Uncategorized

There’s compelling evidence to suggest that 2008 is the Year of the Matchmaker. There seems to be a coalescence of various iterations of matchmaking happening, which I chronicled in “2008: Year of the Matchmaker?” last week’s article in the NY Jewish Week.

An excerpt:

2008 was about a week old when the influx of matchmaker-related services started hurling themselves like Anna Karenina on the tracks of my singles-columnist life. “Are you a matchmaker?” a reader from Israel queries. “Have you ever used a matchmaker?” asks a friend in Arizona. A matchmaker emails, not about a match, but to insist that I remove a benign blog announcement about one of her events. She is attempting to cleanse the internet of all mentions of her that aren’t glowing testimonials. The e-mails are constant — from SawYouAtSinai and JRetromatch; from individual matchmakers; from articles in newspapers, from blog posts, and of course, from my Facebook friends. Is 2008 the Year of the Matchmaker?

Year of the Matchmaker?” one friend snarked. “Is that like the Year of the Rat?” (Um, sometimes.) As the year continues, so does the trend. A newspaper requests a comment about matchmaking. A magazine pegs me to do an in-depth story about matchmaking, for virtually no money. (No thank you.) I get an e-mail about the “Make-a-Shidduch Foundation” name, which is only a “Shidduch” away from the “Wish” that another organization grants to kids with cancer.

And then there are the stories: Friend 1’s matchmaker told her she isn’t attractive enough for that yenta’s clientele. Friend 2 tells me of her matchmaker’s assessment: that — even though her salary is at least triple mine — she is unmatchable because she doesn’t have a college degree. Friend 3 notes that her matchmaker has matched her with men incapable of basic conversation, “not appropriate for her on any level.”

I know it works for some people, and God bless them. But I admit my bias: I don’t love matchmakers. I had a very lovely matchmaker on Saw You at Sinai, but no successful matches resulted. An offline matchmaker with a religious clientele first expressed horror at my “single, never-married” status (“What? Not divorced? Not widowed?”), and tried to match me with secular men opposed to Shabbat and kashrut, because in her book, that’s what Conservadoxy was. One religious blogger I know reported that her friend had uploaded a new photo to her online matchmaker, and received a note back from the shadchan with the word “EW” in the subject line and a body text that included “berating and ridiculing remarks regarding this woman’s picture.”

Thanks to everyone who helped out with this. I protected your identities, but am happy to identify you (with a link if you’d like…) with your permission…Read more here.