I come from a very religious family and, as is the custom in our community, I got married very young to someone I didn’t know very well. Not too surprisingly, that marriage didn’t work out and we ended up getting divorced after only a year. During that year, I had time to reflect on my life and what I wanted for myself and I decided to make a change and to go back to school to finish my degree. Once that was done, I started thinking about getting into a relationship again. But I didn’t have much of an idea as to how to go about it. I had never seriously dated and what I heard from my colleagues about online dating was a little scary. It seemed like it was a lot about rejection. People would go on dates and sometimes they would get almost insulted by the people they were meeting, or the date was good but they never heard from the person again and they were left wondering what had gone wrong. I knew this was not for me. I was already estranged from my family. I didn’t need more rejection. So when someone at my synagogue told me about Simantov, I was immediately conquered by the idea. This in a way resembled old-fashioned matchmaking -something I am familiar with – but with a modern twist and it seemed perfect for me. I was not disappointed. Mr. Weber is a very warm and understanding man and I felt very comfortable with him from the beginning. I was looking for someone who could understand my background and, through Simantov, I was able to meet two men who were perfectly appropriate for me. While I didn’t feel a real connection with the first, the second I fell in love with pretty much at first sight. He is older than me and I for sure would never have met him on my own but M. Weber insisted that I should a least give him a chance and he was absolutely right. The age difference doesn’t seem to matter at all: Shimon is a very sensitive and cultured man, a wonderful listener and a great nurturer. We are different in many ways but we complement each other perfectly. We’ve been married 3 years now and we couldn’t be happier. None of that would have been possible without Simantov.
