Your perfect man is out there, ladies – he just doesn’t want you
ABOUT 10 years ago, a job lot of my fortysomething neighbours got divorced. Maybe divorce is contagious – so many ‘normal’ bickering couples tumbled like skittles in a few months – but the dull, paunchy men re-coupled up as fast as Love Islanders while the ex-wives kept the home fires burning for long years while scouting for replacement partners in the scary land called Out There.
Yesterday I got a sudden surprise SOS from one of them. I hadn’t heard from Maggie (not her real name) for years but knew she’d moved to East Anglia after her husband scarpered with a much younger model. In the subject line of her email it said, ‘Re: Dating Agencies – please expose what a waste of money they are!’
Maggie had contacted me after she’d read about the case of Tereza Burki, 47, the woman who last week won damages of £13,000 from an ‘elite’ dating agency called Seventy Thirty.
Burki, a divorced mother of three, had paid finder’s fees of £12,600 for the agency to match her with a ‘sophisticated’ gentleman, who would provide her with international travel, a wealthy lifestyle and maybe a fourth baby, but claimed she’d been tricked as the agency had only 100 men on its books and none had a spec that ticked all her boxes.
She had sued Seventy Thirty for failing to present her with an appropriate man, despite her large upfront outlay.
My former neighbour Maggie came down hard on Ms Burki’s side. She told me dating agencies (I won’t name them in case I’m sued!) were ‘a complete con on vulnerable, divorced or single women’. While women like her paid through the nose, she claimed most single men on the site had been popped on the books for nothing, with agencies trawling the personal ads of national newspapers to find their fresh meat.
One ‘exclusive’ London-based agency that charges women £15,000 to join had apparently ‘recruited a lot of my single grey dullards for free’, Maggie reported. Once the agency does finally match you up with a prospect they are inevitably a ‘huge disappointment,’ she continued.
Mmm! Be that as it may, I suspect there might be another factor keeping more eligible men away. As the judge himself noted with heroic understatement: Ms Burki’s requirements for a man who would be both a walking wallet and potential babyfather were ‘not modest’.
ESPECIALLY given that many single, older men will no doubt have already forked out a fortune to an ex-wife or two via the divorce courts. The last thing they want is to risk another woman taking them to the cleaners – especially one as unashamedly direct in her demands as Ms Burki.
When it comes to this high-rolling dating game, I suspect men are hearing not wedding bells but warning bells.
They know that what many women want is not to find true love but to land a big fish with the smallest hook possible, and men who sense this are like canny old trout lying low in a shady pool. They won’t rise to that bait.
Can’t say I blame them much.