A decked-out and eye-catching
49-year-old, Janis is, by her estimation anyway, the reigning
queen of the matchmaking world. She says that she has been responsible
for 715 marriages in the past 10 years and a thousand long-term
relationships that haven't quite made it to the altar. (Confidentiality,
she says, makes it impossible to verify these numbers.) Janis
comes across as a comically exaggerated version of a Jewish mother:
exuberant, zany, voluble, enthusiastic, affectionate, unstoppable.
She makes no bones about the fact that you (whoever you are)
have waited far too long to marry (or remarry). And since you
have already failed at finding your mate, she's taking over,
and she's going to get you married right now. Although she's
motherly, she's not your mother, so her bullying feels caring
rather than controlling.
Gorgeous (the description proved accurate) is lounging in
one of the cafe's deep velvet armchairs when we arrive. Janis
has a collector's eye for a certain kind of man, but as he
stands, I see this one didn't require perspicacity. As he and
Janis talk, I idly study him under the lamplight, contemplating
whether his looks are fully leading-man material or more suitable
for TV. He insists on getting our drinks, with the debonair
air of someone who has an easy time pleasing women.
Gorgeous was intrigued when Janis strode over to him a few
days earlier at the same cafe and boldly introduced herself
as a matchmaker. He was impressed when she backed up her introduction
by pointing toward the goods -- a bevy of beautiful women in
the corner she had just finished interviewing to see if any
were suitable for matching with her clients. Although Janis
originally represented both sexes, now she has only male clients.
Virtually all are wealthy and successful, of course, but occasionally
she gets the kind that makes her lick her chops: wealthy, successful
and handsome -- the kind she can marry off, as she puts it,
''in a New York minute.''
Gorgeous gets down to business: What are her fees?
Janis is a persuasive sort. She has the glitzy confidence
-- and look -- of someone who moves a lot of oversize jewels
on QVC. Although she likes to put off the monetary specifics
until after more chitchat, she doesn't blanch. Janis Spindel
Serious Matchmaking Incorporated's fees begin -- begin! --
at $20,000 for an initiation fee, plus $1,000 for a one-year
membership that includes 12 dates. That also includes a background
check and a home visit, during which Janis spends time with
the client, to get a sense of him and verify that he is who
he says he is (i.e., rich or very rich). Her image consultant
also comes to inspect his wardrobe and, if necessary, make
plans to revamp his look. Janis has many clients outside the
New York area (in Tampa, Miami, Los Angeles, Toronto, Las Vegas).
An out-of-town client must fly Janis and an assistant first
class and put them up in a hotel for the home visit. Additionally,
a marriage bonus is expected -- sometimes it's a car or extravagant
jewelry; other times it's cash. She has received gifts in the
$75,000-to-$250,000 range.
Gorgeous tries to negotiate the price, but Janis flatly refuses.
Then he says he's uncomfortable with the general idea of paying
for dates and wonders what kind of women would date a man who
needs to pay to find her. He doesn't want to be set up with
''shrews'' or women who are interested in him because he owns
a successful business.
This strikes me as an extremely realistic concern. How else
to describe the women who, Janis says, pay $750 for a 30-minute
meeting to audition for her databank of women (6,800 of them,
Janis claims) who want to marry a man rich enough to pay for
her services? (Janis will waive the fee if an attractive woman
organizes a group of six to eight friends, because she says
that attractive women have attractive friends -- and, conversely,
homely types often stick together. Attractive friends of homely
women, however, are out of luck.) When Janis's database proves
inadequate for a specific client's needs, she holds ''casting''
parties, for which she advertises in publications like New
York magazine, at which hundreds of women show up to fill out
her questionnaire and hand in their snapshots, which she and
her staff will vet for the anonymous Prince.
''No, no, no, no,'' Janis now tells Gorgeous in her rapid-fire
style, in which she doesn't so much address concerns as try
to blow them away. ''I have quality women, professional Ivy
League women. I'm not setting you up with shrews and gold diggers.''
Gorgeous asks if he'll be able to see photographs, and Janis
again says no. Like other matchmakers, she does not allow clients
to pick or be picky about their dates: that's her job. She
promises to set him up with any kind of woman he wants, but
he has to trust her to screen and select.
After he leaves, I ask Janis what kind of women she would
set Gorgeous up with -- and if one of the ones I met earlier
that day was suitable. In particular, I wondered about a petite,
young Jewish woman in a dark pantsuit -- a sorority sister
who had recently graduated from a state school in upstate New
York and now worked in product development. When Janis asked
how tall she was, she swore she always wore heels, sticking
out her little pointy shoe as evidence.
Janis dismisses my suggestion quickly: ''It's not happening
for her,'' Janis says. And I see what Janis is getting at.
Short is pretty, but she's not glamorous or memorable. Although
Janis keeps a small pool of short women for short men, for
which she might consider Short, she wasn't going to give her
to Gorgeous. Although Gorgeous hadn't said much about what
he was looking for (just the usual ''fun,'' ''nice,'' ''smart''),
I instantly realize Janis is right: he wants someone happening.
I assume that this meeting will be the last Janis will hear
of Gorgeous anyway. Why would a dreamy 36-year-old shell out
the price of a compact car for a handful of dates whose pictures
he can't even see, when thousands of women would be available
to him through friends and acquaintances and on the Internet?
But this was not the last Janis heard from Gorgeous. A few
days later, he called. He was interested. He was very interested.
''It would take me meeting 100 girls to find the one who clicks,''
Gorgeous later explains to me. ''I think Janis has already
met those 100, and I'm paying her to save me the effort of
sorting out who is and who is not right for me. Janis is a
screener.'' Moreover, he says, ''I'm scared of the Internet.
The women could be crazy.''
How did he come to have more faith in Janis's ability to filter
than in his own?
''It's harder to see yourself as you truly are,'' he says.
''Janis was absolutely relentless in the way she pursued me,
so I know she'll be absolutely relentless in finding the right
girl.''
Souring on the Internet
Until recently, dating services were thought to be for -- as another
professional matchmaker, Samantha Daniels, puts it -- ''desperadoes.''
But the rise of Internet dating made the dating business sexy, respectable
and ubiquitous. For those who don't find computers romantic, however,
or are too concerned about their privacy to advertise their singleness,
or are overwhelmed by the prospect of sorting through Match.com's 15
million members, personal services are increasingly attractive. High-end
matchers have seen a rise in their business in the last few years.
''After 9/11, people didn't want to be alone,'' Janis says, explaining
why she thinks her business has been booming. Expensive matchmakers,
she says, have recently opened shop in San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Miami, Houston, Washington, Chicago and Minneapolis.
For many of the matchmakers' clients with whom I spoke, Internet
dating had curdled. (Last year, the online dating business
grew at a much slower rate than it had in the previous two
years.) The bitterest complaints were that prospects misrepresented
themselves, and that, although the deception was often immediately
apparent, the clients would still have to sit through -- and
even pay for -- a drink or dinner they felt tricked into.
But there are also deeper, more psychological reasons that
draw people to a matchmaker. After years of dating, still-singles
may begin to wonder if they are really their own best advocates
in the search for a partner. Some may not find the lovers they
want, or, more troublingly, the lovers they choose may be repeatedly,
chronically wrong. They begin to distrust their own judgment.
They are weary of being alone with their confusion. They need
an intercession. They need a Cupid to point her arrow.
The Mother
No one points more clearly than Janis. Although Janis offers her clients
a dozen dates, more than 90 percent of her clients, she claims, settle
on one of the first three matches. If they don't, they owe her a good
explanation.
''I listen to what men say they want, and then I give them
exactly that,'' she says. She describes her reserve of beautiful
women as either ''street smart'' or ''book smart'' (since no
one says he's looking for a dummy). Some are musical or are
runners or golfers or are endowed with specific matchable hobbies.
Janis's women fill out a brief questionnaire in which they
answer basic personal questions (religious beliefs, number
of children they want, what they like to do on the weekends)
and then characterize themselves: Party Girl, Sophisticate,
Intellectual or Domestic. They also have to check off the kind
of man they like: Bad Boy, Life of the Party, Jet-Setter, All-American,
Brainiac, Guys Guy, Family Man or Other. Then -- if they make
the grade -- the women go into her databank.
''If you give the client beauty -- and brains and athletic
abilities, if he wants those -- it's pretty much a done deal,''
Janis tells me definitively.
A done deal? Aren't those categories awfully broad? What about
character, temperament and sensibility -- the ineffable qualities
that capture a lover's imagination?
She looks at me curiously, as if I hail from a different planet,
where people search for temperament and sensibility -- but
since no one is sure what those are, everyone stays single
forever. (Welcome to my borough!)
After the first date, Janis will elicit feedback from her
client, and if the woman doesn't please, she'll refine the
search and try again. For example, if her client says that
the woman was too talkative, she'll send someone quieter. If
the woman was too shy, she'll send someone livelier. If the
client doesn't know what the problem was -- he just wasn't
excited -- she'll offer a second or third match. After a third
woman, however, if the client doesn't have a specific complaint,
''if they say, 'Oh, I don't know Janis, I just can't put my
finger on it,''' she tells me, sounding like a scolding mother
disappointed in her beloved son, ''I'll say: 'Exactly what
finger can't you put on it? Are you like a little boy in a
candy store who can't decide? Because I'm not here to provide
candy. Do you want to get married or not?'''
Clients usually shape right up, she says, and focus on their
(her) goal. If a client starts dating a woman, however, but
doesn't become engaged or seriously involved in three months,
Janis will call him up and tell him to stop dillydallying.
Interiors vs. Exteriors
Matchmaking requires a peculiar, innate talent, as rare a gift as being
able to shoot a basketball through a hoop again and again. No one does
it flawlessly, but some people are much better than others.
Obviously, part of the secret of a matchmaker's success is
that by the time clients write those fat checks, they are highly
motivated to settle in order to settle down. But, of course,
most of them have been highly motivated for a long time and
have failed to find a helpmeet through other dating methods.
I love to matchmake. (I have had a hand in four marriages
-- as well as many failed setups.) But when I match, I match
from the inside out. I think about the inner landscape of my
friends. I contemplate questions of intimacy: boundaries, neediness,
expressiveness, self-awareness, sexuality, the effect of their
childhoods on their romantic relationships.
But professional matchmakers match exteriors. They have a
finely honed ability to instantly classify people anthropologically,
according to socioeconomic type, and pair them off accordingly.
Behind this kind of matchmaking lies a deep distrust of romance,
as we usually imagine the word. Matchmakers believe that people
should stop their agonized search for soul mates. After all,
a soul mate can be glimpsed in many inappropriate objects:
the soul may be located in someone who is too young or too
old or too poor or the wrong religion or a convicted felon
who is married to your sister. Half of literature concerns
the perils of falling for a soul mate: the Victorian heroine
runs off with the gardener; Romeo decides he can't live without
the daughter of a family with whom his is feuding. And these
tales always end badly, with disgrace and death, so that the
normal order of society can be soberly restored.
The new matchmakers take a traditional approach. They believe
that people do and should marry within their tribes. The count's
daughter is not going to be happy as a gardener's wife, no
matter how mad she was for him at first, whereas a person from
affluent Millburn, N.J., will find comfort in a spouse who
grew up in nearby Short Hills and went to the same tennis camp.
They will speak the same dialect. They will move back to New
Jersey and send their kids to that tennis camp. The matchmakers
themselves need not necessarily speak their -- or any of their
clients' -- languages. Rather, matchmakers are like linguists
who recognize the sounds and structure of many languages and
then get the natives together. And if the clients protest that
their hearts aren't beating fast enough (Short Hills? Near
my parents?), the matchmakers will insist that the pairing
is right. Once they commit and start building that long-delayed
life, they'll be happy -- or happier, at least, than when they
were single.
Of course, you wonder if these kinds of matches actually last,
or whether a few months or years after that hefty wedding bonus
has been paid, one of them starts saying: Do we really communicate?
Sometimes I wonder if you really understand me. Does the man
think, What about all that money I paid for you? Does the woman
wonder, Should I have a profitable divorce and marry for love
the next time?
None of the professional matchmakers keep track of their divorce
rates (or would admit it if they do). But since half of Americans
who find their own turtledoves let them go, there is no reason
to think that match-made marriages don't do as well -- or better.
The Ultimatum
Janis's initial consultation often takes place over lunch or dinner.
The potential client picks a restaurant and wines and dines Janis,
showing her how he behaves on a date. She also screens for pliability.
On a recent afternoon, she was having lunch with a 47-year-old
man from Westchester who desperately wants to have a family.
He's a fine-looking fellow with a good job -- an executive
at a large company, where he has worked for two decades. He
doesn't understand why women on the Internet keep blowing him
off.
''I see the same women on the site, year after year, getting
older, no longer listing their goals as having a family, he
tells Janis. ''It's sad. Yet they wouldn't meet me for a cup
of coffee.''
Westchester makes a lot of jokes, which do not seem to amuse
Janis. When the bill comes, he signs the check and shows it
to her, saying facetiously, ''Good enough tip?'' -- which Janis
finds déclassé. If he becomes a client, she tells
me later, she will definitely discuss that with him.
Janis asks a few questions about what he wants (''nice,''
''down to earth,'' ''regular,'' ''Jewish''). ''Street smart
or book smart?'' Janis asks, nodding when he settles on street
smart. Janis tells him that she pays a home visit to new clients,
and he protests that his studio isn't fixed up for visitors.
He says he hasn't had a girlfriend in a while, and if Janis
finds him one, he'll decorate.
No, Janis tells him, if he hires her, he has to get his place
ready for her immediately. Then she begins to quiz him about
why he is living in a studio in Westchester anyway.
He likes Westchester, he explains; it's quiet and pretty.
He has lived there a long time.
Is he ''where he wants to be'' with his job, Janis queries
(i.e., can he afford the city?).
''I think so,'' he says.
''No Manhattan woman is going to date someone in Westchester,''
Janis says. ''In a studio.'' Cowed, he agrees to consider moving.
When Janis tells him the price of her services, his face falls.
Is there any guarantee? Could he pay part upfront and see what
she does for him? What if he doesn't end up with so much as
a kiss?
Janis dismisses the idea with a wave of her hand. ''Look,''
she says, ''it's not working for you. Do you want to continue
on, or do you want to make a change? It's that simple.''
I see from his pained expression that Janis has struck a nerve.
The force of her presence is so great that suddenly we are
in Janis's world, and there is only one way out of his loneliness.
He must come up with the money or resign himself to his solitary,
studio fate.
The Audition
Although Janis's clients are all male, her new book, ''Get Serious About
Getting Married: 365 Proven Ways to Find Love in Less Than a Year,''
is directed toward single women: the kind you often find gathered in
her living room auditioning for dates.
This afternoon they are sitting primly, their legs crossed,
in outfits as careful as their smiles. There are two average-looking
New York professionals -- a blond real-estate agent and Short,
the woman Janis rejected for Gorgeous. And then there is an
anomaly. The anomaly sports a platinum blond wig, a florid
face and a tight white sweater with a white fur-lined hood.
As she leans forward, her breasts graze her thighs. Her breasts
are so large, they look like pets. For a moment, I think I
have never seen breasts like those, and then I realize I have:
in pornography.
Indeed, it emerges that the woman works as a model for Penthouse
and Hustler and other porn magazines.
Janis wastes no time. ''Are those real?''
''Well, I had large breasts,'' Buxom says plaintively, as
if to say that her identity is not completely fraudulent. ''But
I had them enhanced for modeling.''
Janis asks about her hair, and she admits that she is wearing
a wig ''because it is cold out.''
''What color is your hair normally?''
''I can do any color,'' she says timidly.
Janis snorts. ''Normally. What are you normally when you go
out?''
''Blond, I guess,'' she says uncertainly. She plays with her
white hood, pulling it up over her head.
Buxom's goals are the same as those of the other women: she
wants a nice, rich, handsome husband, and her job isn't the
right place to find him.
After she leaves, Janis calls a client. Although she doesn't
usually send pictures, when Buxom's (brunette) picture came
in a few days before, it was so steamy, Janis impulsively told
her assistant to send it to a client she knew would appreciate
it.
Now she's on the phone with the man. ''Forget it,'' Janis
barks. ''I met her, and she's a porn star.''
They argue for a few minutes and then Janis hangs up. ''He
wants to meet her.''
A Matchmaker's Intuition
While Janis is proud of her work, to her dismay, her clients are not.
They pay their bonuses quietly -- and no one (no one!) has ever invited
her to his wedding. She returns to this disappointment often: how she
is cheated again and again of the realization of the fruit of her work,
on which everyone else feasts on the wedding day. Yet she does often
foresee that day. How does she pluck the future bride from her databank?
''I'm clairvoyant,'' Janis says. ''I remember once I was sitting
on an airplane, and I said to my friend, 'I've got it -- I
know who Andy is going to marry.' And I was right. I introduced
him to her, and they got married. It used to spook me, but
it's happened so often now.''
As with many of her male clients, Janis found Bookish on her
own, through the extensive grapevine that feeds her information
on affluent, eligible single men. One day, Bookish says, she
called him at his law office. She refused to say who she was
or what she wanted -- she just kept repeating that he should
have lunch with her and find out. Recently divorced, he assumed
that it was an anonymous setup. At the appointed time, he went
to an intimate French restaurant in SoHo and uncharacteristically
ordered himself a glass of white wine.
''Then Janis walked in, in all her splendor,'' he recalls.
Bookish has an understated, well, bookish look; he sat, staring
at Janis, confused. He was even more confused when he saw her
wedding ring. When she explained that she was a matchmaker,
he was amused. Although he told her he wasn't interested, they
had fun at the lunch, and he had ''a sense she was a good person
-- she has a warm heart.''
A long, romantically bleak year later -- having attended a
''hideous'' singles event, after which he cried out of alienation
and despair -- he called her. Most of his dates had been setups
by friends who ''had their own agendas or didn't get mine.''
He didn't like the Internet, and as a partner at a large firm,
he didn't have time to go to lots of social events searching
for women.
''I trust Janis,'' he says, and ''I like her,'' and he says
he believes that she genuinely cares about him. It took her
a while to understand him, he says, but her setups are ''getting
warmer.''
He also got to know her husband, a personal trainer who sometimes
works with Janis's clients, whom he thought was ''a great guy.''
Janis's great guy -- a handsome man I had seen in her house,
playing with their 5-year-old daughter while Janis worked --
did not appear to be the typical Alpha-male executive that
Janis represents.
''Perhaps she married for love,'' Bookish says with a laugh.
The Mitzvah
''Matchmaking is the world's second-oldest profession,'' Janis likes
to say. And, of course, she's right: after God matched Adam and Eve,
with a common rib, parents, relatives or a designated member of the
community took on the sacred task of arranging for a young person to
create a new household, thus ensuring the continuity and stability
of society. Although in much of the world that tradition continues,
in our mainstream culture of individual choice and romantic self-determination,
finding your own mate is a rite of passage, an exercise in autogenesis.
Among certain immigrant groups in this country, like those
from Southeast Asia and Africa, ancient traditions of arranging
marriages continue. In the Jewish tradition, arranging three
marriages secures you a place in heaven. Ultra-Orthodox marriages
are routinely arranged, and conservative communities often
have informal matchmakers.
Or sometimes a town is just lucky and someone has a calling.
Florence Berger is the kind of old-fashioned matchmaker who
used to exist all over but is now regarded as a kind of archaic
angel. Florence -- a recently retired professor at Cornell's
School of Hotel Administration -- is famous among the Cornell
population of Ithaca, N.Y. She married the daughter of Cornell's
former president Frank Rhodes to her former graduate assistant.
She married the son of friends to her husband Toby's cousin's
husband's brother's daughter, and they are now expecting their
third child. She even matched her gay secretary (although they
eventually broke up).
''One might ask if there is a matchmaker gene, because her
matches seem so intuitive,'' comments a woman whose husband
Florence found 25 years ago.
Unlike the high-powered businesswomen of the matchmaking world,
Florence does not accept payment for matchmaking, although
couples may give her a gift, like sending her to a spa, when
they marry. While her own two children married young, depriving
her of the opportunity to pick her son- and daughter-in-law,
she knows that plenty of other deserving mothers have not been
as fortunate. Such women often call Florence and beg to be
on her ''list.'' But Florence has to feel inspired, and she
doesn't choose a new person to match very often -- once a year
or so. Although she will match non-Jews, she doesn't usually
match anyone under 30, because she says they will not be sufficiently
''marriage minded.'' What is most unusual about the 25 couples
Florence has united over the past 25 years is that none of
them, as far as she knows, have divorced. And she's still in
touch with many of them. (She even matched a few couples outside
the United States when she was on leave in Japan and France.)
Unlike Janis, whose clients keep her role in their lives secret,
Florence is the guest of honor at every wedding, and she is
thanked all over again each time a baby is born.
Florence is a short, cozy, dark-haired 60-year-old whom people
describe as ''an iron fist in a velvet glove.'' She made her
first successful match shortly after she married her husband,
Toby. Her husband's brother was a brilliant mathematician.
Florence wanted to secure the right sister-in-law, but brilliant
mathematicians are quirky and can't be matched with just anybody.
She found him a fellow brilliant, she says, and now they have
brilliant children.
She had invented a rule for the setup: the couple had to promise
to go out twice, regardless of how they felt on the first date.
Florence's two-date rule proved ingenious: first dates depend
on people who are skilled at self-presentation -- and even
those may feel apprehensive knowing, as the professional matchmaker
Samantha Daniels puts it, that ''you only have one chance to
be positive and interesting and fabulous.'' On the other hand,
knowing that even if you fail, you'll still have dinner next
week makes everyone relax.
On first dates, people are heavily influenced by perceptions
of appearance, Florence says. Yet everyone has had the experience
of finding their dates' appearances metamorphosizing during
the course of an evening: their faces rearranging themselves
like a Picasso painting into something compelling or ugly.
On the second date, Florence says, people start to see the
way they are really going to see each other. And Florence's
theory has been confirmed: many of her couples told her they
would not have gone out a second time if that hadn't been the
bargain.
Twenty-five years ago, Florence chose a new colleague at the
hotel school to match. She was 32 and single. Although Florence
and Chosen barely knew each other, and Chosen did not ask Florence
for help, Florence took her situation to heart. Chosen was
tall and did not want to have children.
''All summer, I walked around the Cornell campus, looking
for a tall man who didn't want to have children,'' Florence
recalls. Everywhere she went, she thought, Could that be Chosen's
husband? Then one day, she was walking past the school of management
and saw one of the deans in his office window. She had recently
been to a dinner with some friends that he was at and remembered
that he was tall.
''I am fearless when it comes to matching,'' she says in a
way that leaves no room for disbelief. She called the friends
from dinner and suggested that Dean be set up with Chosen.
The friend was hesitant -- she did not want to be held responsible
for a bad date -- but Florence was insistent, and the friend
agreed to give Dean Chosen's phone number. He called the next
day. When Dean and Chosen got together, they discovered overlapping
biographical details that Florence hadn't been aware of: they
both grew up in the Midwest, less than 30 miles apart, rooting
for the same basketball team -- the kind of serendipity that
confirms the matchmaker's philosophy that like marries like.
Once Florence inscribes someone in her head, she doesn't cross
him or her off until he is wed. A divorced corporate lawyer
in Princeton recalls how, six years ago, Florence approached
him at a wedding. She took him aside during dinner and told
him she would like to find him a wife. ''I was incredibly touched,
flattered and surprised,'' he recalls. He didn't meet many
single people in Princeton, and he worked all the time. ''I'm
happy with my life,'' he says. ''If someone comes along, great,
but I'm not unhappy.'' The idea of searching for dates on the
Internet makes him feel as if he is needy or lonely and does
not fit his idea of the fortuitous way romance should occur.
Florence's interest, on the other hand, made him feel nurtured.
He wasn't randomly searching for a needle in a haystack; he
was accepting a gift.
Although Florence doesn't know many women in his area, once
a year or so she sends him a new woman and -- although he wasn't
interested in any of them -- he is always pleased to realize
she hasn't forgotten about him.
Persuasion
Florence matches the same way that the high-end matchmakers do, with
the goal of creating stable families by finding partners with similar
values and backgrounds. She shares the same essentially conservative
philosophy: get married.
At times it strikes me that she talks about marrying as if
it were shopping for a dress. Everyone knows that when you
go out looking for the perfect dress, you can't find it. You
drag your friends to store after store. The event grows closer;
you're still shopping. How about this one, your friends ask,
or this? Any of these would look lovely. The event has started;
you're still in the store. Better to buy an imperfect dress
than to miss the party entirely, your friends counsel. You
cave. Then you go to the party and have a great time and get
compliments, and you can't remember why you agonized so long.
I first heard of Florence through her son, Larry, who is a
friend of mine. When I initially e-mailed her, telling her
I wanted to write about matchmakers, she did not seem interested.
Instead, she wrote back: ''Larry tells me you are not interested
in being matched. I told Larry, Don't be so sure about that!''
In the following months, I was unable to shift Florence's
attention to the article I was writing. If the journalist is
single, she must be matched. What kind of single person refuses?
Then she thought of Princeton. Why couldn't I date Princeton?
she wanted to know. After all, we live near each other.
I demurred. Nothing against Princeton, I explained, but an
absence of a sense of potential for deep connection.
Did I imagine that he wasn't literary enough? Florence wondered.
''He is a good catch,'' she wrote. ''He is very smart. You
could marry him and have a friend who has more literature DNA.''
When successive e-mail messages over the course of the year
revisited the subject of Princeton, I tried to be clearer.
I am not interested. No interest. Not. And neither is he.
But interest for a driven matchmaker is neither here nor there.
''Please just consider some bourgeois perturbations to what
you've been thinking,'' Florence wrote. ''I know this will
make you angry, but . . . I've made some people angry on the
way to making them happy.''
Although I had denied it, Florence was convinced that I was
not drawn to Princeton because he was a corporate lawyer. She
knew that I had once been engaged to an artist and liked poetry.
So she decided that I imagined I could be captivated only by
a poetic type. But ''tortured poeticness may ultimately be
a shallow contributor to love,'' she wrote. Then, with a neat
rhetorical trick, she declared: ''This is not to say that there
aren't tortured poems that are worthy of love. It is to say
that those poems can be part of your marriage by owning the
book and taking it off the shelf when the children are sleeping.
. . .
''I am wondering,'' she concluded, ''if you should consider
changing your model. . . . ''
The Socialite
Although Samantha Daniels comes out of the same Jewish matchmaking milieu
as Janis and Florence, you won't hear it from her. ''I hate the word
'yenta,''' Samantha says. ''I am the opposite of how people picture
a traditional matchmaker.'' Samantha is a spin machine. She styles
herself the cool matchmaker: a sexy Upper East Sider who says she is
35. She touts a large social network of people like her, who might
-- for a price -- count you in.
Samantha was once in Janis's databank. (Janis says she believed
Samantha was interested in being set up, but now speculates
that Samantha may have been researching the business.) Samantha
charges a minimum of $10,000 to set clients up on 12 dates
with people she has handpicked from her pool of thousands of
eligible acquaintances, she says. It's as if the client is
an outsider she is befriending and bringing into her glamorous
world. She takes clients to parties and benefits, chatting
up single women for her male clients and vice versa. (Fees
for these extra services are negotiable.) She arranges for
extensive makeovers, including recommendations for haircuts,
teeth-bleaching, contact lenses, Botox and nutrition counseling.
Upstairs at Barneys one wintry afternoon, Samantha was doing
a shopping makeover with a woman, for which she would charge
$350. ''I won't accept her as a client until she dresses more
suitably,'' Samantha tells me. ''She looks too 'downtown.'''
Downtown is examining a skimpy miniskirt when we arrive, though
nothing in the store is as short as what she is wearing. A
cashmere sweater with a black-and-white image of a nun knit
into the chest is stretched across her breasts, so that the
nun appears to be dissolving in her voluptuousness. Downtown
says she likes to dress like ''a rock chick, like Pamela Anderson.''
Each rack is a struggle. Downtown pulls out a short powder-pink-rabbit-fur
jacket, and Samantha holds up a white wool pantsuit, which
Downtown observes looks like something from a ''Virginia Slims
ad.''
''You're still going to look sexy,'' Samantha assures her.
''But guys don't like it when you can see it all upfront.''
''I get a lot of compliments -- I can't walk by a doorman
without being whistled at,'' Downtown says defensively.
Samantha gives her a you're-not-going-to-be-dating-doormen
look.
Samantha describes Downtown as ''a bit of a lost soul.'' She
worked in the music industry in Los Angeles for many years
but recently moved back to an Upper East Side apartment, where
she is trying to write a screenplay and buying vintage clothing
and jewelry to resell on eBay. In her mid-30's, she is still
dating the kind of men she gravitated toward a decade ago --
aspiring actors, artists, writers, hipsters, guys who like
to live on the edge. Internet dating was ''worse than her worst
nightmare'' -- encouraging her tendency toward disastrous affairs.
She thinks now of the boys she knew at her prep school --
nice, bright, hard-working ''vanilla boys'' whom her parents
would approve of, and she therefore disdained. ''Even a year
ago,'' she would have rejected them, she says, but she regrets
that attitude now. For the first time, she has a sense of needing
intervention. She needs someone to take her under her wing
and bring her into a social circle she has never considered
desirable -- introduce her to the vanilla boys who have grown
into marriageable lawyers and doctors and financiers, with
whom she could have the life she was brought up for. She needs
someone to circumvent her own desires and help her make better
choices. Downtown's mother suggested Samantha, with whom she
had a social connection. Downtown was resistant but agreed
to a makeover so she would at least have clothes to wear to
cocktail parties with her parents.
Samantha's Pitch
Samantha says she became a matchmaker because she wanted to be in ''a
happy field.'' After graduating from Temple University Law School,
she worked in Philadelphia as a divorce lawyer for her father, but
she didn't like dealing with the stressed clients, who were always
''at their worst.'' Then she moved to New York and continued to work
as a lawyer and increasingly turned her attention to what she liked
to do best: giving parties. She would persuade a bar to lend her space
early in the evening in return for a cut of the door, and she would
have someone stand at the door to collect $20 and business cards. At
her parties, she would have a sense of potential couples and make introductions.
Later, she would hear that the couples were dating, or had even become
engaged. Before long, she says, she had thousands of names in her little
black book and decided to make a living out of her favorite hobby --
socializing.
In 1999, she set up shop, Samantha's Table, an Upper East
Side matchmaking business. A year and a half ago, with business
growing, she expanded to Los Angeles and now claims 48 marriages
(though, like Janis, she won't produce anything to back up
those numbers). Her funny, mean roman à clef, ''Matchbook:
The Diary of a Modern-Day Matchmaker'' -- which Samantha claims
to have written herself -- was recently published, and she
was the inspiration for the main character in ''Miss Match,''
an NBC television series that ran in 2003.
Most of Samantha's clients are in her peer group -- age 27
to 50. ''Almost all of my male clients make over half a million
dollars a year,'' she says, ''and many make over a million.''
She says that she represents 50 to 75 clients at a time (at
$10,000 a pop, that puts her in the same financial category
as her clients), whom she meets at her office: an appointed
table at Manhattan hotels, usually the Regency, where the waiters
know her favorite drinks (cranberry juice without ice, hot
chocolate). During an initial $400 consultation, she tells
potential clients that she will think about whether she can
match them. (She keeps the fee whether or not she accepts them.)
''I don't work with people who aren't popular and interesting,''
she says. ''I work with people who are social. My clients are
overachievers who have a lot going on, who travel, attend charity
events, have interesting hobbies, run triathlons. They are
C.E.O.'s, actresses, doctors, lawyers, real-estate developers,
advertising executives, producers, directors.''
What happens -- I ask -- when a client's problem finding love
is more than a shortage of time? What about folks who are hard
to match because they are difficult, depressive, fat or shy?
Does she reject them?
''Those people don't come to me,'' Samantha asserts without
missing a beat. ''You can only work with the people who come
to you.''
Samantha's matching method, like Janis's, is frighteningly
simple. After the clients sign, she has them fill out a one-page
questionnaire and asks them basic biographical questions about
their background, family and interests, as well as their income
level. (The lowest category is $50,000 to $75,000.) She finds
out what schools they went to and what summer camp. She tells
them to bring pictures of their exes and asks them to list
the qualities they want in an ideal mate.
However, she tells me tartly, ''they can't put 20 things on
their list.'' When clients say, ''I must have this, I must
have this,'' she asks whether all those things are critical.
''Maybe you can't have those things,'' she tells them. ''Which
can you survive without? What if she doesn't play golf but
would go with you to a golf resort? What if she's not Jewish
but would convert and raise kids? Is Judaism really important
to you personally or just to your great-grandmother?''
Clients generally, and particularly female clients, cannot
afford to be picky. ''If she says, 'I want a man 5-foot-10
and up,' I say, 'What happens if he's 5-foot-8?' I make them
be realistic. I don't have a button on my computer where I
can manufacture men. I need to be able to make a match happen.''
If the client ''whines she wants all of them,'' Samantha points
out that she's not getting any younger and if she keeps waiting
around for everything in one person, she might just die alone.
''Clients have to commit to listening to what I say,'' Samantha
says. ''I run a tight ship.''
Samantha's clients, like the clients of other matchmakers,
like having their romantic lives managed -- feeling someone
is captaining their boat and steering them into port. Interestingly,
unlike Janis's, Samantha's success is not a product of her
personal warmth or expansive enthusiasm. She can have a peevish,
critical air and seems easily annoyed. But rather than detracting
from her appeal, snobbishness seems essential to it. She's
like the ringleader of the popular group in school, who tells
initiates she could bring them into her circle -- if they do
what she says.
After a consultation with a client, Samantha goes home and
starts looking at her lists: Museum Type, Sexy, Natural Looking,
Easy Going, Petite, etc.
How she picks the most likely prospect for the first date
is hard for her to describe. ''The way I really match is on
a vibe. If you don't laugh at the same things and find the
same things annoying, it's problematical.''
Samantha not only picks the dates; she also sets the time
and place of the meeting (which is always for drinks, for which
the man pays). She does not allow clients to speak or see pictures
of each other before meeting, because when she did problems
arose. Sometimes the man wouldn't get around to calling the
woman for weeks, by which point the woman would already feel
rejected and hostile, or they might have a bad phone conversation
or not like the sound of each other's voices and call Samantha
and complain that they didn't want to proceed with the date.
After the date, Samantha calls both parties and gets feedback.
Often she can't fall asleep, she says, until she gets the postdate
calls. Then she passes the feedback to her clients. For example,
she says, if the man found her client insufficiently sparkly,
''I will call her and tell her that in the future if you can't
be positive and smiley, because you've had a bad day at work
or whatever, then you should cancel, because you only have
one chance.''
Simply having a matchmaker, she says, can help clients. With
female clients, she says, ''often their whole disposition has
changed because they've assigned me their social life. They
don't come across as intense or anxious or goal-oriented''
to marry (although, in fact, they are more so).
Her dating advice has been finely honed in the last six years.
''I know what men like and don't like,'' she says. If the client
is thought to be quiet or dull, she instructs him to have a
reserve of appropriately vapid date conversation: about ''a
fun play in the city, a new restaurant, a funny'' -- not poignant
-- ''childhood anecdote, a great vacation.'' If she hears a
second time that the client was boring, the client gets a talking-to.
Sometimes the client breaks down and cries -- some of her least-favorite
moments as a matchmaker. But afterward, Samantha says, they
dry their eyes and pay attention to what she says. ''I give
people good advice, and they take it.''
Chatting
I recall her advice a few weeks later at the Guggenheim Museum's Young
Collectors Council Artist's Ball (code: people rich enough to be collectors
if they have any interest in contemporary art -- which none of the
people I meet do). Samantha moves around the room, dressed by Christian
Dior in a skimpy leopard-spotted top with a fur ruff, which, with her
long tousled hair, gives her the appearance of ''Gilligan's Island''
meets ''Temptation Island.''
''Hey, Sam,'' a group of guys call, and she turns and gives
them a studied smile. ''Here are some eligible bachelors that
I might set up with clients,'' she says, introducing them.
From their beautiful suits and references to corporate jobs,
I guess that they are on her high-earners list. As Samantha
drifts away, it turns out that we don't have much to say to
one another. I try politics, with even less success than contemporary
art. Then I recall Samantha's list of approved conversational
topics and test out great vacations (which all of them take).
We move on to new bars and restaurants, and the rest of the
conversation is smooth sailing.
It isn't the actual topics, I realize: no one cares what I
think about bars. But when I tried to formulate a thought about
Abstract Expressionism, my brow furrowed; when I moved on to
Iraq, it furrowed farther, and I put down my drink. But complaining
about the dearth of groovy eateries on the Upper West Side
(where I live) while extolling their neighborhood -- the Upper
East Side -- made us want to refill our glasses.
So Samantha's advice had been right -- for her market.
Advice
Behind all of Samantha's counsel is a simple message: if you want to
marry, don't blow it. Play ball, don't rock the boat, avoid controversy,
get along, don't drag her or him into heavy conversations. Go out,
have sex, take trips. Eventually, you'll become comfortable, and attachment
will grow, and pretty soon you'll be cruising on a lane toward that
tollbooth, and it's harder to get off than to go forward. It's not
just that you should delay turning on that bright light of serious
scrutiny (Is this really the right relationship for me?), which inevitably
produces ambivalence; you should leave it off forever.
Samantha likes to micromanage her clients' relationships.
She strategizes. She'll tell a female client to play a little
harder to get while telling her boyfriend he needs to show
more devotion. She smoothes over misunderstandings. For example,
she tells me, suppose a female client is hurt because the man
didn't include her in a family gathering. Samantha calls the
man and tells him that it is important to women to be included
in family events to make them feel like girlfriends and give
them hope that one day they might be a member of that family.
And (she says) clients listen. ''A lot of times without me,
couples would just break up.''
Believing
One morning at the Regency, Samantha and I role-play a consultation.
After scolding me for being late, she examines my clothing -- a cashmere
sweater set that was a gift from my mother -- and it thankfully passes.
I would have thought there was nothing anyone could tell me about my
romantic life that I -- and a dozen of my closest friends -- didn't
already know. But it is a startling experience to be forced to summarize
your romantic history to a chilly stranger: not the inner story, in
which it is so easy to become entangled, but the facts. Samantha is
impatient with details; she only wants to know whom did you date, how
old was he, how old were you and why did it go so long if you weren't
going to wed? If you don't have a solid answer for your last seven
serious relationships, she pounces.
In my mind, (almost) all my relationships have been dear.
It's not simply that you discover new things about yourself
in different relationships, but you become a new self in each
relationship, and that self is not lost when the relationship
is. Relationships have an innate logic: they blossom and flower
in their own time, whether it's a year or three or a lifetime.
You don't want to snip them in the bud just because you know
they might not last forever; you want to treasure the blossoming.
I believed that I would spend my life with my ex-fiancé.
But we didn't marry, and although that is poignant and complicated,
my ex-fiancé and I still value our engagement because
it was a beautiful thing at the time, and now we are friends.
This, at any rate, is the way I understand my life. But this
is not the way Samantha understands life, and in part, you
are hiring her for her understanding -- for suspending your
own worldview and adopting hers. And in her view, a broken
engagement is like skidding off the road when you were en route
to the only place that matters: marriage. I can see from her
face (and the horror with which she asks, How close was it
to the wedding?) that for her the idea of valuing a trip that
ended before the altar is as bizarre as sentimentalizing a
bloody car wreck.
Yet she is single herself, I point out: surely she doesn't
see her own relationships -- each with its world of private
particular meaning -- as simply a series of failures to marry?
But apparently she does. A look I have never seen before --
dreamy and wistful -- softens her features as she says, ''Just
because I'm a matchmaker doesn't mean I have an express lane
to the promised land of marriage.''
Although everything about modern culture has shown that vows
do not guarantee happiness, stability or even a future, for
all her savvy posturing, Samantha is a deep believer. Every
day she strives to bring her clients to the threshold she hopes
to one day cross herself. For a matchmaker, that's where romance
begins.
Photos: Janis Spindel at home with a few of the potential
female matches in her databank.; Samantha Daniels, left, at
Saks, making a client date-presentable. (Photographs by Chris
Buck for The New York Times)
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