The Rabbis have another way of measuring how much attraction needs to be there, and they put it in a rather sobering way. They suggest that the person cannot be disgusting. Now what does it mean that a person cannot be disgusting to you? It means that if you find a physical blemish, and I think this is a very important insight, if there’s something physical, no matter how small, don’t dismiss it. People come to me for counseling, they come to me for advice, and often I’ll hear people say — You know, everything is great except I just can’t get over her nose. It’s just a little bit too big. Everything else, you know, I find attractive, but it really bothers me. And I feel so superficial for being concerned about that. Should I just overlook it? And based on this insight that I shared with you earlier from Judaism, the correct advice, I believe would be, is no. You cannot overlook it. You should continue to go out with the person. I think the more we go out with someone, we can learn to adjust our feelings and our level of attraction to them can increase. Yet you can’t dismiss something that you actually do find disgusting and that you really feel that you can’t live with. So in the end, you have to ask yourself, can I live with it. And if you can’t, then you really should not consider that person as marriageable material because, again, our tradition says that if you do marry someone who has something that you find disgusting, then you may come to hate them. So attraction is, needless to say, an important dimension. But quite a bit less important than, perhaps, it is placed by people in the secular world.

To finish off the second point, let me give you a shorthand way of evaluating character. There are three questions you could ask yourself:

Would I like to have a child with this person, would I want to have a child with this person? Would I want my child to be like this person? And do I want to be more like this person?