When I overlooked perfectly nice guys in my twenties and early thirties, I never sat down and thought about how complicated a calculus middle-aged dating becomes, if you factor in a much smaller pool of available men, a much smaller pool of available men who interest you, a much smaller pool of available men who are interested in dating someone your age, and the logistical baggage we all carry forward the older we get. Now I began to see all of this. But it wasn’t until I let another woman sit in the Sheldon seat and was left standing alone that it finally sunk in how limited my options really were.
Even the local matchmaker couldn’t find me another date.
DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO
While Wendy searched for a new prospect, I’d need to find a way to meet more men. But how? If going to a local matchmaker offered the advice and perspective you can’t get from online dating, the greatest disadvantage, it seemed, was how few people she might have in her personal network. On the other hand, smaller seemed better—if you know that’s the deal upfront. Had I truly understood that it was Sheldon or bust, I’d have met him (reservations and all) and seen how the date went. Instead, I was still stuck in the online dating mentality—that if you don’t like something about one guy, there’s a seemingly infinite supply of new dating candidates lined up. I figured a matchmaking company would be a happy medium—more prospects than a private matchmaker, and more guidance than the wild Web.
I got out the phone book and did some searching. After ruling out agencies that seemed to focus on setting up wealthy men with beautiful women (one was actually called Beautiful Women—Successful Men, succinctly summing up our primal longings), as well as those that seemed big and impersonal with offices across the country, I picked Make Me A Match, run by two sisters. I went to their Web site, filled out a short form—name, phone number, gender, how I’d heard of them—and waited for someone to contact me.
A few hours later, I got a call from one of the sisters, Kathy Moore. She started with a brief sales pitch: 550 weddings, personal service, the experience to know what works. She sounded sharp and professional. Then she turned the conversation to me.
“Tell me about yourself,” she said.
I explained that I was a journalist, 41 years old, never married, a single parent . . .
“What did you do, go to a sperm bank?” she interrupted.
I paused. It seemed a little forward to ask of someone she’d been speaking to for three minutes. “Um, yes,” I said.
“Good for you!” Moore replied. “I should have done that.”
Huh?
Turned out this matchmaker was a single 45-year-old who wished she’d had kids when she was still fertile. I wondered how that could be: How could she find husbands for hundreds of people but not be able to find one herself?
“You don’t have to be sick to be a good doctor,” she said, but I didn’t buy that explanation. It wasn’t even an accurate analogy: Moore wasn’t a healthy doctor curing sick patients. She was more like a sick doctor who couldn’t cure herself of the same disease she specialized in treating: single-itis. It made no sense. When I pointed this out, she added, “Well, also, I don’t date my clients.”
Okay, I thought, fair enough. But why not go online, or hire another matchmaker to find her someone?
She seemed to have an answer for everything. “People know who I am,” she said, meaning, I guess, what she does for a living. “It’s intimidating for guys to date me.”
The whole situation seemed a bit kooky: Should I ask a lonely heart to find me a man when she couldn’t find one herself? At the same time, I was discovering that we aren’t the best people to find ourselves a mate; that sometimes we need outside perspective to counter the fantasies we have about who we should be with.
I asked about the kind of men who came to her. What kind of men sign up with a matchmaker? Moore acknowledged that she had far more female than male clients, but still she felt she could find me someone: If she doesn’t have a man for a female client, she told me, she asks other matchmakers for assistance. She also scours online dating sites, and if anyone seems interesting, she’ll meet with him in person to see if he might be a good fit. I liked that idea: someone to screen all those online candidates so I didn’t have to go on an endless array of coffee dates myself.
The next step was for me to go in to Make Me A Match, so that Kathy and her sister could get to know me and see which men might be a good fit. It seemed worth a try, until she dropped the bomb. I asked about cost, and she deflected, saying that we could talk details in the meeting. I insisted on knowing upfront and, after she hedged for another couple of minutes, finally she relented: For six dates in the span of one year, the fee was $3,500. I grabbed my calculator and did the math: $583 per date! Their Web site made it seem like they catered to normal people, not just the super-wealthy. $583 is a very expensive date. And she wanted me to pay for six of them!
“I know, it’s sticker shock,” Moore said. “But you get what you pay for. You can expect to be here for at least three hours when we first meet you. Then every time we send you on a date, we get detailed feedback. We might get it right on the first date, but it might take some work to refine it. You’re paying for the personal service.” I told her I was interested, but I just couldn’t afford it.
“How about three dates for a thousand dollars?” I asked. I didn’t know the protocol—could you haggle with matchmakers?
“It takes too much work to do anything for a thousand dollars,” she said. “It’s not worth it for us.” I could tell that she wanted to move on. Her phone had been ringing repeatedly in the background and I imagined that there was no shortage of female customers more than willing to pay the full fee.
“You know what I suggest for people like you,” she said, in a way that gave me the impression she’d spoken to “people like me” before. “Go on JDate.” She was referring to the online dating site for Jewish singles.
I told her that I’d already been on JDate, that I’d met my last boyfriend online, but that I wanted a matchmaker’s help in picking appropriate men. My last boyfriend was smart and sexy and funny, but when it came to being a husband and father, he was completely wrong. I didn’t trust myself to pick men off the Internet anymore. I needed guidance.
“Well, here’s what you do,” Moore said. “Save your pennies. I don’t want to feel like I’m taking the last of your life savings, but save up. Don’t take a trip, or give up that pair of shoes, and put away money for your love life. Make your love life your priority.”
She didn’t seem to understand that it wasn’t about choosing between a vacation (which I hadn’t taken since having a child) or a pair of Manolos (which I’ve never owned) and my so-called love life. It was about the reality of what regular people can afford. When I clarified this, she replied with, “We only take financially stable clients.” Her definition of financially stable seemed to be different from mine.
I hung up more frustrated than ever. I suspected that if I were a guy, she would lower the fee or waive it entirely, simply to have more eligible men in her database. I didn’t add much value to her business. It reminded me of the dowry system, in which you need to have a lot of money to marry off your daughter. Could this be the modern American dowry: a woman over 35 needs a lot of money to marry off herself ?
And here’s the sad thing: Although I declined to sign up with Make Me A Match, I didn’t rule it out entirely. Instead, I thought about ways of “saving my pennies.” I’m sure Kathy Moore knew that’s what would happen. She may not think of herself as preying on vulnerable singles willing to go to impossible lengths to find a good man, but I’m guessing that a number of women who show up for that initial three-hour meeting and are then shocked by the cost don’t leave until they’ve written a check and signed a contract. I’m also guessing that women like me, who say no on the phone, come back to her eventually—borrowing money from parents or maxing out credit cards—beca
use she leaves them with an impossible question: At what cost, love?
After a week or a month or another year of empty dates or, if they’re lucky, a failed relationship, they might come to the conclusion that what Kathy Moore is selling isn’t exorbitant, but priceless: hope that they won’t end up alone.
LESSONS FROM A MATCHMAKING TEACHER
Lisa Clampitt co-owns the the Matchmaking Institute in New York, the only place in the country that trains and certifies matchmakers. I called her up and asked why these services are so expensive. What, after all, do matchmakers know about what makes for a good romantic connection that the singles seeking their help don’t?
Clampitt, it turns out, hadn’t always been a matchmaker—she’d been a social worker in child protection services at Bellevue Hospital. She enjoyed working with people, but after thirteen years of dealing with trauma and illness, she got burned out. Meanwhile, she’d been having some success setting up friends and, one day, she was inspired by something she read in the newspaper about matchmakers. She’d never considered being a professional matchmaker before—in fact, she didn’t even know they existed in this day and age—but she loved the idea and thought it would allow her to do “the fun elements of social work.”
To become a “certified matchmaker,” she explained, here’s what you do: You buy a home study kit from Clampitt’s Web site, which, she said, has everything you need to know about the matchmaking industry, including how to prescreen a client, interview a client, do coaching, set up a business, and do legal contracts. Then you take an online test. If you pass, you come to a one-day certification training or do six consultation sessions over the phone. After that, you submit a business plan, and voila, you’re certified.
For this, I asked, clients pay $3,500? What does some stranger who took a one-day seminar know about who I might click with?
Clampitt said that matchmaking isn’t rocket science.
“Hollywood makes it seem like the hard part is finding the guy,” she said. “But the relationship is the hard part. Just this morning, my husband and I had a thing about when he was leaving for work.”
Single women, she thinks, make the search harder and more angst-ridden than it needs to be. She believes that while beauty matters, women waste far too much time on appearance, when their biggest obstacle is actually not being realistic enough when they’re younger—and then ending up being even more unrealistic later on.
“A lot of women come to me when they’re suddenly realizing they need to do something differently because they’re thirty-seven and still single,” she explained. “So they tell me what they want, and they think because they pay for a matchmaker, they’re going to get the men they request in their interview. But that’s not reality.”
HE’S A GOOD DEAL, I’LL TAKE IT
Clampitt, who’s in her forties, knows this firsthand. She wouldn’t have met her own husband if she hadn’t been realistic. “I think my husband is adorable, but was I like, ‘Oh my god, I’m sweating’? No. He was super-friendly, relationship-oriented, has a Ph.D. and is a professor. I don’t care about money as much as I care about intelligence. So I thought, he’s a good deal, I’ll take it.”
A “deal” is a term Clampitt uses a lot, which may seem like an odd way of describing your spouse. But in her view, choosing to spend your life with someone involves deciding which package—which deal—works best for you given what you want out of life. “Everybody has their pros and cons,” she said, a lesson she learned from her two very different marriages.
Marriage number one was classic: She and her first husband met through friends when they were in their twenties. They both went through grad school, and she thought he was handsome and loyal, a smart guy working in finance. But he didn’t have a “life force.” He wasn’t “feisty.”
After two years of marriage, she left him.
Was this the right decision—divorcing the great guy for some intangible life force that she may or may not find in someone else? It’s an impossible question.
“I think if I were more mature, I probably could have made it work,” she said. “It wasn’t my priority to have a family then, but now I think he would have been a wonderful father, and his extended family was fabulous. I didn’t know how to respect him—instead I said he was boring. But what’s better than someone who will be a really loyal partner? How wonderful to have a really good dad to your kids. You can make having fun a priority in the relationship. But I didn’t even try! I was so focused on what might be out there that’s better. That’s what happens when you’re young and don’t have life experience.”
That’s also what happens, she said, to the women she meets in their late thirties, who pass up guys without giving them a fair chance.
Clampitt may seem to have gotten the happy ending—at 39, she met and married a guy who was feisty and did have a life force—but it was a double-edged sword involving compromises she wouldn’t have needed to make in her first marriage. One was giving up having a biological child. She and her husband tried to have kids for years using expensive fertility treatments, to no avail—something that likely wouldn’t have been an issue ten years earlier. They’re planning to adopt a son. Financially, too, her situation is different in this marriage—a guy in finance makes a lot more money than a professor. And then there’s the fact that her husband is feisty—which is great most of the time, but at others, it feels more like a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for.
“My husband’s a troublemaker,” she said, “and I love that about him. But I need to figure out how to communicate with him when he’s being a wild man—when we’re trying to plan something together or when he forgets to pay the bills and I have to say, ‘Come on, get with it.’ That never would have happened in my first marriage.”
Her point, she said, wasn’t to complain about her husband, but to say that there’s no perfect guy out there. “There are a lot of guys you can make it work with, and if you don’t realize that, you may end up spending your entire life worrying about whether you’re settling. A lot of people second-guess and assess a hundred different things. I’m surrounded by rich guys all the time, and I could go around thinking, I could have this! My husband could be thinking this, too, about other women. You both have to think that you got a good deal. Long-term compatibility is about respect and common values and building something, not about judgment of imperfections.”
THE TAP WATER INCIDENT
As a matchmaker, Clampitt sees that kind of judgment all the time. Take the tap water incident.
“I introduced this woman to the nicest guy, and they went out and he didn’t order bottled water. He said tap was fine,” Clampitt explained. “This woman reports back to me after the date and says, ‘He ordered tap water. He took the subway to meet me. He didn’t even take a cab at night. He’s cheap.’ In fact, he was tall and handsome and wealthy, so I said, ‘He may not care about bottled water or cabs, but if they’re important to you, maybe he’d understand that. You’d figure out a budget together. These are things you can discuss if you ended up liking each other. At least go out with him again.’ But it rubbed her the wrong way. She wasn’t into it.”
I said that I’d be happy to meet Mr. Tap Water, but Clampitt had already set him up with somebody else and they were excited about each other. The woman who thought he was cheap, she pointed out, was still available.
Clampitt matches people like this: “Number one,” she said, “I look at whether the two people have common relationship goals. Number two, I look at values. Things like independence, family, religion, loyalty. Number three, what are the key qualities this person needs? You get no more than five. Things like, he has to be very intelligent. Number four, I look at shared interests. Interests are great because it’s bonding and stimulating and fun to share those, but the other things are more important for the long-term. I put shared interests last for that reason.”
I told Clampitt that I’d alm
ost always put shared interests first. Not ultimately, of course, but that I’d become attracted to men initially because of our shared interests.
“And how has that worked out for you?” Clampitt asked wryly.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to marry a guy who was smart, funny, loyal, mature, and family-oriented—but who had completely different interests from mine.
What if he was into, say, video games and classic cars and I’m into literature and hiking? What if we had no shared interests at all? Then again, many of my closest friends have completely different hobbies or don’t like the same movies and books and we never run out of things to talk about.
“Two smart, funny people who come from similar backgrounds and want similar things often discover that they have some shared interests,” Clampitt said. “And if you share an interest in being married and raising your family together, I don’t think the video games or hiking would be an issue.”
Suddenly I realized that I’d overlooked the two most important—and basic—interests a prospective spouse would need to share with me: family life and raising children. I knew those were important, but my interest list had been full of the superficial things you’d find on a Facebook page.
I asked Clampitt what kind of guy she’d pick for me. What was, you know, realistic? She said she’d pick someone who’s “maybe not the most gorgeous guy.” Someone who’s shorter, older, and with kids.
“You’re more of a challenge for matchmakers,” she said. “But you’re matchable.”
Marry Him_The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough Page 9
