Matchmaker, Please Don't Make Me a Match

Internet dating doesn't sound so bad after a matchmaker tells a group of women what they need to do to attract a man.

by Anna David

It sounded like a good enough idea at the time.

A friend who worked at a women's magazine had just interviewed a relatively well-known matchmaker, who offered to give her and whoever else she wanted a free session.

Since I have an affinity for anything that's proceeded by the word free and had just moved to New York, I tossed aside my discomfort over the notion that this matchmaker--and others like her--supposedly accepted up to $100,000 from bachelors looking to be set up with future wives while the women she set up paid nothing.

Because look, I'd seen--and been appropriately horrified by--Millionaire Matchmaker. I mean, the whole thing is just a bit too close to the world's oldest profession for my taste. But then I figured if a group of sophisticated, successful New York women deemed this acceptable, why should I have such misgivings? What would be so wrong, I decided, with being fixed up with a guy who'd parted with eight times the annual rent I'd paid in L.A. to have the privilege of meeting me?

A lot, as it turned out. Because meeting said guy first required a dressing down from the matchmaker.

The introduction went okay, but then she asked my age and if I wanted children. My yes was met with a shake of the head and a tart "Tick tock." She then insisted that I must have had plastic surgery; when I assured her that I hadn't, I was given a withering look of skepticism.

Moving on to another girl, she asked if that hair of hers could be straightened. It could, so she was instructed to straighten it immediately if she expected to get a guy. Another girl was deemed the group brainiac because, according to the matchmaker, she'd attended two Ivy League schools. The fact that this girl had only actually attended one Ivy League school failed to register with the matchmaker, but every time she told our brainiac that she ought to play that big brain of hers down if she hoped to get married, she managed to make the rest of us feel like all we had to offer were our looks...which she was in the process of ripping to shreds.

Before the meeting was over, a 23-year-old had been informed she was too young to attract anyone good and a girl who hailed from Long Island was told that this was a fact she best leave out of conversation because if you couldn't be from the Midwest (like our resident Kansan) then you'd better just be born in Manhattan. (The fact that this matchmaker's accent strongly suggested that she too was from Long Island was never addressed.)

The experience left us all reeling. And like survivors of a shipwreck, we shared a few did-what-I-thought-just-happened-really-happen moments and a couple of shocked laughs before we each scooted off to stress about our hair, age, hometown, or lack of intelligence.

To add insult to injury, most of us never heard from the esteem-wrecker ever again, which apparently meant that none of the men in her group found us worthy. Only one girl was invited to an event where, she informed us afterward, the men were decidedly creeptastic. And the rest of us were left thinking that perhaps Internet dating didn't sound so bad, after all.