Q:
We believe that shidduchim are made in heaven; so what’s the principle in the gemara that you have to hurry up to find something good because שמא יקדמנו אחר – maybe somebody else might snatch the opportunity away from you (Mo’ed Katan 18b). If it’s ordained, it’s ordained; what’s there to worry about?

A:
This is an old question that is asked here constantly. And the answer is that when it comes to marriage, to a bashert, it’s ordained that you should have the opportunity. But you could lose the opportunity – in a couple of ways.

One way is if a nice frum girl, a decent girl, comes along but it just happens that her nose is a fraction of an inch too long and you say no, so you lose the opportunity.  Hakadosh Baruch Hu is not going to make a wedding at the point of a gun. He brought the kallah to you. You saw her, you rejected her – it’s your hard luck.  That’s one way of losing out on what’s bashert.

Another way is if you’re already married to the nice girl, but you are so silly that you constantly tell her that you don’t like her. If you’re a meshugeneh, you tell her that girls in the street are prettier than she is. Or you’re crazy enough to bring up the word divorce. Sometimes you’ll say, “I want to divorce you.”

Here’s a man – a yeshiva man – who said it constantly to his wife. Constantly he said, “I’m going to divorce you, I want to divorce you.”  Finally she took the hint and she left him. She left him. And he ran around to all the rosh yeshivahs, all the rabbanim asking them to intercede and to beg his wife to take him back, but she was so accustomed to the idea that he dinned into her ears for years; he’d been telling her for years that he wanted to divorce her so finally she took it seriously.  So he lost out on the girl that was bashert.

So now you have two ways.  One is not to take the right girl, and second is once you have her, you lost her. Now don’t say, it’s bashert that you shouldn’t have her.  Nobody should say, מפי עליון לא תצא הרעות והטוב  (Eicha 3:38). Don’t say that. Don’t say that all those things that happened are only a gezeiras Hashem. מידכם היתה זאת לכם – It’s your own fault (Malachi 1:9)! You didn’t live properly – you couldn’t keep a good wife, so you lost what was ordained in heaven.  Marriages are made in heaven, but they’re destroyed down here on earth.

TAPE # 520

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