Great matchmakers look for what people need
Long ago, I was driving somewhere with a friend, talking about his romantic life — I’m sure I was the one who brought it up — and he told me he just wanted to date someone cool. I set him up with a friend of mine, a certified babe from American lit class, who had great taste, was smart and kind, and was as laid back as most people seem to think they are. Now they have two kids, and live around the corner.
Other than The Cools, I’ve set up a lot of other couples, four of them married, none of them able to escape semiregular reminders of who got them together. ( Me.) The most useful and usually fun expression of my one talent —“people” — is connecting them, sometimes with a dog-walker or chiropractor or roommate or best friend, and sometimes with their person.
I say it like matchmaking is just hosting cocktail parties where everyone leaves with a new relationship, like it’s cute, but it’s actually a considerable privilege to be trusted by your friends to lead them into the wild unknown: meeting someone new, on what is explicitly A Date, is vulnerability in action, especially when there is a pushy friend with eyes on the endeavour. Trust, and faith, that I’ll set them up with someone they might actually like, someone who is somehow their equivalent. It’s also high-stakes: there’s no more important decision in life than who you partner with.
Not that there’s nothing buzzy in it for me. My role as a matchmaker — as well as my role putting together the Star’s weekly Dating Diaries column — has given me the kind of insight into what people say they want, and what people actually want. That, I live for.
I always ask the diarists what they’re looking for, and while the older, more experienced daters say something like “Has a job; isn’t crazy,” daters in their twenties and thirties are more likely to have lists of highly specific and unrealistic qualities, like, “Tall, fun-loving, cures own meat, owns minimum six pairs of Ferragamos, earned a Michelin star, has won the Iditarod.”
Both perspectives are, I’m sorry, stupid. Online dating, while a gift for many people who wouldn’t otherwise have met the love of their life in any of their normal circles, patterns or routines, has also cleaved the rest of the dating population into two groups: one that is so overwhelmed by the inevitable disappointments of cattle-call dating that having standards seems like asking for too much, and one that is overwhelmed by the bounty of people to consider, and the possibilities that each represents, and so goes bananas with imagineered specs of what they “need” in a partner without paying much attention to who they’ve liked and loved before, people who are probably just gloriously, perfectly, gruesomely normal, with the usual goodie bag of human qualities.
(I’m sure there are also people who really think they deserve someone who is a takeout-menu of success and sexiness. Good for them, I guess!)
Both under-doing it and over-doing it with requirements are just another way to manage the constant emotional threat of dating, effective in the shortterm when no one can hurt you or your feelings because they’re so awful, or by simply not existing. Neither are especially useful if you want to actually be with someone.
All I really look for, in a set-up, is the thing that someone seems to both want and need from the world, their job, their friends, whatever, that they aren’t getting. What their relief would be; what their balance would be; where their obsessions and neuroticisms and imaginations would be met, seen, understood. If their own dating prospectus is about who they want to be, my method is about who they really are. I knew what my friend meant when he said something as vague but specific as “cool”: it was the atmosphere of the kind of person he liked. That’s something I can work with.
It’s actually a considerable privilege to be trusted by your friends to lead them into the wild unknown