It never ends. In the eight minute subway ride, as your signal faded out, you’ve gotten four emails from your job, three Facebook invitations, two text messages, a flurry of news blurbs, Instagram madnesses, and the seven articles you’ve been meaning to read — queued away in Pocket. There are fires to put out at work, proposals to write, phone calls to make, others to ignore, vacations to dream of and plan, workouts to crush, show reviews to read (tickets to buy), the new bakery that’s been calling your name on the walk home — for starters. Not to mention the trajectory of your career, the networking potential everywhere you find yourself, the plethora of fun to be had in the wonderland of Manhattan — oh, and the target of six hours of sleep that you’ve nailed once or twice (do naps count?) this month. In the new age of collective ADD, hyper-driven in the five boroughs, there aren’t enough hours in the day, or the week, or, well, ever. And we’re supposed to squeeze in a romantic life?
It’s not a secret that dating is tough in NYC. The infinite options, the absence of time, the swipe-to-the-right endemic of online dating. It never ends — or, maybe it feels like it never really begins. Years back, people were shy about finding a match in a database of profile pics, clever bios, and meandering messages (Hey! I notice you like craft beer… I too like craft beer. I was thinking maybe we could) — stop it. Today, there’s no shame in a solid Tinder game. That is, if you’ve got ten hours a week to spend exercising your thumbs. George Jetson would have been quite the lethario, but here in reality, virtual dating is a carousel.
So what’s an enterprising New Yorker to do about love? Increasingly, people are changing with the times. People are realizing that in the age of overwhelming technology, a perpetual time-crunch slammed together with endless distractions and the lure of “something better” around every corner, using a matchmaker can be enormously helpful. The key is finding someone you like, you trust, you respect, and, frankly, someone who knows the dating game a tad better than you have the time to — its her job, after all. Who does this sort of thing? Someone whose phone buzzes every 6.2 seconds. Someone who begins 73% of responses to invites of any kind with, “Ah! I’m super busy, but…” Someone who admits that the idea of it being slightly impossible to truly connect with someone more than once in this city isn’t completely outlandish. Someone who has a robust career, which, for better or worse, has to come first. Someone who has thought to themselves on a Tinder date “I guess you faintly resemble your profile picture and have the same conversational skills and quick wit as you did in our sixteen message exchange.” Someone who adapts to their surroundings. Its hard out here. Hard to hail a cab in rush hour, hard to get reservations, hard to determine if the place you’ve made reservations for is still okay a week later or is already bridge-and-tunnel-ish, hard to get excited about a second date, or even a drink with someone new on a weeknight. And that’s the last thing that should be hard.