I’m Jewish and want to marry a Jewish man but Jewish dating sites are not working. Help!

You note that you’re not religious but that Jewish tradition is important to you, so I’d ask: will dating or marrying someone Jewish necessarily mean that you won’t be able to continue to embrace and value these traditions?

Though I am not religious, the Jewish traditions I was brought up with are hugely important to me, and as a result I’ve always wanted to marry someone Jewish. After two years on JDate, however, I’m still single and starting to doubt whether I’ll ever find anyone on there who I connect with. Whilst I’ve accepted that if I meet someone non-Jewish in the “real world”, I’d be happy to date them, I can’t seem to make myself go on general online dating sites – I feel like I’m tempting fate by putting myself in a situation that I don’t really want to be in. At what point do I draw a line under JDate and start actively searching to meet someone who isn’t Jewish online?

As New York’s weather made the gradual change this week from “mild” to “inside of an armpit”, I decided that I needed to buy some new T-shirts. Now, I like new T-shirts, but I don’t like going to stores, so I was pleased to find a website that sells a limited selection of just the kind of T-shirt that I thought I wanted: classic cuts, an array of muted, neutral colors, at a price that was affordable but not so affordable that I feared the shirts were manufactured in nefarious circumstances. I ordered some of the shirts and they came in the mail and they were nice shirts, don’t get me wrong, but somehow, they were not quite the T-shirts for me. Kind of boring, if I’m honest. Even though they’d appeared on the internet to fit my specifications exactly.

It could be what you’re really looking for is someone who shares your values, and he e culture as you, or he may be a man who doesn’t come from that culture but who respects and appreciates yours and your relationship with it

I promise there’s a point to this: all dating sites are alluring dating in Chula Vista because they give us the impression that they will provide us with the ability to find just the kind of people we are looking for at a relatively low resource cost in terms of time, energy and dashed hopes. Special interest sites – whether they’re related to religion, culture, career, common interest in cosplay – offer the idea that this cost will be even lower, because the inventory is smaller and more tailored to personal tastes. But that’s still no guarantee that the delivery is going to be what you’re looking for. Two years is a frustrating amount of time, but it’s not a whole life, and a partner is a more important decision that a T-shirt. So it may just be that you need to keep shopping around if you are absolutely determined to meet someone from a specific cultural or religious group.

That said, you might be able to expedite the process of finding someone you really click with if you do cast your net a bit more widely.

(Full disclosure: I’m the kid of one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent who raised me to love and value and feel part of both of their cultures).

Ultimately, you need a partner who supports what’s important to you. You’re open to finding that in an unexpected place in the “real world”. But let’s be honest: the online world is also real.