OyChicago blog

I recently indulged in a guilty pleasure of mine and read an article entitled “How to Date a Jewish Sorority Girl.” I’m sure many of you saw the article floating around Twitter. As a recent college graduate, East Coast native and Jewish sorority girl, I naturally could not refrain. (There are probably more appropriate ways to introduce myself, but they are probably not as fitting.) The article was frighteningly accurate giving advice along the lines of “when in doubt Camp Ramah” and “you studied abroad in Florence? I was in Rome!” It gave all the essential tools and shortcuts to the heart of every Jewish sorority girl.

But how do you date that girl once she has left the sorority, left college? In fact, now that we’re in the real world, how do you date at all?

Some of you might have met your sweetie in college and remained together despite booze and an abundance of the opposite sex, or if you’re really hardcore you’re still with your significant other from high school. God bless you. 

For everyone else, do we all fall to (dun dun dun) social media sites for help? (Not another Grouper, anything but that!) Don’t get me wrong it’s not impossible to meet people the good old-fashioned way. You might have met her at a mutual friend’s birthday party, or you could have first innocently kissed him at the opening of Barleycorn. But sites such as Grouper, Tinder, Coffee Meets Bagel, etc. are all just steadily becoming the norm for a generation of young people.

And then there’s the mother of them all – JDATE. If you’re really serious about meeting someone, getting married, and being an adult, JDate is your one-way ticket to the Jewish American dream. Sure, you might think “no not the J just yet; I’m too young for that, maybe next year,” but then that deadline gets pushed back because every year you re-evaluate your definition of young.

What is young really? What is too young or old to be single, dating, married, dating multiple people? If you have a typical Jewish mother like I do, then you know that too young to be married is not in their vocabulary, even if it’s in yours.

In this modern era, technology and social media have infiltrated every level of our lives, including our love lives. Embrace it or hate it, it is a fact. In 10 or 20 years from now when kids ask their parents how they met, what will the answer be?