People can compensate for their disabilities or weaknesses. They may even overcompensate their weakest areas. Thus, cripples may choose to be athletes. By their sheer determination, they may do better than many others who are healthy.

According to Judaism, a person who is born in a certain month may be attracted to blood. As a result, they could either be murderers, or they could compensate for their feelings by doing things that are acceptable in Judaism, such as becoming a ritual slaughterer or a mohel.

We can trace this concept with other issues as well. Let's take the example of dating, for example. That topic is analyzed at great length in our Grossman Parenting website and our Jewish Parenting Forum.

Some people choose to go to a shadchan or a shadchanit instead of or in addition to other methods of selecting a partner.

This article will not discuss the pros and cons of the decision to go to a matchmaker. It focuses on the professional matchmaker, and determines why he or she would select this profession.

Why would a person want to help others get married?

Some cynics may suggest that they selected the profession because misery loves company. Others may argue that it is because they feel that they are on the same level as G-d. Since this is how G-d spends his time following the Creation, these people are following in His footsteps.

However, this issue should be studied on a far more serious level.

Clearly, some people feel a need to help others get married in order to compensate for their own feelings of inadequacy or of personal loss, in order to compensate for their unsuccessful marriage. Although they feel that they are locked into their own unsatisfactory situation, they want to save the institution of marriage in their own way. Their efforts may make no difference in their own lost marriage, but they are "helping" others in their own way.

This is similar to other situations in which people compensate for inadequacies in life by helping others achieve heights that they could not achieve themselves. It is almost the same as the fine relationship between Zvulun and Yissachar, in which the one who did not spend his life in study supported the other, was rewarded for his actions, as if he had studied himself.

However, matchmaking should be different from other compensatory issues. The "disabled" shadchan will determine the future of a healthy, normal, and naive young adult. Why should one who suffers from a failed or improper marriage help others select their partner?

However, the shadchan may not see things that way. He may have a different agenda:

• A need to over-compensate for his perceived lack of ability to select a suitable mate
• A desire to help or "save" the general institution of marriage by having other people get married
• To balance out their own perceived limitations by creating marriages successfully
• To offer themselves marital therapy
• To resolve their own problems or limitations through others

This page does not mean to cast aspersions on all shadchanim. However, they do face issues that differ from other people:

In most areas of life, compensation or overcompensation may be a good trait. In those cases, the person is helping himself or herself rise from levels of perceived or real inadequacy.

This becomes a problem when one crosses the border by using others in order to alleviate their own feelings of inadequacy.

It becomes a crisis when those people help others determine the most important important decision of their lives.

Is this logical? Does this make sense? Is this a good idea?

Probably not. However, that is not the point.

Perhaps a licensing procedure would alleviate the problem. Today, anybody can call themselves a shadchan. They can advertise that they made 10,000 matches. Nobody can check whether this figure is true. Nobody can check how many of those matches were successful ten years later.

Are they helping the client?

That may not be the point. They are compensating for their own weaknesses. The degree to which the person who receives the shidduch is being helped, as well as the suitability of their counseling (or their future spouses), is unfortunately of much lesser importance to this shadchan.

Thus, one of the first things to do when selecting a shadchan or a shadchanit is to find out more about the motives of your professional.

But how can a client resolve this issue or obtain the answer to this question?