Here's the latest, from arielle:
Reading over these comments, i see a bunch of people who don't understand what it is like to grow up in an orthodox family and then intermarry. I found this blog when i was tryign to google people going through the same situation as me...I grew up orthodox, have been an atheist all my life (i remember in 1st grade moving my lips during davening so i could pretend to pray, because I didn't believe in it). I "came out" as non orthodox when I started college and moved out of my parents house...now I am 25, seriously dating another atheist, who was raised catholic. All those people who say that if you are happy your parents will be happy, etc, that's just not true. My parents talk over me when i mention anything having to do with my boyfriend, use every excuse to give me a musser speach, and have flat out told me that if i marry him, they will no longer be able to talk to me. When I tell them I'm happy, they reply that I only "think" i'm happy, and that down the line i'll REALLY be miserable. Last week I attended my grandmother's funeral, and my father used around half the eulogy to talk about how he has to remember his mother by passing on jewish traditions to his children and make sure his children are jewish, etc. Now my dad is a baal tshuva, and his mom never cared who i dated...the only thing she ever asked me is if i was happy.
while it would be nice to think that parents will be happy if you are happy, the truth is that for many orthodox parents, religion is put above their children. It's sad, and hard to understand if you don't come from that background, but it can come down to a choice between your parents and the person you love- and they set it up that way to put incredible pressure on their kids to marry jewish. Meanwhile, most jewish people i have dated over the years (and it's been a LOT) do not have similar views to me on how to live your life, god, feminism, etc. When I started dating my current boyfriend on the other hand, it was like "wow, i finally understand what people are going on about when they talk about meeting 'the one'"; not only do we agree on most issues and get along great, the fact that we were both raised in very extreme religious conditions (his parents are fanatically catholic, and he was kicked out of his house for a while as a teenager because he did not want to get confirmed) brings us even closer together.
