It is time to start finishing up my dating series, looking for love in all the wrong places. When I started the series I wanted to try various websites in order to land a date and compare the women of these sites versus women I met in the real world. As this progressed I received a ton of e-mails from people suggesting other sites that I should be apart of including some pretty odd niche sites. There was one e-mail though that was really interesting, I was told that I should try to get on the reality TV show Confessions of a Matchmaker which is filmed here in Buffalo.
Being the self promotional whore that I am I figured that I could wear a pointlessbanter.net t-shirt on every date that I went on, reference the site every five minutes, and reap tons of traffic. Or I could go on there and show off that I am the tortured bachelor and maybe have it lead to an upgrade to the show the Bachelor where I can hold rose ceremonies and laugh at girls that didn’t get a rose. I would love to boot girls off the show and totally destroy their reputations while doing it, “You should have swallowed, no rose for you.”
Girl: But I didn’t even go down on you.
Me: Sure you didn’t, sure you didn’t. Let America be the judge you non-swallowing trollop.
Anyways, I filled out the online application and ended up getting a call a few weeks after where I did a phone interview. The interview was with a new girl on their staff, she had to be in her mid twenties and we had a good conversation, I essentially just spurted back everything I have written about here and the horrors of dating. She liked me and we scheduled a time for me to come in and meet the owner Patti Novak, the star of Confessions of a Matchmaker.
When I arrived I had to fill out a shit load of paper work and take a survey, I talked about one of the inane questions before in this blog. After I finished the survey I was called into Patti’s office where we had about an hour conversation. Patti poured through my application and we talked about dating, she complimented me on my looks and told me that I seemed like a good catch. She said there were no red flags on my application and then proceeded to tell me how things worked.
She would select the girls I would date as she matched them up by my likes and dislikes. Patti would essentially give me a run down of three girls a month, I would get their phone numbers and I would call them to go out on dates. We couldn’t talk more than five minutes on the phone because she said that it would build false expectations and ruin the date. We were to meet in public and she suggested that TGI Fridays was the perfect place, and probably harped on that point like four time. Apparently there were no other dining establishments in Buffalo except TGI Fridays and magic would happen if we went there. Their square mozzarella sticks are a natural aphrodisiac I guess. The next day after the date we both would call her and give our review, if we both liked each other she would give us permission to call each other one more time and setup another date. After that date we would wait a little bit, do the call to her again and then she would let us go off on our own and date freely.
Now she was going to base who I should date off a bullshit questionnaire that asked me what type of animal I would want on an island. Call me cynical but that isn’t exactly the type of questions I want my potential date to be answering. I was more concerned with important things like: do you have a hunchback?
It was all fine and good I guess, it is a match making service after all, I had to keep an open mind. Things sounded mildly interesting until the conversation progressed. Patti said that it was also her job to tell her clients how to date and how to handle themselves on a date. She went through my application and started talking to me about certain points that should be presented in certain ways.
Religion: On my application I told her I was agnostic, she brought this up and said that girls would not want to date a guy that didn’t list a religion because it shows that they have no faith and probably wouldn’t settle down. How these two things are related I have no idea. She asked me what religion I was when I was growing up and I told her Catholic. Then she changed my form to say “non practicing Catholic.” I was told that it would make me more attractive to potential dates. In under three minutes apparently my entire belief system had been changed.
Grad School: She grilled me about what I was doing in grad school and what I wanted to do when I got out. I told her that I wanted to consult and that I could work from anywhere in the country. Immediately she flipped out and said that I can’t tell a girl that I might leave the area when I am done with school. I replied to her saying that I could end up with a new media job in Hollywood or NYC that would be paying disgusting money. Considering most of the girls she was going to set me up with were teachers or nurses I didn’t see the problem. She said that most girls would have established careers and wouldn’t want to uproot it for a guy, I disagreed with her based on simple logic. I think a 175K year discrepancy between their pay and mine would kind of be a selling point along with a move out of Buffalo. Apparently not according to her, I don’t know if I would want to date a girl that didn’t understand math. I was told never to talk to girls about leaving the area.
Family: I told her that kids weren’t really on my radar right now that I had so much going on professionally that my goals were set on that. She told me that a lot of the girls I would be going on dates with weren’t there to date and were looking to settle down, so I could be expecting the call for a family within three years. She told me not to mention my hesitancy to start a family within the next three years because it would be seen as a sign of non-commitment.
At this point I had to present myself with a different value system, lie about my future plans, and give people total false expectations in order to sell myself on these dates. Personally my problem isn’t what to say on a date it is finding the correct girl I should be on the date with, I don’t know if I would want to date someone that had expectations that were false on a dating profile that was essentially no longer me. Of course the best part of all this is that I would have to pay $1000 to establish myself as a total fraud and be set up with girls that had the wrong information about me. Paying a grand to lie and to be lied to really sounded like a sound investment….
Tomorrow Part 2: Politics, more conversations about religion, and did I sign up?
Do I sign up or do I not?
This is going up at humor-blogs.com
We left off with Patti Novak, the star of the reality show Confessions of a Matchmaker, talking about all the things I wasn’t allowed to talk about when I was on a date. She then shifted to politics and asked where I stood on some issues, which then turned into ten minutes of her giving me her own political leanings. I now know the official stance that she has on illegal immigration, let me just say that this talk had me biting my tongue and cringing at some of the terminology she used. At this point I was convinced that this lady wasn’t going to get a dime of my money. In fact I was trying to figure out a way not to stand up and toss her out of the window.
I write about the stuff we all think but don't like to talk about.
