A Matchmaker and a Little Lox

I am burned out and have officially diagnosed myself with DATING SITE FATIGUE. I have decided what I really need now is an old fashioned Matchmaker as I read in the New York Times they are in demand. Where are they? Are they on Google? Or in the Yellow Pages from 1935? I am certain if I could just sit down with a traditional Jewish matchmaker (who hopefully serves lox and bagels) she could find me a man.  

I once believed Dr. Phil could find me dates, as his smiling TV ads promised discovering love on Match.com. The promos never lived up to the hype and he wasn’t available. I’ve seen the same faces for years. I’ve had men contact me with whom I’ve already gone out. Have they been on the site so long that dating dementia has set in?    

Under thirty, meeting men was like fishing in a stocked pond. And speaking of fish, Plenty of Fish was a possibility, but now I refer to it as, plenty of dead Trout floating on their side in a polluted lake. 

Tinder says you can swipe your way to love. I have no idea how swiping became a dating technique. Right, left, left, right; it makes me dizzy, confused and wtf!  I don’t see swiping in my future.  It would be easier and more logical to stand on a street corner wearing a sandwich board which reads “date me.”  

And frankly, who are the men whose profiles read like Ernest Hemingway? It’s terrifying to think that if Ted Bundy was on a dating site I might have gone out with him.  After all he was handsome, charming and a law school student. I’m sure he posted fabulous fun vacation pictures, said he was athletic, smart, liked to dance and loved dogs. The perfect guy.  Since then I assume everyone is a serial killer until proven otherwise which is exhausting and anxiety evoking. I don’t believe any of the dating sites do FBI background checks, which might be a great promotional idea.  

At the moment there are more sites than hours in a day. It has become a job to scroll through the pictures and profiles. It’s time consuming, laborious and I don’t have enough years left to spend looking. I definitely don’t want to be found dead face down on my computer with a picture of Dr. Phil on the screen.

What happened to the days of meeting someone in the produce aisle of the grocery store?  It was so easy to strike up a conversation with a cute guy, “Do you prefer vine ripened or beef steak?” This line stopped working however after the age of fifty five. Walking the dog is another old fashioned and organic pick up option. I met my first husband because our Golden Retrievers hooked up in Central Park. I ultimately kept my dog but not my husband. Sadly I’ve noticed all the canines in my neighborhood are attached to wedding rings.  

Pick up bars were never my idea of a way to spend an evening and find a date. If I went with friends I brought a book because men never cozied up to me. I am brunette. My girlfriends were all blondes. Men made a b-line over to them and I was shoved out of the way. There I was the lone brown haired girl with my head down reading. This was ok with me because I never took “bar speak” which I think consists mostly of monosyllables.  I never developed the art of idle chit chat. My lightest subject was Kubrick. I sat alone a lot.

Getting fixed up worked back in the seventies as everyone I knew was single and looking to meet a prospective partner. Now in 2022 I have had to resort to begging and pleading with friends and acquaintances to fix me up. As it turns out not one of my friends, family members, mailman, or my buddy the checkout man at the local Jewel knows anyone single. This doesn’t seem possible when half the adult population is divorced. The question that haunts me is, where is that half and how come no one knows them?

I’m hoping someone who reads this knows a person in the divorced half.  If not, a matchmaker is my last hope. I’m willing to bring the lox.