of the bride dresses, table linens, centerpieces…you get the picture. Gemachs are basically libraries of items available for rent or even for free if someone can’t otherwise afford something. We hear about tefillin gemachs, and wedding dress gemachs, but many large communities have gemachs for everything from sheitels to chuppas. These are available to you even if you’re not Orthodox, and they can help you save tons of money, though you should be aware that if you’re looking for a sleeveless wedding dress you won’t find it at a frum gemach

You probably want to check out Calm Kallahs. When it starts to gross you out, head over to Only Simchas and set up your engagement home page. Wait for all your friends from high school to post giggly messages. Gloat.
Rock Out: With Maxwell Street Klezmer
The Week Before

My favorite wedding custom is rarely practiced by my friends, but is no less cool in my eyes. Basically, the bride and groom are forbidden from seeing or speaking to each other for a full week before the wedding. I’ve never seen a source brought to support this, the reasons seems to be simply that they’ll miss each other so much it will make the wedding that much more exciting. Though logistically I imagine it’s a nightmare, what with rehearsal dinners being something of an impossibility, it strikes me as incredibly cool. A couple of friends of mine did this before their wedding, and every night they left each other voicemail messages…it’s pretty seriously cute.

At the Wedding

You probably want a little printed out guide/program to let everyone know what’s going on. I came across an amazing one for a couple I’ve never met, Jen and Seth. It’s really funny and informative in a clever fun way. Awesome excerpt:

Now we get into the ceremony itself - finally! The marriage ceremony, while solemnizing the holy joining of man and woman into a new Jewish household, is also a business deal. As such, it must conform to three rules: (1) don't touch the merchandise before you buy it; (2) don't pay for the merchandise before you see it; (3) NEVER PAY RETAIL.

 

Jewish weddings have two parts, kiddushin (betrothal) and nissuin (marriage). These parts were historically separated by a time period up to a year long. However, since Jewish history, particularly in Europe, was never very peaceful, it became risky to have too long a time between betrothal and marriage, since the groom might end up dead in a pogrom or something in the meantime. So now the two parts are done consecutively in one day.

You may not want to copy Jen and Seth (and you should probably get their permission if you do want to copy them) but try to put together something for Aunt Ida to fan herself with while the bride is circling the groom.

At many weddings while the Bride is waiting to be veiled the groom gives a tisch, or a little sermon, to his friends and family (traditionally only the men are invited, but I’ve been to a number of coed pre-chuppa tisches in my day). The talk is accompanied by many l’chaims, and it’s customary to interrupt him as much as possible, and to constantly be lightening the mood, because it’s supposed to be such a happy day for him. A good pre-chuppa tisch is key.

At most observant weddings the groom wears a kittel, that white robe that he’s supposed to wear on the high holidays, and I know of at least one wedding where the bride wore one over her dress while they were under the chuppa. It’s a little silly looking, but I’m all for it.

Part of most Jewish weddings is the reading of the ketubah. Since the text of the ketubah is in Aramaic some people think it’s boring (I have a weird obsession with Aramaic, so I dig it, but whatev) but I encourage you to do it, and to make sure you have a woman do the public reading. Why? Because a little while back Rabbi Hershel Schacter of Yeshiva University made the following statement about whether or not it’s okay for women to read the ketubah at a wedding:

Since the whole purpose of krias hekesuba is to introduce a pause between the brachos over the two cups of wine, the longer the pause - the better! (See Beikvei Hatzohn pg. 268.)So it is a correct observation that if one only studies Even Hoezer Hilchos Kiddushin and Hilchos Nisuin there's absolutely no mention whatsoever that anything is wrong with a woman reading the kesuba. Yes, a monkey could also read the kesuba!

Monkeys, women, talking parrots, a gorilla using Aramaic sign language—they’re all fine! If that wasn’t offensive enough, Rav Shachter goes on to say that even though it’s permissible for women to read the ketuba, they shouldn’t because it’s a public thing, and such a display would be immodest. Since I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in the world who’s actually turned on by someone reading in Aramaic, I feel like I can go ahead and say Shachter is being ridiculous. I’m not attracted to girls, so we’re out of the woods. Anyway, I say have a chick with a miniskirt read your ketubah just to stick it to our monkey loving YU posek. Also, after the groom breaks the glass I am strongly in favor of tongue kissing under the chuppa.

Bring In Da Noise, Bring in Da Klezmer

We’ve already established that I have a crush on all things Sephardic, but at a Jewish wedding, there’s nothing like getting down to some seriously rockin’ klezmer music. I am slightly obsessed with the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band in Chicago, but I’m sure there’s an excellent klezmer band near you (even if you live in Denmark). Klezmershack has a nice listing of hundreds of bands that you can search by location, so you shouldn’t have trouble finding someone who’s handy with a clarinet. A lot of these bands have people they can bring in to do regular wedding songs (I’m looking to marry a man who will be totally cool with a wedding song that’s totally inappropriate. Sex and Candy by Marcy Playground, maybe? Just cause it would be hilarious), so don’t feel like you need to hire multiple bands to satisfy both Jewish and regular dancing requirements. But I really feel the klezmer part is not optional.

Mazel tov!

Go have awesome sex, already.

Marriage is about money, as anyone who’s ever taken a college seminar on Jane Austen knows. On the wedding night, the bride’s assets slip into a lace teddy, the groom’s assets put on their silk pajamas, and the two become joined forever in a perfect union. Theoretically, this tender commingling of bank accounts could cost the couple no more than $55 for the marriage license. But these days, before the marriage transforms the couple’s finances, the wedding often threatens to destroy them.

Look, for example, at the changing customs around ring shopping. As soon as we started thinking about getting married, my boyfriend and I found ourselves presented with these old-fashioned roles to play: He’s the stoic breadwinner hunting down the diamond for his bride, and I’m the demure dependent breathlessly accepting the gift presented at my feet. These roles have almost nothing to do with our actual day-to-day lives, of course, but rebelling against them takes a lot of work. Rather than trying to subvert the dominant paradigm and plan the wedding at the same time, most people simply pay extra to make the cognitive dissonance go away. This is terrific for Tiffany’s, but kind of a scam for the rest of us, which is why I’m proud to say that I’m a diamond-free bride.

The groom as tool: De Beers helpfully explains gender rolesHistorically, buying the ring is the groom’s job, and his ability to save two month’s salary—a standard invented in the first half of the twentieth century by the jewelry industry—signifies his prowess as a provider. Since most brides have their own incomes these days, this tradition doesn’t make much sense, but we haven’t scrapped it. Instead, more and more brides simply contribute their own salaries towards the ring. In 2007, 39% of women said they’d help pay for the ring (up 11% over the past two years.) It’s a good thing, because ring prices have skyrocketed: In 2006, the average couple spent $4,470 on an engagement ring, or 25% more than they did back in the simpler days of 2002.

Sharing the cost hasn’t helped alleviate our anxiety about the size and shape of our rings, though. One in four women admit the engagement ring they received was too small or not what they had envisioned, which sounds horribly materialistic until you remember what else the ring is supposed to demonstrate. Cartier might sum it up perfectly in their ad campaign: Under three big rocks, the caption reads “This is what extraordinary love looks like.” It’s impossible to miss their point. A big ring means big love; a little one suggests simply lukewarm affection.

My own engagement ring has no diamond, but it does have a huge replica of a rock. The designer, Alissia Melka-Teichroew, traced the silhouette of a diamond ring onto a piece of silver and then cut it out. It’s a comment on ringness, a meta-ring. It’s conceptual. It cost $99. I love it.

A ring about ring-ness: Mine's the one on the far leftYou’ll forgive me if I sound a little snotty, a little triumphant, a little too cool for school. The truth, of which I am exceedingly proud, is that no one in my life has given me a hard time about my lack of diamond. I’ve gotten a couple semi-skeptical comments — one “So when are you going to get the real ring?” and one “You know, you have a very different attitude about this than most women.” But nobody’s told me that my fiancé priced me out at less than a hundred dollars, and for that I’m very grateful.

Why the anti-ring? Well, there’s the crass financial reason; neither of us saw the point of spending so much money on a piece of jewelry, especially when the meta-ring was so perfectly suited to both of our tastes. There are also a host of ethical reasons, given the well-documented corruption of the diamond industry. "If you really want a typical engagement ring," said my fiancé, "I could always go to Sierra Leone and dismember some small children."

Not long after we got engaged, I found a picture of my ring on Offbeatbride, the website accompanying Ariel Meadow Stalling’s excellent eponymous how-to book about non-traditional weddings. She described it as “the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to anyone who asks about your diamond ring.” In the comments section, someone called her out, wondering why anyone would want to be so rude to people who just want to appreciate your good fortune. I saw her point, but it seemed obvious that the real source of hostility here wasn't the occasional friendly ring-gawper. Every time you open a magazine Cartier’s there to tell you that your man doesn’t love you—and “fuck you” is the wrong reaction?

Good enough for Grandma?: Mead's bookAs Rebecca Mead points out in One Perfect Day, her meticulously-researched book about the wedding industry, ads like Cartier’s are effective. In fact, diamond rings only became widely associated with engagement after the diamond company De Beers began advertising in the 1930s. It took them years to invent the tradition: Even as late as 1939, one-third of brides went ringless. It wasn’t until 1947, when a never-married copywriter coined the phrase “A diamond is forever,” that diamonds become a crucial part of betrothal. It’s a hard slogan to argue against. If a diamond is forever, and you’re dismissive of diamonds, doesn’t that suggest you’re saying fuck you to forever?

Jodi Kantor seems to think so. In her New York Times review of One Perfect Day, Kantor appeared to take Mead’s criticisms of the industry personally, arguing that her own wedding was tasteful and referring to the book as “dour” (which is up there with “shrill” and “hairy” on the Top Ten List of Ad Hominem Responses to Feminist Arguments.) Kantnor hastily pointed out that she didn’t disagree with the book’s general thesis; she just believes our current wedding excess can’t be too bad, because it makes people happy. “Do grandmothers cry just as hard when a bride is married, as Mead was, at a courthouse while wearing office clothes?” she asks. Read that again: The New York Times’ reviewer just accused a journalist of making her grandma sad by not spending enough money on her wedding. It’s a perfect example of the way the industry has coached us to conflate what we buy with how we feel.

The industry is only so powerful, though, as the story of the male engagement ring demonstrates. In 1926, with revenues threatened by the rise of department stores, jewelers began marketing rings for men—“mangagement rings,” as my fiancé wistfully calls them. They positioned these rings as historically macho, advertising them with pictures of be-ringed Conan the Barbarian types charging into battle and naming them things like “the Pilot,” “the Executive,” and my favorite, “the Stag.” But there was an essential problem with the male ring: it didn’t fit with traditional engagement gender roles. Men were supposed to be bestowing the rings, not wearing them, and all the ringed barbarians in the world couldn’t convince the public otherwise.

Bling it on: Does wearing jewelry make this guy less of a man?This problem played out logistically. Since it was taboo for women to propose marriage, brides couldn’t figure out when to buy their fiancé’s rings. Were they supposed to secretly return to the jewelry store after the proposal? Not only was the process clunky, but grooms tended to stand in the way. As one trade magazine pointed out, if a man discovered that his bride planned to spend $30 to $50 on a ring for him, he’d probably talk her out of it. For the mangagement ring to succeed, then, women would have to deceive their fiancés in order to buy them gifts that they didn’t really want.

Deep-seated gender roles are much harder to escape than a sixty-year-old custom. I should know: Our engagement ring might be postmodern, but my fiancé’s proposal was entirely old-fashioned. Andy bought the ring without me—without my knowledge. (If I may be sentimental for a moment, the vision of him engagement-ring-shopping at the MoMA store totally kills me; it’s like some weird pre-sexual fantasy I would have had as a pretentious eight-year-old.) And he proposed on one knee, just like Mr. Darcy.

I’m rare among my engaged and married friends; most had long, heartfelt discussions about commitment and readiness before anyone thought about buying a ring. Sixty-four percent of women help pick out the ring, which means they’ve discussed getting married before the actual engagement. But only 5% of women propose. Had we stuck with our happy living-in-sin arrangement for another few years, I like to think I would have suggested we get married—but I would have felt ridiculous getting down on one knee. Even the phrase “Will you marry me?” seems to belong to men; speaking it, I think I’d feel like I was play-acting, and I suspect my fiancé would feel the same way. We’re independent-minded enough to buck a tradition created by the jewelry industry, but neither of us can fully escape the idea that some roles are for men and some are for women.

Next: Is it ethical of us to get married when so many of our friends can’t?

*** Also: Five ways to keep the wedding-industrial complex off your ring finger

Getting a Get: Way EasierCindy Chupack strikes again! In yet another Modern Love column from the ever so Jew-ish "Sex And The City" brain trust, Chupack has treated us to an exploration of the Jewish divorce process, otherwise known as the get.

I’m in the midst of getting a get at the moment, myself. Which is a strange thing, I can attest, not least because of its singular linguistic weirdness: Where else in English do we have the chance to use an identical verb and noun in concert? Chewing a chew? (Starbursts leap to mind. Mmmmm, cherry.) Swallowing a swallow? (I’m a vegetarian; that’s gross.) Fucking a fuck? (We’ve all made mistakes.) Drinking a drink? (Yes, please.)

Here’s how it goes: Over the phone, I give the special get-giving Rabbi my Hebrew name, my ex-husband’s Hebrew name, our parents’ Hebrew names, and a few details about the when/where/why/how of the whole debacle that was our brief marriage. I send him our Ketubah, which, since it is egalitarian, includes