How reasonable are your expectations about matchmaking
Having been a matchmaker for 21 plus years I think I have seen just about everything.
YOU SHOULD KNOW WHAT YOU WANT, BUT…
I remember early in my career sitting down with a fairly attractive 40 year old woman who had prepared a list for our meeting. “Great” I thought. I love people who come to the interview prepared. Here’s where it got a little weird. She had 15 pages. And she wrote really small! She covered just about everything. No kids, wants kids, what his primary car should be (and yes she gave makes and models-Audi’s, BMW’s, and Mercedes), what his weekend cars should be (yes really- Jeep Cherokee or Land Rover) and what his house should be decorated like, right down to the thread count on his sheets (I kid you not). In my naïve first years of matchmaking I thought I could talk to her about expectations and explain some of this might be unrealistic. What I didn’t understand then and have come to over the years is that this kind of criteria isn’t about what someone wants or needs in a relationship, it’s about keeping a relationship at bay.
She probably didn’t intentionally make her list impossible. She just subconsciously wasn’t ready at that time to have a relationship. By making it about everybody else not being able to measure up she took the pressure off herself.
YOUR EXPECTATION MAY CHANGE!
Ok, that is the exception to the rule. It is also a good cautionary tale. I also had another client come to the service who was in her late 40’s and insisted she wanted someone never married with no kids. She spent two years in the service and despite my counselling her on some lovely men who were not quite what she was looking for in that they had a child or two, she absolutely refused everyone. I heard a year later that she had met and married a man with 5 school age children! Again I think this is a function of timing. I didn’t think she needed to meet someone with 5. She could have met someone with one or two and been perfectly happy. Obviously the guy she met was worth changing her expectations for. Sometimes when people pay for a matchmaker they mistakenly think we’re making people according to their specifications. We don’t have a mould in the basement. We try to get people as close to what they are looking for as possible. You won’t be able to predict who you’re going to end up with. Chemistry reigns in world of dating and matchmaking.
