There is nothing I won’t do for my clients, and an outfit assessment ahead of time can be helpful. This particularly witty New York chap was confused when Match Girl emailed him her standard “What are you wearing?” email. My, my!, he thought. What a question! Then it all became clear, and he wrote the following delicious email.

I thought I would share it with you as inspiration on how to approach Mystery Dates, how to have humor about the whole process, and how to define your personal style, all in one. Enjoy this wonderful note!

From: New York Dater (MALE) 7.31.12.

To: Match Girl

Subject: Tonight!

I see now why you asked me about clothing. I am so fuckin dumb.

I’ll wear jeans and a black polo. I have a brown/red beard, glasses and brown hair.

Basically I look like this…..

….except the real-life version of that:
less stylish
less pretentious
less Williamsburgy
less cinema studies major
less standing-on-the-corner-trying-to-look-hip
less beardy
less, ahem….slender

So you may have started the fight—but does that automatically mean the responsibility is yours to end it?

You may have dealt the first blow, but was it the hardest? What are the rules, if any,of the dance of conflict in the love relationship?

For example, I indeed may have perchance been the one to raise my weapon and start making little pokes on a most inopportune day at a most inappropriate time. (the wedding anniversary, ehhem.)

But once the provocation has started a jest, and he’s in the fight… I don’t have to be the first one to drop the proverbial sword, do I?

Some of my clients who have come out of long marriages recently are in the position of finally surrendering after years and years of trying to get around a tangled web woven through the missteps of a steeply declining holiness of the matrimonial state. They sound tired, but relieved that they have finally put down that sword.

In the game of He Said/ She Said, should male chivalry always prevail? I suppose I have to admit that my attitudes are in some ways medieval–in the sense that, regardless of the fact that I was a naughty princess, I still expect my prince to be gallant enough to take the fall for me.

So I am signing us both up for Aikedo. I figure this will beat the worn-out European prissiness out of me, and I’ll get the gumption and the training to end a fight I started. Seems to me a rather elegant turn of events… and indeed a fine anniversary present.

“Here, honey, I will work on my ability to finish fights I start, sparing us a few days of exhaustion every few months, and aggregative, we’ll have about seven more years of fight-free time as we live out our lives together…”

tawk that tawk, girl!

The Extra Terrestrial interference by The Church of Scientology has been credited as the catalyst in the divorce-du-jour of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise. What’s seldom celebrated in the highly publicized marriage termination is the fact that  Katie actually got herself together and made THAT call – THE call that so many of us are hesitant to make even without the whole world watching.

The Tawkify team are constantly working with our clients in the pursuit of new love connections and whilst doing this we inevitably uncover the reasons why previous matches went sour. Most of those relationship breakdowns become far from amicable because people simply aren’t willing face the fact that their relationship is over and neither party was willing to make that call. Consequently the relationship becomes the cart that leads the horse down the lonely road of bad phone coverage…. making that call ever harder.

One such case that stands out as being in dire need of a ‘call to service’ involved a wonderful gentleman who was only a breath away from being a Tawkify superstar. He was desperate to meet an amazing women but was faced with the daily challenge of a woman he divorced 11 years prior.  He was literally confronted by his ex-wife every morning because  ‘on account of the children’s wellbeing’   they’d remained living together for the past 11 years! Not surprisingly EVERY woman he’d met since the divorce had lost interest in him once they realized his ’no take home’ rule wasn’t a chivalrous ‘fling avoidance’ but rather due to the fact that his ex-wife had not yet been flung. Did i mention his children were in their 30’s?

Do not become a victim of your own disconnect – or inability to. Katie Holmes turned to Suri and made that call. So readers… pick up your Suri, Siri, iPhone 3, Android or whatever mobile device you like and MAKE THAT CALL.  Once you’re finished with your old love provider call the Tawkify team and we’ll make the connection you’ve been longing for.

Now, while we at Tawkify don’t exactly approve of launching into a lip-lock with a near-stranger in the first available shadowy spot (right, Auntie EEEE?), we DO promote (AND arrange!) the half-innocent, half-sexy “Mystery Date” and it’s less provocative, but still all the equally enjoyable cousin, the ”Walkify.” These are our odes to the timeless Rendezvous.

Al and Louise—thanks for being so hot for each other, or else I’d not be around

My grandmother, Mama Louise, often reminds me that if it weren’t for her and Papa Al, me and my four sisters would never have come to be. “All of this, it’s because of US,” she says proudly.

When I first inquired into how my grandmother Louise felt about my grandfather Al back when they were young, her response was so quiveringly and overtly sexual that I was rendered speechless. I was expecting a dainty story of her sitting underneath a white armada, leaning over the banister flirtatiously while he approached her with an innocent lemonade and asked to take her to the fair on Saturday.

Rather, I got this description (and mind you, I was ten years old): “I was sitting down in a room full of people when my head slowly turned and I caught sight of this (and here she sighs and shakes her head for effect) this… handsome, handsome man. And Charlee, he had these blue eyes that just… let me tell you…(she grunts at this point) I am not kidding, they brought. me. to. my. knees.”  She nodded to emphasize, waiting for me to comprehend the sheer animal force that my grandfather exuded, that she was victim to. “And even twenty years later, we’d be at a party and I’d catch eyes with him. And it would just DO things to me.” She then looked so feverish that I became frightened that my poor grandmother was under the spell of a sex God–yes, the same old man who would sit in his La-Z-Boy as I combed his single tuft of gray hair on his shiny old head, clipping it with my pink bows.

I marvel to this day that I am the product of a young man and young woman’s unbridled carnal passion for each other—even if in every other aspect of life, they seem less than compatible.  It’s really something not to be underestimated, this sex appeal, this thing called chemistry. I often set up clients who find each other to be just fabulous–except they don’t feel that ‘heat’–that heat my grandmother spoke of so vividly and that embarrassed, and ultimately, shocked me, to know that it was what was ultimately responsible for my very existence.

My husband and I were talking yesterday in the car as we traveled through the desert about dating services, and he asked me if I thought whether, if  I were still single, I’d ever use one. I said I didn’t know, that I’d probably just always end up dating a neighbor–I was really under the influence of the law of proximity. When I asked him, he said, “If I hadn’t found the woman of my dreams–you—then, oh definitely. Since you’ve been doing this work, I have really become more and more convinced that it as good a way as any other to meet anyone, and really, preferable and superior in many ways. Because you can still have the room to see if there is chemistry and attraction, but you don’t have to be prey to it. You have someone working on your behalf to help guide you into compatibility and health, into harmony with another person. It’s a great thing.” I would never have expected him to say that, but he is quite right.  I am glad my grandmother and grandfather forged a life together, albeit based pretty much solely on sexual attraction, because otherwise I’d not be here. But I always thought it was a pity that two people should be so enslaved to each other due to this one ruthless, blind force. I always thought marriage and love should combine the best of friendship with the best of romance. And I suppose I ended up just in the right job in life to be able to see to it that there is more of that.