Think your mother is a meddlesome Mary when it comes to your dating life? You haven’t seen anything until you’ve been matched by one of the city’s most aggressive yentas-for-hire.
Meet the modern-day matchmaker. Gone is the stale archetype of the schmatta-clad, love-finding guru. In are Louboutin-clomping, single-gal hunting matchmakers who prowl the city for ladies to add to their database.
These madams of matrimony charge their male clients as much as $10,000 to find a worthy bridge, but the cute young things they recruit don’t pay a dime. Some NYC gals take the bait. But those opting to go old-school quickly learn that the city’s cash-mad Cupids are no bargain.
Let’s meet a 29-year-old we’ll call Sally, fresh off a divorce and wanting to get “back out there.” A colleague introduced Sally to a matchmaker, who invited her to a meeting of “all the girls.”
“It’s in my ex-husband’s building,” the financier tells The Post. “I was like, I can’t go there. So they picked me up in a Jeep outside the Starbucks by my office, I hopped in the back, we talked for 10 minutes and I sketchily got out and went back to work. I felt like I was in some weird Bond movie.”
One 26-year-old grad school student (let’s call her Lauren) was picked up by a matchmaker’s assistant in a cafe.
“She handed me her business card and said, ‘I think you’re cute. You look fun. I have a lot of great guys who would love to go out with you.’”
Lauren figured, why not? The 40-year-old guy who had a painfully obvious face-lift and the decent-looking 30-year-old techie, who sweated so much he dripped onto his entree, was why not.
Another pretty 20-something we’ll call Christina was introduced to Lori Zaslow, star of “Love Broker,” via a friend. Zaslow was the second matchmaker the Chelsea resident had tried.
The first guy Zaslow pitched? Christina had already been out with him courtesy of the first matchmaker. “So Lori starts describing a second guy. She says he’s really great, from Long Island, has this great finance job, is really close with his family, lives on the Upper West Side — I stop her. It’s sounding way too familiar. I ask if he went to Cornell. She says no.”
Turns out, the guy was, indeed, a Big Red, and yes, another dude she had already been matched with. “Apparently, these guys cover their bases,” she says.
Susan, 30, went on a date organized by a team of matchmakers. After her dinner date, she kissed the gent goodnight “because we had been drinking” and tipsily agreed to see him again two days later.
“The matchmakers called, asked for all the details and said, ‘We hear you’re going out again!’ ” Susan says. “I explained that I actually didn’t like him.”
They were flabbergasted. Why did she kiss him? Why did she agree to go out again? They demanded Susan think it over. When she didn’t respond, they called to say their client had “moved on.”
And then there’s a girl we’ll call Katie, who works at a Midtown ad agency. She joined a matchmaking agency after a friend said it was a good way to meet older, established guys. One month later, she got a call. They had her perfect man, who they referred to as “their Israeli Stallion.”
She met him for a drink.
“He was wearing a ton of unpleasant cologne, had slicked-back hair and a shiny purple shirt,” Katie complains. “I got the impression that he had been expecting to impress me with tales of sailing the Hudson River, traveling around the world, buying new cars and apartments, etc.”
Katie never heard from the Stallion nor the matchmaker again.
“These men, the clients, are looking for a sexpot,” Katie says, “a simple kind of girl who will ooh and ahh at their fanciful tales and look past the obvious flaws that led them to have to use the matchmaker in the first place.”