Excerpt: 'Matchbook: The Diary of a Modern-Day Matchmaker'
March 10, 2005 -- -- Divorce attorney turned matchmaker Samantha Daniels is the founder of Samantha's Table, an introduction service that caters to singles in New York and Los Angeles who are serious about meeting the right person. In "Matchbook: The Diary of a Modern-Day Matchmaker," Daniels explains how she turned away from her career as a divorce attorney to play matchmaker to her willing bachelors and bachelorettes. Here's an excerpt:
Yesterday I was a divorce attorney. Today I am a Matchmaker. Crazy, I know, but that's my life.
I went to law school and decided to pursue a career in divorce law basically because my mom suggested it and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn't put all that much thought into it. My mom said that maybe divorce law would be the most people-oriented, and I agreed.
I practiced divorce law for a while, and it was in fact very people-oriented, but in an unpleasant way: divorce lawyers do help people, but at a time when they are at the lowest point in their lives and depressed all the time, which in turn makes them depressed all the time. I soon discovered that most divorce attorneys burn out quickly. To ward off potential burnout, I began throwing parties. I took over swanky clubs early in the evening, before their regular patrons showed up. I gave the management a small cut of the door. I charged $20, collected by one of my "bouncers" (my brother Sean or my brother Christopher), and I had several scantily clad "playmates" (younger sisters of my brothers' friends) stand by the door and collect business cards so I could invite the attendees to the next shindig. Each evening would end with me lying on my bed surrounded by hundreds of $20 bills and hundreds of business cards from all of my new friends.
I loved throwing the parties, I loved meeting the new people, and I found that I was really good at remembering little factoids about people and at introducing couples. Sometimes I couldn't help myself. I would see a guy on one side of the room and a girl on the other, and I would grab them by their hair and pull them toward each other, make the introduction, and walk away. Time and time again, I heard through the grapevine that these couples were dating, had gotten engaged, or had even gotten married. Soon, according to the Jewish faith, I earned a place in heaven, since more than three couples had ended up getting married through my introductions.
For years I continued to start up all sorts of singles businesses -- group-share vacation homes, coed back-to-summer-camp weekends, more and more singles parties, singles newsletters -- all the while subconsciously wanting to be a Matchmaker but refusing to step up to the plate and officially declare my Matchmakerhood. I remember with particular fondness my idea for a coed back-to-summer-camp weekend: I envisioned three hundred or so single people traveling to a sleep-away camp in upstate New York to relive their camping days. Originally, the fantasy was that I would sell so many tickets that I would have to put people on a waiting list, but the reality was that I dragged myself and my very patient boyfriend at the time up and down the beaches of Southampton, approaching strangers and trying to convince them to purchase tickets so I wouldn't have to cancel the weekend. Though a near disaster with no profit whatsoever, the weekend wound up being a lot of fun, and I walked away with a few thousand new friends whom I had met combing the beaches.
I also recall with fondness my newsletter, called "In the Loop," which I decided to mail out to all my new friends. In it, I pontificated about being single in New York, suggested great places to go as a single person, and wrote a Dear Samantha column in which I responded to people who wrote in with serious dating dilemmas (I made up more than a few for the purpose of the first column). I promised that the newsletter would come out monthly, but it never came out again, and in retrospect I'm not sure all that many people missed it.
In the beginning, some of my singles ventures were harebrained, to say the least, but through it all I built up a pretty kick-ass mailing list of the best and the brightest young singles in the New York tristate area. I probably could have handled being a divorce lawyer for a few more years, but what was the point? I always wanted to have my own business, to be something, someone a little different, even unique. And I definitely had a following in the singles world, so I decided to become, as far as I knew, the world's youngest Matchmaker.
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