From the editor's desk: The wedding announcement

This past month, I have been honored to attend three weddings that exemplified the solution to the so-called shidduch crisis, couples representing very different backgrounds, with love triumphing. A story worthy of publicizing. I brought my dancing shoes, a shiny Borough Park suit, and practiced my handstands for the mitzvah of sameach chasan v’kallah. But there was one item that I left in my parked car, and for good reason. The facts below have been slightly altered to protect the parties’ identities.

The first wedding involves a 27-year-old lawyer from Long Island who has never been married before. They met through a Jewish match making web site and their intense Skype conversations turned this coast-to-coast relationship into an engagement. The groom was a single father of a six-year-old girl who shares the bride’s name. The bride did not let the fact that he was a divorced father deter her from seeing his positive attributes. Nor was she deterred by the superstition that a stepmother should not share the same name as the child. Behind the scenes, the bride’s best friend recited tehilim daily and made a donation to Kupat Ha’ir during the course of the relationship. I’ve read plenty of miracle stories from Kupat Ha’ir’s brochures, but this was my first time seeing the story in the flesh.

The second wedding I attended was a 27-year-old groom and a 30-year-old bride. He was not deterred by the fact that she was older. After all, some of our greatest sages, including the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, married older women, as did Amram, the father of Moses.

My third wedding involves a groom who is nearly 60 years old. His bride is a decade younger. He is divorced with a grown daughter. She has never married before. After a lengthy courtship, they went under the chuppah. Their marriage is certainly an inspiration to the older singles in the community. So why did I leave my notepad in my car?