Sexy Times- Totally Not Depressing…

Um. Hi. I’m a matchmaker now people. Uh huh. That’s right.

I had low expectations starting the job. (That’s called foreshadowing, ladies and gentleman.) Per the advice of my Jewish mother, I did diligent research before accepting the position. To start, I read reviews of the company, from both employees and clients, and they definitely tipped to the negative. I even messaged an employee on LinkedIn (who actually turned out to have quit after 2 months.) I interrogated her about the day-to-day workflow. She dealt a lot with angry customers who thought the company was a scam.

So bla bla bla, I took the job anyway thinking, “Fuck it. I wanna be a matchmaker. If it sucks I’ll nanny again.” And so I started my first ever office job working for a corporate company.

After training I was thrown into the bullpen. Days are jam-packed. There’s never a dull moment. Each matchmaker has a region or several regions to cover and we spend our days finding our client’s matches (then logging it in the computer) then presenting the matches to our clients (then logging it in the computer) then getting availability for a date if they say, “yes,” to the matches… or decline the match if they say “no…” and if the “yes” is mutual between both parties, I make a reservation and email them the details of their upcoming date. Then, after the date I touch base with the clients, get feedback, and restart the matching process. (Logging it all in the computer, of course.)

There’s more to it than that, but that’s it in a nutshell.

Of all the challenging aspects of the job, the hardest part is managing expectations. There’s nothing more frustrating when you’re sure you have a great match for someone and they dismiss the person based on them being an inch too short, or the color of their eyes.

Presumably, the biggest difference between paying for a service like ours and dating online is that we get to know our clients, so we aren’t just setting someone up based on a picture. We’re setting up 3-dimensional human beings based on personalities, common interests, and meeting our quotas. (Ehehe.)

The problem is people are so stuck in a preconceived notion of what they’re attracted to that they miss the opportunity to be pleasantly surprised.

I think back to crushes I’ve had over the years… some big ones weren’t people I would swipe right to. I didn’t find them attractive at first. Yet, in the flesh the chemistry, the simple fact I had no expectations, allowed me to get to know these people and thus knock down my walls of what I thought I found attractive. The result was I became unexpectedly very attracted to them.

Alas, my clients are not simply meeting their college orientation leader, or a mutual friend on a trip to Italy. They’re paying to be set up with potential “ones.” Thus, their expectations are ridiculous. I mean, plentiful.  

Carrie Bradshaw Moment: Leaving me to ponder the question, are expectations necessary, or do they work against us in finding love?

In the world of online dating, we often don’t have the luxury of getting to know people on a deeper level before making a judgment call about compatibility. The better the picture, the better chance we have at swiping right. Then we project what we hope that person to be based on that picture. If that person meets our expectation, great… but they very rarely do.  

Then the other factors come into play, as we measure conversation flow, similar interests, personality quirks, and that intangible something called chemistry. That busy voice in our head constantly judges, judges, judges, and the more attractive someone is, the less we cross our t’s and dot our i’s.  If these boxes are checked right away we become giddy-in-like. Or if we find them attractive enough, we think the boxes are checked and become giddy-in-like.

This is the confusing part. Is giddy-in-like from the get-go actually where you want to be after a first date? In my experience, very rarely have relationships developed smoothly from such a starting off point. Was that simply by chance that they were the quickest to fall apart, because none of these people were, in fact, a “one?” Or, were my feelings tricking me into liking someone before I actually got to know them? In other words, did the feelings get in the way of seeing the other person clearly? On the contrary, if the feelings take longer to develop, is that a bad sign?

So here I am, at 6:13 PM on my lunch break for seven more minutes. My last conversation was with a new client who has already tried (and failed, they always fail) to get a refund. I asked her about how some of her recent online dates went and she jumped to such small, specific things about her dates that she didn’t like.

“He wanted to Google how to rack a pool table.” She told me. She enjoyed playing pool, but not that he wanted to take the time to figure out how to do it correctly.

It bothered her enough to use it as an indication that he wasn’t a man for her. And I get it. I read into each and every behavior on a date, trying to decipher whether the person is indeed someone I could spend the rest of my life. It’s… too much.

I’m going to leave it here, partly because my brain hurts and I think this job has confused me more than helped me in my own dating life, so far.

And partly because my lunch break is over now in 1-minute and I’m about to go back to the grind: “It’s Shira, your matchmaker! I have a great match I want to tell you about, do you have a second? I’m emailing his picture now, but I can promise you it really doesn’t do him justice. In the meantime, let me tell you about him!”