Jewish history is in many ways the story of marriage. The various unions, too many to count in the Bible alone, define the generations and ancestries that lead from the first Jewish family through enslavement in Egypt, glory in Israel, expulsion and anti-Semitism.

This is perhaps why the Bible takes such pain to provide the details of various family trees, even though the majority of names on these lists are inconsequential to the larger biblical story: the notion of a cohesive family unit, sustained by marriages and births, is in and of itself endemic to Judaism.

So I can understand why some Jews have been sounding the alarms of a marriage crisis in various Jewish communities. And I can even fathom why one Jewish marriage expert recently called the situation an “epidemic” during a speech in Toronto – though likening “un-marriage” to an infectious disease is probably going a bid overboard. For Jews, it is not incorrect to define a falling marriage rate as a serious religious problem.

This explains the explosion of efforts over the last five years to help young Jews find mates: websites, singles events and an ever-growing army of shadchans have been established to help Jews of marriageable age find suitable husbands and wives, so that they, too, can join the religious tradition of expanding the Jewish genealogy. Yet the crisis persists, and no one seems to understand why.

There is, I think a simple answer: marriage isn’t what it used to be. For thousands of years, marriage was closely related to family ties, economics and social class. And the decision of whom should marry whom was made by parents and relatives, not the two immediate parties. Love was sometimes a byproduct of these unions, but almost never the predominant reason for marriage.

But over the last hundred years or so, the situation has taken a dramatic turn. Young people developed the notion that they should be the ones to choose their spouses. And in many ways this revolution has made marriage a much happier, loving union: As marriage expert Stephanie Coontz writes in a recent essay titled The Future of Marriage, “A good marriage is fairer and more fulfilling for both men and women than couples of the past could ever have imagined.”  

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the new marriage model has made the old standard so unattractive that singlehood has become the preferred state for those who don’t, can’t or haven’t yet found the perfect match. Coontz again explains: “The forces that have strengthened marriage as a personal relationship between freely consenting adults have weakened marriage as a regulatory social institution.”

The rapid change in how people get married is a worldwide phenomenon. But it’s easy to see why tight-knit religious and ethnic groups, Jews among them, would feel the effects more acutely than the larger trend. In these sorts of groups, reconciling an old standard with the complex redefining of marriage is bound to cause confusion.

The mere fact that the downward trend in Jewish marriages is being called a “crisis” indicates that the notion of marriage as law, or at least social law, is still alive even while union as personal preference takes hold with younger generations. There is a fundamental gap, then, between those who want to get married but only under the right conditions and those who simply want people to get married. Both groups view marriage as a goal, but seemingly under different circumstances and with different motivations.

Which leaves the question: is there a Jewish marriage crisis? I would argue no – that an evolutionary shift in the concept of marriage has led young people to look for something more when considering when, or even if, to get married. Where the crisis may lie is if those institutions so bent on helping Jews to get married cannot evolve to help today’s marriage candidates find the partners they’re looking for.