I get to know you by email. No forms, no résumé, no app. Then I look for someone worth introducing you to. Matching isn't switched on yet, so what you can do today is the getting-to-know-you part.
I'll send you a few short questions. Answer as many or as few as you like, or leave it, and nothing else happens.
Most of the shidduch process asks for your height, your seminary, your yeshiva, and a list of your qualities. That's the version that makes a person feel like a résumé, and it's the complaint that comes up more than any other.
So I don't require any of it. Tell me your age, your yeshiva, where you daven; plenty of people do and it helps. It just isn't the price of admission, and it isn't where I start. I start with what you're like, what you find funny, what you'd do with a free afternoon, and then I ask about whatever you actually said rather than working down a script. After a few rounds I write up what I've understood about you and send it to you to check.
That write-up is what the matching will run on, and it's why the questions are what they are. When I build it, it won't be looking for two people whose details line up. It will look for the specific things each of you would appreciate about the other, and say so plainly to you both, so you each know what I saw before you decide whether to meet.
Every question comes out of something you wrote. How far it goes is up to you: some people want to be asked the searching questions, some would rather keep it light, and I follow your lead rather than push.
If you answer in two lines, you get a short, accurate description instead of a padded one. What you tell me is yours to share or keep.
Give it to a shadchan you're already working with, send it to your
family, cut it down for a résumé. It belongs to you, and you don't owe
me an explanation for what you do with it. Reply @profile
any time for a clean copy.
You see everything written about you first, and you correct it until
it's right. No name or contact detail reaches another person until you
have both said yes. One thing you should know going in: a person here
can read conversations, to check the system is working properly. Reply
@human any time and someone reads yours deliberately.
Nothing. No payment, no card, no trial, no tier, no account and no password, and nothing to cancel, because you never signed up for anything. It's an email conversation, and you can stop replying whenever you like.
That holds once matching is running. I don't charge to start, I don't charge for an introduction, and there's no shadchanus gelt if it goes all the way: nothing when you get engaged, nothing at the wedding, no invoice afterwards.
If you'd rather be deleted outright, reply @stop and I stop
immediately, with everything I hold deleted within thirty days. You don't
have to give a reason.
This is what the whole conversation is for, and it's the part I'm still building. Nobody is being suggested to anyone today. When it does open, here is exactly what happens — and nothing about it starts without you saying yes first.
In writing, as a plain yes-or-no question, and not replying means nothing happens. Finishing the questions now doesn't enroll you in anything later.
Not a list to browse and not a stack of profiles. One person, with a short anonymous description and a straight answer to why I think the two of you are worth introducing — drawn from what you each actually wrote, not from your ages matching.
Nobody sees your name, your contact details, or your full write-up unless you have both said yes. You never have to explain a no, and I won't ask you to.
Names, fuller descriptions, and references — the way a shadchan would do it. Your references are never called before that point, and I'll tell you before it happens.
Expect few rather than many. A suggestion that wastes your time costs you more than one that never arrives, so I'd rather stay quiet than send something I don't believe in.
All made up, and no names on either side at this stage. This is the part where I say what I think I'm seeing, and why.
… so here's why I thought of her for you. She has her sister's kids most Shabbosim and says the whole trick is keeping the menu boring enough that she isn't stuck in the kitchen all Friday. You told me the test of a good Shabbos is whether anyone is still at the table at four o'clock.
I think you'd like that she's funny in a completely flat way. Asked to describe herself she said "ask my sister, she's more objective and less kind." You said the thing you'd want most is somebody to laugh with at the end of a long day, and my guess is this is that.
I think she'd like that you don't need to be the one talking. She's been on a few dates where she felt like the audience, and the part of the day you told me about was the shmoozing after seder rather than the seder itself …
… short version: you both go out of your way for something nobody is paying you to do. You started running again last year and told me you're slow and don't care. She's been reading about the Romans for fifteen years with nobody to discuss it with.
I think you'd like how little she performs. I asked what she's proud of and she told me about a boy on her caseload who can tie his shoes now. Not the job, not the certification. The shoes.
I think she'd like your seder, and not to be impressed by it. She said she wants somebody who has already built his week around something, so she isn't the one holding the shape of it, and yours has survived three jobs and eleven years.
One thing I'll say plainly: she's quieter than you are, and you told me you find silence at a table hard work. That might be nothing. It might also be the thing …
… I thought of him because of the singing, honestly. You said you sing and that you stopped doing it around people. He plays guitar badly on purpose, his words, and has a standing arrangement with his brother-in-law to butcher old Carlebach every Chol Hamoed.
The harder part, and I'd rather you heard it from me than on a first date: he was widowed four years ago and raised his two through it. He doesn't present it as a tragedy and he didn't want it leading his description either. He told me what he's looking for is "somebody to eat supper with who's glad I came home."
I think you'd like that nothing about him is arranged for anybody's benefit. He described his own cooking as "edible if you're not fussy" and his apartment as "fine, I'm not there much." I think he'd like that you're direct, because he said the part he finds hardest is the guessing, and you answered a question of mine before I'd finished asking it. Neither of you, I suspect, would need the other to explain why some weeks are harder than others …
Examples, not real people. A real one would be built from what you actually wrote, and ends with "@yes" or "@no".
So at the end I'll ask what you made of it: whether the description is really you, what was tedious, what you'd tell somebody thinking about trying it. Criticism is the useful kind of answer, and it's the whole reason this stage exists.
All sorts. Plenty of people here are dating again after a marriage, or came to Yiddishkeit later, or are past the age where the phone rings much. None of that is a note on your file, and none of it changes the questions I ask you. It's part of who you are, the same as everything else you tell me.
That's a good thing and I hope it goes somewhere. None of this is instead of that — take what I write for you and hand it straight to them if it's useful. If a shadchan or a friend or an aunt gets there first, tell me and I'll be glad to hear it.
The questions work today. Matching is the part still to come, and you'll be asked before you're part of it.
Prefer to do it yourself? Email hello@ai-shadchan.com
with @register_me in it. It's the same thing.