The Demise Of Virtual Dating - The New Wave Of 'Love Facilitators'

Amanda Perkins had been married before - happily at first then hostile, angry, and disgusted with the man she had met through an online dating service.  She had filled the questionnaire honestly and rigorously, dismissing the easy inquiries quickly - she was a non-smoker, moderate drinker, reasonably balanced between the outdoors and city life, accepting of family and social responsibilities - and taking time with the more nuanced questions.  

Yes, she was interested in sexual exploration, but no, she was not interested in anything out of the ordinary.  She wanted a lover, a man of Lawrentian desires, but nothing overtly male-centered. 

In short she presented herself fairly - a girl of patrician parentage and breeding, well educated, temperate in political philosophy, moderate in social reform, and all-in on family, children, and the building of a responsible legacy. 

The computer matched her with men of similar backgrounds, but there was always something that brought out the dweeb, for lack of a better term; men of good backgrounds but indifferent appeal.  Good husbands perhaps, but not the kind that would, again for lack of a better term, ring her bell. 

There was Jerry X, divorced, well-employed, an outdoors type with a taste for good cuisine, favorable to new fiction but solidly old school, talented in linguistics and chess, handsome so many said, but not Hollywood worthy.  Predictable. Rejected. 

Harry F, financier in a Wall Street brokerage house, responsible for vast restructurings but thanks to an innate moral code, never made millions in buyouts and repurposing.  A religious man of principle but not fundamentalist beliefs, a man of integrity.  Bullish. Rejected. 

After having had it with failed algorithms that couldn't come up with anything better than this, a new name popped up, one Belkins R who simply said, 'Try Me', and listed only the basic biographical necessities - birth, parentage, location, and profession. 'A good woman will judge me well'. 

Amanda was intrigued and went through the well-vetted and -practiced steps to mating.  A brief meeting at the Oak Bar, dinner at Lutece, and an evening boat ride from Georgetown to Alexandria on the 'River Queen'; and more serious involvement was virtually assured. 

But the technology was still new, and what appeared to be a reasonable match, confirmed by this series of increasingly intimate encounters, turned out to be a crossing of the wires. What she found out after tying the knot in the offices of the San Francisco Justice of the Peace, was none to encouraging.  Belkins R was a tangle of weird obsessions none of which were caught by the still immature computer algorithms.  How was anyone to know about his fascination with Millard Fillmore? Or fishline tension? Or academic 'rhythms'? 

Not that these interests were perverse or distorting in any way.  Just that they were unanticipated, and what Amanda thought was a bright, considerate, honest, and intriguing man turned out to be dull, inconsiderate, duplicitous, and baldly unpretentious.  He disappeared for hours into his man cave, emerged only after 'the aha experience', some location of an intellectual G-spot in his research, pleased as punch but completely indifferent to Amanda.  A klutz. 

Harmon K. Absecker had had his share of amorous adventures.  Not exactly a Casanova or Lothario, he knew enough about relationships to avoid the worst and be tempted by the best.  His transition from part time lover to marital advisor was not surprising. He was known as a man who knew when to hold it and when to fold it, someone with grace enough to call it quits without recrimination, with enough charm to attract women well above his station, and enough savvy to winnow the wheat from the chaff. 

His classmates, friends, and associates all came first to him for advice; and those women who were not intimidated by male sexual savvy sought him for insights on men and male sexual pursuit. 

With a few months course work and a desultory internship, he was able to hang out his shingle as an advisor to the lovelorn and and love-intent.

His job was not so much consoling those who had loved and lost, but those who sought congenial sexual companionship and, as in the case of Amanda Perkins, how to get a man.  

He was not in the marriage brokerage business per se- that is, he was no mating pimp with a ready stable of stallions for eager young mares - but a reformer, an expert in priming the young, marriageable woman to meet her most desirable mate. 

Harmon was of the conservative opinion that it is the woman who attracts the man.  She is the one to interest him, lure him, seduce him, and bed him; and not the opposite.  Sure, there were men of innate sexual allure to whom all women were immediately drawn but the reverse was the standard.  Women for millennia were gussying themselves up to catch a man. 

 

Times had changed, and the whole idea of seduction, male or female, was passe.  Mating had become more a question of synchronicity than desire, an issue of compatibility and harmony rather than pure sexual impulse; but Harmon knew that nothing had really changed.  Women lured men, and men pursued women. 

So in his sessions with women he simply told them how to tart up - to play upon men's innate sexual instincts.  Not so much the old comic book pouting lips, tears, and décolleté, but something far more sophisticated, hard to put in words, but reinstalled as an integral part of womanhood 

For men, he taught no differently.  Gone were the old female stereotypes of the fragile, innocent young thing looking for love, and in its place was the super-confident women of today who beneath the feminist Sturm und Drang were still beautiful, delicate flowers that need attention. 

On occasion, introductions were made.  Harmon had so many male and female clients that it would be a shame not to mate them.  In time that side of the business prospered far more than the counselling side; but both were necessary to sustain profitability.  He needed satisfied, confident, well-educated men and women, happy with their sexual lot in life to be successful at brokering. 

So Harmon's practice became a revolving door - in one side despondent, needy, frustrated, and ambitious; and out the other well-prepared to meet the next Mr. Right. 

Without knowing it, Harmon had become a thing.  He began the wave of return to normalcy, the in-person, physical laws of attraction.  His dismissal of algorithms, big data, and virtuality in sexual matters was but the first and most pronounced of the general return to traditional values - nuclear families, two genders, classically familiar male and female roles, etc. Under his tutelage men and women began behaving as they had always done before the sexual radicalization of the Left; and it felt good.  Men were men and women were women again. 

Harmon's treasury filled beyond his wildest dreams and Amanda found the ideal husband.  She and Parker were perfectly suited, not by data matching but by chemistry, gesture, animation, and physical subtlety.  Of course there were problems.  No couple last more than a couple of months before squabbling; but in their case the disputes were minor and easily resolved. 

As for Harmon, the hours and days spent mixing and matching grew tedious and took away from his own seduction time.  One had to look after oneself after all. 

He eventually got married to a lovely young girl from the North Shore, but ironically it didn't last.  He had been too impatient to heed his own counsel, was besotted by her patrician beauty and Hollywood charm and jumped right in.  It wasn't long before she took a more exciting lover and that was that. 

However, one should not be quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Harmon's educational principles were as sound as could be.  It was just that human nature tends to throw a spanner into the works on occasion.