DATING FORUM

Question

I love reading your column in the 5TJT and would be so grateful to hear your thoughts on my situation. My boyfriend and I are moving toward engagement in the next few weeks, but I’m concerned that I don’t feel the excitement that I see in many other kallahs. Instead, my emotions feel more like approaching Yom Kippur (my favorite yom tov): nostalgic and warm, with a deep yearning for closeness (with Hashem), alongside awe, trepidation, and a strong sense that the stakes are very high.

It’s not a feeling that makes me want to jump up and dance with simcha. Rather, it feels cautious and reverent, almost as if the dancing should wait for our first anniversary. Is this something to be concerned about? Should I be feeling more outward excitement? Or does excitement grow closer to the chuppah? Thank you very much.

Response

Thank you for your readership and entrusting me in assisting you with the most important decision of your life. You’re asking a beautiful, thoughtful question, and the way you describe your inner world already says a great deal about the kind of kallah you will become.

Let me begin by saying something clearly and gently: What you’re describing is not a red flag. If anything, it may be a sign of depth, yiras shamayim, and emotional maturity. The present culture often highlights one very specific image of engagement: effusive joy, constant smiling, overt excitement that announces itself loudly. There are kallahs who feel that way, and that experience is real and valid. But it is not the only authentic emotional landscape from which a healthy marriage can emerge.

What you’re describing feels less like a party and more like standing on holy ground. Awe is not the absence of simcha. You compared your emotional state to Yom Kippur, your favorite yom tov. That comparison is extraordinarily telling. Yom Kippur is not devoid of joy; it is saturated with meaning. It carries closeness, yearning, vulnerability, gravity, and an acute awareness that something eternal is taking place. It’s a day we approach with trembling and love.

Marriage, when entered with intention, can evoke something very similar. Chazal describe marriage not merely as companionship, but as a bris, a covenant. Covenants don’t always feel bubbly; they often feel weighty. When the soul senses that it is stepping into something irreversible and sacred, excitement may express itself as reverence rather than fireworks. Some souls dance before they understand the magnitude of what they are entering. Others feel the magnitude first—and the dancing comes later. Neither is wrong, and not all joy is loud.

There is a common misunderstanding that simcha must be exuberant to be real, and that’s the main reason people end relationships (getting cold feet) or marriages, rachmana litzlan. They don’t understand what they’re feeling, and instead they run away searching for the giddiness that they may find for a short while, until that feeling dissipates too. There is a secular version of excitement towards marriage that is at the heart of what could be causing you some confusion. I will articulate that for you without mocking either side. In the secular world, engagement is primarily framed as self-actualization and romantic culmination. The excitement is often built around personal fulfillment: “I found my soulmate.” Public validation: the ring, the announcement, the reactions, the photos. Emotional intensity: butterflies, adrenaline, constant anticipation. The fantasy of the future: the wedding as a peak experience, marriage as an extension of dating pleasure.

The secular model values heightened emotion as proof that the decision was right. If you’re not buzzing, you’re taught to question the choice. Excitement is outward, expressive, and performative by design.

There’s nothing inherently shallow about joy—but this framework tends to equate volume of emotion with truth and feeling good with being good. When the nervous system is activated with dopamine, novelty, and anticipation, it feels like certainty.

The Torah does not deny joy, but it situates it very differently. In a Torah worldview, engagement is not the culmination of a love story. It is the entrance into avodah, a work in progress. Marriage is a covenant. A covenant is a mission, not a fantasy. It is a structure for kedushah, not self-expression. The emotional tone that naturally accompanies this is yirah alongside love, peace, and calm alongside warmth and depth rather than sparkle. Most importantly and why your instinct went to Yom Kippur, not Purim, is because your neshamah knows that in a marriage, responsibility goes alongside the couple’s wants and needs.

Yom Kippur is the day of greatest closeness, but it comes through seriousness, self-awareness, and the knowledge that something eternal is at stake. No one measures the success of Yom Kippur by how euphoric they felt at Kol Nidrei. The Torah never suggests that the right emotional posture for a covenant is giddiness.

Secular excitement asks: How does this make me feel right now? Torah excitement asks: Who am I becoming through this choice? One is about incentives. The other is about significance. One spikes early and must be maintained artificially. The other often unfolds slowly as trust and shared purpose deepen.

The Torah path may feel quieter because when a person senses they are stepping into something sacred, the soul often slows the body down. That quiet you’re describing is not emotional flatness (often wrongly described by secular coaches and couple’s therapists): it’s inner gravity. Wisdom brings humility. When the neshamah recognizes the weight of what it is choosing—a life partner, a home of kedushah, future generations—it may naturally respond with stillness rather than fireworks. That stillness is not the absence of joy. It’s joy that hasn’t been converted into performance. In Torah life, simcha is not concentrated in the announcement; it’s distributed across the years. It appears when conflict is handled with dignity, when loyalty is tested and held, when Shabbos feels like home, and when two imperfect people grow toward Hashem together. That kind of joy doesn’t photograph well—but it lasts.

So, when you notice that your inner world doesn’t match the secular narrative of engagement excitement, that’s not a failure of emotion. It may be a refusal of your neshamah to trivialize something holy. The Torah doesn’t ask if you are thrilled. It asks if you are choosing with clarity, integrity, and yiras shamayim. And from the sound of it—you are. That is not less beautiful than dancing in advance. It is simply a different—and very Jewish—kind of joy.

Judaism has always recognized multiple textures of joy. For example, there is the simcha of Purim: explosive, external, uninhibited. And there is the simcha of Shemini Atzeres: quiet, inward, intimate. Both are simcha; they simply speak different emotional languages.

Your joy sounds inward facing. It sounds contemplative. It sounds like the joy of someone who knows that what she is choosing will shape her life, her avodas Hashem, and her future generations. That kind of joy doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it whispers.

You question, “Should I be feeling more outward excitement?” A more helpful question may be: “Do I feel clarity, respect, safety, and a desire for deep connection?” What I wish that people who are heading towards an engagement would ask themselves, and what you should be quietly examining is: Do you feel seen and valued by this man? Do you trust his middos? Do you believe you can grow together, especially when things are not easy? Do you feel that this relationship draws you closer to the best version of yourself and your avodas Hashem?

If the answer to those questions is yes, then the absence of giddiness is not a problem; it may simply reflect your temperament and your spiritual sensitivity. Excitement rooted only in emotion can fluctuate, an example we see in the secular world, where people search for love in all the wrong places, consequently not finding it. Commitment rooted in awareness tends to endure.

“Does excitement grow closer to the chuppah?” The answer is that sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t, and then it blooms later. For many women, the emotional arc looks nothing like a steady upward climb. It may come in waves. Some feel a surge of joy after the vort, others under the chupah, while others feel it months into marriage when trust deepens and the bond becomes lived rather than imagined. Yet for some, the real simcha arrives not in anticipation, but in embodiment, when the relationship becomes real in daily life, shared rhythms, shared challenges, shared hopes, and shared tefillos.

There is no timetable your heart is obligated to follow. However, I would recommend you take an example from the Torah. Chazal tell us that when Adam first met Chava, he didn’t dance—he spoke words of recognition: “This time, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” It was an encounter with awe and knowing. What you are describing sounds less like fear and more like reverence. Less like hesitation and more like awareness. And awareness is a powerful foundation for marriage. So, no, there is nothing “wrong” with you. You are not deficient in simcha. You may simply be a woman who understands that love is not only a feeling to be enjoyed, but a responsibility to be shouldered with humility. And there is profound beauty in that. May you be zocheh to enter your chuppah with clarity, yishuv hada’as, and a simcha that unfolds in exactly the way your neshamah is meant to experience it. n

Baila Sebrow is president of Neshoma Advocates, communications and recruitment liaison for Sovri-Beth Israel, executive director of Teach Our Children, and a shadchanis and shidduch consultant. Baila also produces and hosts The Definitive Rap podcast for 5townscentral.com, vinnews.com, Israel News Talk Radio, and WNEW FM 102.7 FM HD3, listenline & talklinenetwork.com. She can be reached at [email protected].