It’s not so easy to play Cupid anymore
My wife came home from lunch with a former colleague. She’s usually bubbly after such events. On this day, she was a bit moody.
“He got divorced,” she announced. “And he wants me to fix him up with a female friend of mine. Any female friend.”
She agreed to try, without enthusiasm, without any guarantees offered or expected. But as she tossed her raincoat onto a chair and slumped onto the couch, it was clear that the prospect of arranging a meet-up didn’t delight her.
Fixing people up, at our (advanced) age? Fixing this guy up, when he’s 71, kind of nerdy and kind of set in his ways?
“I don’t really know what he’d be like in a dating situation,” my wife said. For that matter, she doesn’t really know what any of her female friends would be like, either.
She now has two pals — the guy she just had lunch with, and whoever she might suggest to him as a date. But if the date goes sour, she might quickly cascade from two friends to neither. Who needs that?
On the other hand, there’s always a whiff of possibility when someone has just divorced and comes back on the market, regardless of age.
So many people think that having a partner, a regular date, even a sometime squeeze, is the natural order of things. Why be lonely? Any companionship/cuddleship is better than none, right?
I asked my wife if she had any ideas about unattached women she might suggest to this guy.
I know her so well. She mulled by walking that question up one side of her face and back down the other. Then she said: “I know a lot. But none of them have ever told me that they’d be interested. They’re women of a certain age, and they’re perfectly happy to be single.”
In this day and age, a single man with wrinkles and white hair isn’t as rare as it used to be, I pointed out. “But it isn’t a fair fight. That single guy attracts far more attention than a single woman does or would. It’s not a level playing field, but it’s the truth.”
My wife knows me so well. She asked if I could please recount the story of my two fix-ups.
In both cases, the couples were in their 20s (I was in my 40s).
Couple One consisted of my research assistant and my wife’s cousin. They met. Sparks flew. They’ve now been married for more than 30 years — and have moved on to grandchildren, no less.
Then there was the fix-up that turned to mud.
She was a colleague. He was a professional acquaintance. She asked if I knew anybody. I asked if he was interested. He was.
The relationship took off like a rocket. Three dates in three days. Tentative plans to meet the other’s family. They called me separately to thank me.
Was I batting 1,000?
Nope. A mere .500.
Something went badly wrong. The couple splintered into a million pieces on a snowy streetcorner in downtown Washington. She called me the next day to say she never wanted to see him again.
But they did meet once more — on the Oprah Winfrey Show!
A producer called me. Oprah was doing a segment about blind dates that didn’t work, but might have. Did I have any guests to suggest?
I sure did.
Winfrey management flew the couple to Chicago (yes, on separate planes). They sat five feet apart on a couch while Oprah grilled them on national television.
Neither looked at the other. Neither smiled. Neither had a good word to say about the other, or the whole experience.
I stayed home from work to watch the episode. As glares and grimaces multiplied, I remember thinking, “Robert, you gave America THIS?”
Which was exactly why my wife wanted to hear my fix-up stories yet again.
She asked if I had ever again tried to play matchmaker after the streetcorner splinter. I said I hadn’t. Why risk a lifetime .500 batting average?
She is still mulling whether to help her lonely, divorced male friend. She is still landing on the basic truth of all potential couplehood: You never know until you try.
But the mulling has gotten less frequent lately. I think she has landed on a soft no.
Dating is so fraught at any age and any stage. My spouse seems sold on the idea that it will all work out for her divorced friend somehow, without her help — and without Oprah’s prying postmortem.
Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.
