A year ago I wrote in the JC about my plan to help my single friends find partners, through the personal touch of good old-fashioned networking. Well, I am ashamed to say I failed spectacularly. My apologies to readers who put their hopes in me.
It all started promisingly. I had attracted an enthusiastic committee of about eight people who all knew plenty of single people. We set up a What’sApp group and arranged to get together.
Finally, after finding a date to suit all our diaries, we sat around my kitchen table, pen and paper in hand, reeling off names of every single person we knew aged 35 plus. I often hear from single ladies, that they heavily outnumber suitable men. However, we came up with around 100 names, pretty equally split between genders.
So, what went wrong? Well, we debated about how to get these people to meet. The only guy on the committee said a big “singles” event, inviting everyone we knew, would be too big, too unselective and too uncool. Then one of us kindly offered to host a Friday night dinner at her home. I thought that was too much work for too few people. That left us with a compromise option: a “by invitation only” event of hand-picked singles to take place after Pesach. As one member said: “If we don’t have the right people there the first-time round, no one will come again.”
We decided upon an informal smallish “drinks evening” for 35 to 50 year-olds, one July evening. Knowing how some people run a mile from events labelled “single”, the word was deliberately left off the invitation. Also, as one friend suggested, having some marrieds at an event takes the heat off the objective in sight. They may even spot a single person who would be suitable for one of their friends.
Event agreed, it was time to make up the guest list. The What’sApp group pinged constantly with names of candidates, many men, some well over 50 After the initial burst, the pings died down and came to a grinding halt. No confirmed people, no event, no success! It certainly felt like a great shame, as we had started off with a lot of optimism. What was clear to me was that, in spite of the goodwill of the committee and the abundance of single people around, organising the right event was much more difficult than I had anticipated.
However, not all is lost. I am hopeful that the recent launch of We Go Together, Daniela Pears’ free introduction service for those aged 30 to 85, is a great way of overcoming the problems we faced.
“There will always be the intangible chemistry (which no matchmaker can account for),” it states, “but what we are trying to do is introduce a deeper dimension to the dating process, to give it a greater chance of success.”
