2008: Year of the Matchmaker?

by Esther D. Kustanowitz
Special To The Jewish Week

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.”
“After many frustrating and totally off-the-mark suggestions” by her online matchmaker, E., 28, went on one unsuccessful date; she’s now engaged, but not through a matchmaker. A., a transplant from Detroit, remembers telling his matchmaker, “There are no Modern Orthodox girls in Detroit.’ She said, ‘There are plenty!’” After three girls, “who barely qualified as Modern Orthodox,” the matchmaker “ran out.” So A. moved to NYC, where he has never again felt the need to use a matchmaker.
A different A., approaching 30, met with a matchmaker at an event, but she didn’t match with anyone in the company’s database. The man she had enjoyed chatting with at the event took her number and never called. “Why would he call me?” she said, in feigned surprise that’s all too familiar. “Just because we were both single and met at a Jewish singles event and happened to have a nice conversation?”
Friend 3 contacts me via instant messaging: “You must know some good single Jewish men ... over 5-5,” she quickly adds. A tall Jewish man is hard to find (and maybe not so tall, if 5-5 is the minimum). P. is tall, He’s married now, but when he was single, his matchmaker would immediately set him up “with the tallest girl on her books, even if she was only 5 feet tall.” He met his wife (she’s 5-6) through friends, but first, he says, he met “some very nice tall girls, even if we shared nothing of the same outlook in life.”
If matchmaking were easy, everyone would do it successfully. I do know some good single Jewish men (even if not all of them are tall). But who to match them with? I don’t believe in tossing random people together merely because they’re single; the pair would need something to talk about besides me.
As I’m reminded every tax season/spring cleaning time, I’m a hoarder. I save paper receipts and try to hold on to people, which is good, but I did also have three blenders at one point. I try to follow the advice a personal organizer once gave me, and purge where possible. Maybe it’s time to match my men with my ladies, or at least throw the lists into a blender and see what happens. n
Esther D. Kustanowitz fully expects a barrage of mail about how she should have included quotes from matchmakers in this piece. But with only 750 words, sometimes a girl’s gotta focus on one aspect of an issue. You can email her at jdatersanonymous@gmail.com.

Westchester Jewish Conference

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