Is this romance coaching or is it cheating?
I’ve had clients who have asked me to write their emails to prospective dates for them. I do play a very active role in the development of each client’s profile, even writing a draft of the essay, but my clients play a part too, answering a long list of questions that I draw from when writing. I give suggestions when asked on how to write a first email, occasionally even writing a draft, but I have never taken on the entire correspondence like this guy below, Matt Prager. I could do it well, just like he does. Like him, I am a psychotherapist and a good writer, but I think it is really important for us all to have a direct hand in our own futures. And I agree with Sonali Fernand, quoted in the article: If you do not reveal right up front that someone else is writing for you, then it is deceptive. What do you think?
Online dating: Cyber Cyrano for hire
John Connolly
So, it’s your first date. You’ve been emailing for a couple of weeks, and now you’ve taken the plunge and decided to meet for a drink. He’s nicely turned out and even better looking than his pictures suggested. Perhaps he’s not quite as witty as he was over the internet, but then some people are just more fluent when they can put their thoughts down in writing. Mind you, he doesn’t seem to remember all of the conversations that you had, or not in any great detail, and was that a piece of paper he was consulting at the bar as you walked in? Hey, are those notes? What kind of person brings notes on a date?
Not as witty. Doesn’t remember conversations. Needs notes. Wait a minute…
If this situation were to play itself out in a bar in Manhattan or elsewhere this very weekend, then it’s possible that either Matt Prager or, more likely, his latest client would have only himself to blame. For Prager, a clever 42-year-old therapist and former screenwriter based in New York, has a curious sideline: he is regularly engaged by men to assume their identities and find possible dates for them on internet dating sites. In essence, he pretends to be his client in the early stages of courtship and then, when the woman agrees to a date, he hands over all of the information he has collated to the man in question and lets nature take its course. In our initial conversations, I referred to him as a “Cyber Cyrano”, after the large-nosed 17th-century French dramatist and duellist Cyrano de Bergerac, who was immortalised on stage by Edmond Rostand. In Rostand’s play, Cyrano seduces the beautiful Roxane on behalf of the doomed, but more conventionally handsome Christian. But Prager took issue with this comparison, and suggested instead that he was, in fact, closer to an avatar, a cyber version of the client’s own personality.
“I’ve heard the Cyrano thing before,” Prager says, “but I’m not even that classy. I’m doing a dirty job that nobody wants to do. I think the mercy for my clients is that they’re cut out of the process entirely. They’re generally people who get a lot of emails in the course of their jobs, and tend to answer them at a brisk rhythm. The prospect of trawling through more, even for dating purposes, doesn’t appeal. I feel like the only reason I even have this work is that people view it as such a pain in the ass, and the idea of outsourcing it is appealing to them.”
Prager views part of his role as “dating coaching”: he will talk to the client to find out what his expectations are, and the kind of woman that he is seeking. “Then, at a certain point, once I get where they’re coming from, there’s no discussion. I just tell them to look at their online account, email me details of the ones that they’re interested in and we’ll take it from there. This, to me, is where it slots into my writing background. I try to take on the character of my client, but the truth of the matter is – and this holds true of most people in the online world – that they want to get to the date quickly. It’s basic, generic chatter, and then some version of ‘Do you want to get together for coffee?’ My primary job is just laundering emotion. Imagine if you contacted 20 people, crafted these emails, and not one person contacted you back. It’s so frustrating. My clients don’t have to experience that stuff, because I experience it for them.”
Prior to the first date, Prager compiles a “cheat sheet”, consisting of a picture of the woman and a summary of their correspondence – her likes and dislikes, hopes and expectations – which the client will usually be seeing for the first time, and a few suggested conversation starters, although even such apparently simple civilities can be fraught with unanticipated difficulties. “On one cheat sheet, I mentioned to the client that his date had had a cold, and I’d asked her how it was. The client said, ‘I never would have asked her how her cold is’, which kind of explains how he’s in this situation to begin with. Another client screwed up by skimming the cheat sheet but not really reading it. The date brought something up, and he couldn’t remember it. I even had to get one client a stylist, because you can’t turn up in your work suit, or jeans and an old T-shirt. You’re playing a role: the guy they want to be with.”
Here, perhaps, we come to the heart of the issue. Quite clearly, on one level Prager and his clients are practising an act of deception. While Prager’s involvement is not entirely dissimilar to that of a traditional matchmaker, in this case one of those involved in the prospective courtship is not aware of the presence of a third party.
“Look, I’m not oblivious to what you’re saying, and perhaps I lack a moral compass, but the deception seems minimal,” Prager says. “To me, there’s really only one character deception at play in terms of my clients which is: ‘I’m someone who’s too busy to manage my online dating life.’ It’s just the email. It would be different if I showed up on dates for seven months, and then, suddenly, ‘Ted’ stepped in instead. That would be bad.”
Others might beg to differ. Step forward Sonali Fernando, author of Soulmates: True Stories From The World Of Online Dating. Her view of the activities of Prager and his clients is decidedly unforgiving.
“This makes me feel queasy,” she says. “Any man who is interested in a mature adult relationship with a woman would recoil at the idea of deceiving a possible life partner. There can be no great relationship without equality, and the fact that you have hoodwinked someone into coming on a date with you implies a fundamental inequality of knowledge.
“Quite apart from the deception, guys who want to avoid the ‘online’ part of online dating are missing out on one of the great pleasures of this new form of meeting people: cybercourtship. Many couples I interviewed actually began their relationship through a thrilling kind of email tennis in which they could really experience the other person’s mind, sense of humour and values before meeting; when they met, it was simply to confirm the rapport that had developed online.
Fernando is also uncomfortable with the concept of “emotional laundry”. “People gain emotional maturity only when they learn to deal with the messy bits themselves. Rejection, pain and the realisation that we’re not going to be God’s gift to everyone we meet are essential milestones on the road to self-knowledge.”
But in addition to taking on the task of dealing with being ignored or rejected, Prager is also winnowing the field, as it were, separating the wheat from the chaff. In our consumerist society, we have been conditioned to believe that choice is an advantage, and therefore the wider our range of choices, the better. Yet it’s easy to become overwhelmed, and this is as true of potential partners as it is of flights and hotels. Excluding cohabitees, there are about 18 million single people in the UK. In 2008, the research agency Jupiter suggested that, of the 24 million first dates in that year, nearly 70% were arranged online. If there was once a stigma attached to internet dating, a sense that this was, in some way, a last resort for those who couldn’t find a date by any other means, then it seems to be disappearing fast.
Not that one would necessarily guess that from Prager’s clients. Trying to get one of them to talk about his experiences involved establishing a temporary email address for the client in question, and the creation of a false name, so it was a little like dealing with someone in the witness protection programme. Eventually, “Joe”, a 45-year-old professional, divorced for four years and with two young children, agreed to talk.
“I had had some frustrating experiences with internet dating: endless emails, few meetings, dates with disappointing women. I just was not able to find desirable women. As an older guy, some sources, like bars, are harder to exploit. My main sources for dates have been friends and women I meet, so it was important to add a key additional productive source: dating sites. Matt and I met extensively beforehand, and he now knows me very well. He prepared my profiles based on what I told him. I’m confident in him. If there is something he doesn’t know how to answer, he asks me, but in the majority of situations he saves me the trouble of repeating myself by saying what I would tend to say. But we are not the same person. We aim to progress as fast as we can to meetings or phone conversations, at which point Matt leaves the process. The women can then come to their opinion of me based on meeting me.”
Matt has certainly proved successful for Joe, who told me he’d dated more than 50 women in the last six months, a number of whom he continued to see as he had not yet settled on “the one”. His energy is admirable for a man in his mid-40s: I’m 42, and the idea of dating two women a week for six months makes me want to lie down with a cold compress.
“Matt has generated an incredible flow of women,” Joe says. “Some days and weeks I can completely fill my free time with them, if I want. Many are high quality. Matt is the best. He knows how to present me in the best way, while adhering to who I am, and makes me more confident about the dating experience. He spends countless hours working on this, hours that I don’t have. As a result, I can spend my time on the actual dates, rather than on the process.”
One doesn’t have to be a trained psychologist to pick up on some interesting use of language and concepts in Joe’s response: flow generation, “process”, “key additional productive source”, “exploit”. This is the language of business, not of feelings. For Joe, Matt appears to serve something of the same function as a personal assistant at his firm: Matt drafts the emotional missives, and Joe signs on the dotted line. It’s not deceit: it’s just the way that busy people manage their affairs.
Yet some element of deception might be viewed as part of the dating process. When I went on the first date with my partner, Jennifer, I told her that I liked vacuuming and was practically a vegetarian, neither of which was even on nodding terms with the truth, but I wanted her to like me and I wasn’t about to let my tolerance of dust or my fondness for meat get in the way of that. We all tend to be on our best behaviour in the early stages of a relationship, and try to keep the more flawed elements of our natures to ourselves.
Such concealment is made easier by the internet, which is a virtual petri dish for the successful promulgation of deceit. In this, it is aided by the absence of visual cues, since we rely so much on non-verbal signals – the giveaway movements of faces, eyes and hands that poker players refer to as “tells” – in our day-to-day interactions with others. According to one poll by the US network MSNBC, a third of people who use online dating services are already married. A survey conducted by MIT and Boston University found that 20% of online daters admitted to deception, but when asked what percentage of others they believed to be lying (possibly a more accurate way of gauging deceit), the estimate jumped to 90%.
For the most part, though, when it comes to online dating, the lies we tell are generally minor: men tend to add inches to their height while women prefer to shave pounds from their weight. Photos will generally err on the side of youth. When one of Prager’s clients confessed to his date that he had not been her email correspondent, the woman shrugged and admitted that she had a 17-year-old son that she hadn’t mentioned in her profile. Could it be that the internet has conditioned us to expect, and accept, some element of deception when it comes to how we relate to others online, or is it instead a testing ground for our own emotional honesty? After all, simply because we can deceive others doesn’t mean that we should.
“Online dating, when used honestly, provides people with a huge amount of information,” says Sonia Fernando. “This enables a very active kind of filtering from a position of safety and anonymity, so that people can weigh up the pros and cons of meeting before agreeing to go on a date.
“So, if women are evaluating a person’s writing style and things like the frequency of their emails, yet the person in the photo is not actually the one who is writing the emails, they have arrived at a judgment based on false information: the proxy dating business has basically invalidated one of their most important filters.”
Perhaps, in the end, Prager’s undoubted skills appeal more to those who view the early stages of courtship as, at worst, a burden and, at best, a means to an end, whether that end is simply a drink and dinner, or a full-blown relationship. Yet it’s hard not to feel that if one’s personal boredom threshold is so low as to make unappealing the initial process of getting to know a prospective mate online, then one’s relationship problems are greater than even Prager can solve.
Or, as he himself puts it, “I’m not your dick. If you really need my help to get laid, then you’re in more trouble than you thought…”
