her further on what to talk about on and offline. The entire service consisted of friend-like conversations by phone and e-mail between Grace in New Jersey and Evan in Burbank, California.
In her selection of Evan’s Premium package, Grace was deciding how much to put herself in Evan’s hands and how much she would do herself. To the extent that she put herself in Evan’s hands, she also accepted his guidance about how to feel. He started with how to feel about the very act of hiring him: “Congratulations for hiring me,” he said. “Don’t feel ashamed.” In a separate interview, Evan told me, “I’m everybody’s dirty little secret.”
Clients kept mum about hiring Evan, he thought, because they felt they should be able to find a romantic partner in a natural way—through friends, family, work, or church. He was right. When she told friends she had hired a love coach, they said, “You’re hiring a what?” But Evan told her to feel good about taking matters into her own hands by hiring him. Evan was changing the rule on shame: do not feel it.
He also recommended that Grace be wary of trusting a sense of “falling in love,” of rushing into the idea that she had met her soul mate. “If you sense yourself feeling that,” he suggested, “it’s probably infatuation.” Paradoxically, he even warned Grace against the messages in the ads of his fellow love coaches: “Find your soul mate. Find perfect chemistry. Fall in love.” “Soul mate” is a retrospective concept, Evan cautioned. “Only when you look back after twenty years together, do you say, ‘We’ve been soul mates all along.’” So Evan invited Grace to reinterpret what she had once defined as “true love” as being “infatuation.”
Eager clients project onto their on-screen suitors all the wonderful attributes they so hope to find. So he cautioned Grace: “Keep a check on your dreamboat fantasies. Go slow. Don’t be too eager.” Grace might wishfully fantasize that the man she sipped wine with by the fire in her brother’s living room was “the one,” Evan counseled, but this would be a bigger problem when Grace clicked her way through hundreds of profiles of online strangers. Her hopes could be wildly unrealistic, he explained:
Women come into my office with long lists of characteristics they want: the man should be successful, tall, handsome, funny, kind, and family-oriented. Does he like to dance? Is he a film aficionado? A real reader? They want a charismatic guy who doesn’t flirt, a successful C.E.O. who’s home at 5:00 p.m. Some women price themselves out of the market, and they’re very touchy about not wanting to settle for less than the complete list that they believe promises a soul mate and chemistry. Then a lot of people get discouraged and conclude it’s impossible to find real love.
Grace could imagine she had experienced a magical moment shared with the man of her dreams, only to discover it was all an illusion. So she needed to work out new terms of emotional engagement. How emotionally attached to an on-screen man should she feel at that first exchange? On the first date? The second? The third? Evan advised her on how attached to let herself feel by comparing dating to work at a job. Dating as work? Okay, Grace said, “I’m an engineer, so it was easy for me to think of dating as work. Just get it done. I know that sounds un-romantic, but that’s okay so long as I get to my goal. Evan kept my nose to the grindstone.”
We usually think of meeting a person to go on a date—a hike, a picnic, a restaurant dinner, a play—as a voluntary and pleasurable act. Indeed, we imagine pleasure as the very purpose of it. To compare dating a potential partner to the tedious turn of a grindstone is to say, in effect, “Don’t expect this to be fun.”
Others writing on Evan’s online blog also approached dating as work: “I keep plugging away, TableForSix [a service that sets up dinners with other singles], poetry readings, volunteering, it’s hard work.” Others did not agree: “Looking for love is not like work,” one wrote defiantly. But Evan told Grace that dating was work—and that she should not resent it. Indeed, part of the emotion work Evan was asking Grace to do was to try feeling upbeat about the fact that dating was work:
When you’re unemployed, what do you do to find work? When you are single, what do you do to find love? I’m not telling clients to spend forty hours a week looking for love, but I tell them, “You can give it three. Do the numbers—and don’t resent it.”
Another way Evan prepared Grace for the online dating market was by asking her to think of herself as a brand:
The Internet is the world’s biggest love mall. To enter it, you have to brand yourself because you only have three seconds. When I help a client brand herself, I’m helping her put herself forward to catch that three-second glimpse, and I’m helping her footnote the rest. A profile could say, “I talk about myself a lot. I go through bouts of depression, and Zoloft usually works.” That might be the truth, but it’s not going into her brand.
Like an object for sale, Grace had a label, Evan explained, and it had to grab attention. About her online profile, he said, “Don’t hide behind generalities like ‘fun-loving’ and ‘musical.’ Bring out your real self. Put that into your brand.” At the same time, he felt it was important to set boundaries on this public “real self” in early e-mail conversations with men. When Grace suggested telling about a stint at a Buddhist monastery where she was asked to clean a bathroom with a toothbrush, Evan replied, “That’s a little out there.” Grace prepared to emotionally detach from possible responses to that “real Grace” and to put that real Grace out there. That was Evan’s counsel: be interested, of course, but stay detached.
Then there were numbers. As Evan explained, even if Grace did not think of herself as, say, a “6” on a 0 to 10 scale, numbers still applied to her. She should know about them because she was in a market and they reflected her market worth:
In the eyes of many men a “10” woman is 24 years old, never married, has a sexy 36-24-36 figure, Nicole Kidman face, warm personality, a successful but flexible career, and a love of gourmet cooking. As a “10” she would score the highest number of male responses on Match.com.
Grace was very pretty and sexy, but she was 49 years old, divorced, and had little time for gourmet cooking. So, Evan surmised, maybe she was a “6.” He added, “I see a lot of 5 men looking for 10 women, and that leaves the 4 and 5 women in the dust.” So Grace had to try to detach her feelings of hurt pride from “Grace-as-6.”
In all of this, Evan counseled Grace to think about her ROI—return on investment—of time, thought, and emotional involvement. If a man was not right for her, she needed to keep an eye on the clock and move on.
Dating as work, dating as branding, dating as becoming a 5 or 6 in the eyes of others, dating as calculating her ROI, this was the market perspective Evan invited Grace to adopt. It called on her capacity to detach feeling from the idea of herself as a brand and as an ROI collector as well as from any given suitor.
In a grocery store, certain tacit feeling rules apply while transacting business: be friendly and pleasant with the checkout clerk. In the time you have, you can talk about the weather, the Dodgers game, or the taste of a new pesto, but do not get deeply involved. The clerk is doing a job and so are you. If you care too much about the clerk, it hurts the transaction, becomes a problem, and makes you seem strange. The basic feeling rule governing market transactions is to stay fairly emotionally detached.
We cannot apply the cheerful detachment we feel for a checkout clerk to a lover, spouse, parent, or child, of course, without something being haywire. However ambivalently, to them we usually feel deeply attached. Between these two boundaries—one demarking “too much” feeling and the other “too little”—flow all our feelings as we encounter the situations of life.
After Grace had written her profile, posed for her photo, and written her subject line, she panicked. As she recounted, “It was hard to push the button.
