Matchmaker

How BS is The Bachelor? Whether you’ve seen the show or not, we’ve all heard of it, we all know the premise.

They pick one male or female who is looking for true love, and then 25 men and women for them to choose from to get to know in a couple short months and whittle down to that one special person to walk down the isle with.

I have been the victim of getting sucked into this show for a handful of seasons. I get so swept up with all the extravagant dates, gorgeous people, champagne and romance; I almost want to believe it’s this easy. How successful is The Bachelor, matchmakers and dating sites?

I feel like I am presented with well over 25 guys at my access in one single night at a club or bar or hell even just going about my business in this huge city with a surplus of men; and it’s a rarity to find a guy who can hold my interest in one conversation, let alone take to Pennsylvania to meet my family and marry.

I suppose the set up of having a room full of people who are truly looking for love, who want a relationship, would have an impact on raising the success rate of making a match. Verses putting a group together in one room at complete randomness, mixing together men and women, married and single; people who are looking for love and people who are just looking to date. People of all ages. People of all backgrounds with all interests. It feels a bit like finding a needle in a haystack…

It takes about 30 seconds to decide if you are attracted to someone. It takes only a couple minutes to decide if you are interested in someone. It takes probably one date to decide if you could see yourself in a relationship with someone. And it takes around a month to know if you could see yourself with that someone for the rest of your life.

This is a pretty simple progression that doesn’t take long, but we seem to complicate the hell out of it. If we stayed true to listening to our gut in the process of dating, we would probably get a lot closer to love than all the other influences we let weigh in on our choices.

There’s a side of me that wants to believe in the concept of having an outside source bring two people together based on sheer compatibility—kicking aside every other influence…including one-too-many-cocktails, the ex-syndrome (bringing in ex issues into our current situation), getting in our own way, indecisiveness, insecurity…the list goes on.

I have come up with an experiment to better understand the idea of a matchmaker and really test this concept.

For the entire month of February, I am going to let the one person who knows me inside and out, make my dating selections for me. Whether it be at a bar or someone she knows or a guy at our local coffee shop…it will all be chosen by my friend, Beth. It will be good ol’ fashion dating—the works. No sleepovers, no skipping steps—dating. The way dating it’s supposed to be.

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