"... Catch me a catch"

Too bad professional matchmakers have lost their cachet.  Sifting through the creeps on internet dating sites has exhausted me.

I have found myself thinking about that scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding in which men of various demeanors were invited for dinner as potential dates for Toula. With the first camera shot we got the punchline, we knew right away that these men were not for her. Now, imagine one of those men hidden behind a Times New Roman declaration that he "loves life, travelling, pampering, and is looking for a woman who is beautiful on the inside." It takes so much longer to get to the punchline, and if we get to the end of the joke unscathed, we should count ourselves lucky. 


Without our professional matchmaker, who protects us from the disappointments that are part and parcel of finding our one and only? With a matchmaker, we could still choose from pictures (albeit a pile of and not a window full of); we would tell her who we like and she would tell him. In the off chance that he would reject our overtures, considerately she would tell us that as it turns out he is out of the country and not available for a relationship. Or she would tell us that as it turns out, he is a scoundrel and a beast and best stayed away from and she is immediately tearing up his pictures.

In a perfect world, our matchmaker might save us myriad monosyllabic phone conversations. She would protect us from the men that have unilaterally changed the rules of polite conversation. She would save us from the tiresome justifications of why we, who are closing in on a decade of divorce, are not interested in a newly "separated" man who lives in his wife's guest room but "emotionally" lives alone... 

But, in lieu of Yente, I will continue to sift through the creeps on my own. Because I know that somewhere among the rubble there awaits a nugget of gold.