Book Review
Ummatched
3/5 stars
"It's hard to draw information from a book that pisses you off to the fullest."

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Quote 1 (Yiddish proverb): "If a man is meant to drown, he will drown in a spoonful of water."

Quote 2 (Corey Holcombe, comedian): "If you are a woman of a certain age.. let's say 35 ... and you still in the dating game talking about how men ain't no good [pause]. It's you baby. The enemy is in the mirror."

I had to temper my anger at reading this book against the information that can be drawn from it. (It is a book with excruciating detail about a woman's failure to match over some number of decades. It starts before the days of caller ID and during the time when they were pay phones on the street and continues to present times.)

The situation is that:

1. The author of the book is a Jewish woman, and that is one of the hottest things on the dating market. 

I would say that if I normed the set of all white women to be a 5.0 on a 10-point scale, then the subset of Jewish Women would be an easy 7.0. Maybe 7.25. (Lots of good hair. Lots of good eyebrows. Lots of good skin. Frequent "other" Kardashianesque blessings.)

If you are a woman with this ethnic background, and you are not spoiled for choice, then you are either VERY unlucky or VERY unperceptive.

2. The author expressed an interest in black men (they showed up a couple of times in this book and took up a disproportionate number of pages). As a lot of Discount Rack White Ladies know (not suggesting that this author is on the discount rack), then you can open yourself up to a humongous market if you have a stomach (affinity?) for black men.

The story of some white lady scraping a black guy off of something to turn him into a husband happens so often that it borders on sociological cliché at this point.

And I say this as somebody who was, 16 years ago, on the other end of a dating market that really is difficult (I am an always employed black guy with an education / no criminal record/no outside children, and even the ones of us that are intelligent/articulate are not competitive in "certain" dating markets), and yet I still managed to pick from what was available and now I have a house full of children.

If somebody such as our author could have such an easy time, and still finds/creates difficulty: it's hard for me to assign fault anywhere except with the "victim." It really can't be that everybody else in the world is wrong.

And in point of fact, people have been getting married in less than ideal circumstances since the beginning of time. They have been getting married with a minimum of discussion since the beginning of time. They have been choosing from what is available in a matter of fact way since the beginning of time.
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Of the book, it is an easy 206 pages, also with a nice glossary.

It could be read over the course of a single Shabbat (and that is what I did, and I'm glad I could do it because it's not worth more time than that).

There are a total of 74 vignettes here, each of them ≈3 pages. And with two men, on average, per vignette. For a total of ≈150 dates

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This is the third of these books that I have read, and the least informative of the three.

1. "End The Madness," Chananiya Weissman.
2.  "ShidduchCrisis," by Penina Shtauber.

The first book mentioned talked about some of the details as well as some of the philosophical issues surrounding the dating scene. And the second was a series of 30 short representative stories about why people have difficulty getting matched.

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In the end, I'm just not sure what this book was about.

1. Was it about shidduch crisis?
2. Was it about mental health? (The author was in tears on every other page. Maybe Borderline Personality Disorder? Approach-avoidance?)
3. Was it about mind blindness/lack of awareness of surroundings?
4. Was it about anything at all?

I'm leaning toward the final one: Again, if you are white lady with clean Jewish blood and you are willing to consider a black person as a partner, and after all that you STILL can't find a match, then my only question is "How do you *beep* that up? HOW?!?!"

It could have been a matter of finding a black guy and doing the children and marriage first, and working on his conversion a bit later. (Not having Jewish status is easily fixable thing, and Jewish courts are very easygoing about converting a non-jewish partner if he is with a spouse with Jewish blood and they have a family together.)

I noticed that the author also brought up the topic about 4 times (not even halfway through the book) about how people thought that she was gay. 

Was that projection? And even if it was that she had an alternative sexual orientation, that has nothing to do with conceiving and having one's own children. (The famous Jewish inseminator, Ari Nagel, has probably about 160 children by now and his focus is on black lesbians. Also, lesbians who were earlier married to men that they had children with and are now raising with their current girlfriend is another sociological cliché.)
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The advice that I can offer the erstwhile readers is:

1. There are at least a couple of other books that are better than this (cited);

2. John Allen Paulos the mathematician has come up with an optimal dating strategy. If you imagine that you could reasonably expect to have x number of relationships during your fertile years, then your best bet is to reject the first half of the partners and then take the most attractive that comes along after number x/2;

3. Read this book as a cautionary tale that: 
The sun will set without your assistance. (This is another Yiddish proverb, by the way.) And so you can spend as much time as you want bullshitting, but fertility will ultimately cease, and death and senescence will come whether or not you expect them.

4. The case of people who say that they want a match but then use up all of their chances can be summarized in one sentence. (And, really, we have all seen this before.) I don't know if it's necessary to have a narrative Arc about what can be synopszed in one sentence.

Verdict: Not recommended.