Millionaire Matchmaker - Bringing misery to $ingle$ a million at a time

prettyontheoutside.com tackles the Millionaire Matchmaker

We can thank the WGA strike for the recent upwelling of heinously unwatchable reality TV series, the king (or queen) of which just has to be the BRAVO network’s Millionaire Matchmaker. If you’ve been fortunate enough to miss this series despite its obvious trainwreck potential, please allow us to catch you up.

The Ditz:

Patti Stanger, former director of marketing for the formative matchmaking company Great Expectations, brings the cameras into her psycho-dramatic, elitist little business of matching surgically “enhanced” golddiggers with horny but socially inept millionaires. Patti, who will go so far as to pimp out her own staff if she thinks she’ll make a buck, has rules: no curly hair (men won’t want to run their fingers through it), no short hair (not sexy enough), wear low-rise jeans or short dresses with high heels, AND no sex while dating (you gotta’ make them pay for it honey, just ask Anne Boleyn). If Patti’s victims, uh, clients are lucky, they’ll escape her harpie-like clutches altogether. If they are pragmatic, they might create a mutually satisfactory business arrangement and call it a marriage. If they are unlucky, she’ll hook ‘em up with a potential serial killer. But hey, the money’s right!!

The Date:

Case in point - Cidney meets Paul. Paul is a Las Vegas businessman. Cidney is a well-educated Bev Hills idiot (who incidentally was also the Playboy cyber-girl of the week for October 16, 2006 - Patti swears she doesn’t match ex-strippers, but I guess Playboy doesn’t count). When Cidney met Paul she mentioned that she lives with her mom and helps care for her aging grandmother (and would therefore not want to leave LA). So of course Paul insisted that she call her mother on the phone so he could “meet” her and assure her that he is “a good guy.” Once he got them on the phone he talked himself up to Dad and Grandma too. Paul then took Cidney on a date to Vegas, where he discerned that she is afraid of heights and promptly took her on a helicopter tour. Later at dinner, when Cidney facetiously mentioned how thrilled her family would be to get rid of her, and that her grandma is actually knitting baby clothes out of sheer hope, Paul did what every reasonable, common-sensed American male would do. He proposed to Cidney. She said “Um.” He called mom and grandma to tell them the good news. I swear to you it happened.

The Danger:

I’m not going to come right out and call Paul a vicious, malevolent woman-beating son of a motherless goat, mostly because he probably has enough money to dip me in molten gold and display me on his mantle in response. What I will say is that any woman who finds herself in Cidney’s situation should run screaming through the forest of red flags that should have been raised by the dude’s bizarro behavior in the first place.

Because here’s the problem - that kind of behavior just ain’t so bizarre if you can discern the method behind the madness. These are the trick of the trade for an abuser of the domestic violence ilk. I’ll explain:

• First trick - Keep your target off guard by constantly pushing. “You’re afraid of heights? Oh, look, a helicopter! Come on, it’ll be fun.” “You think it’s silly that your grandma is already knitting baby clothes? Here’s my ring! TAKE it! Aren’t I spontaneous and romantic? Don’t be a square. Say YES! Make your family happy!”
• Second trick - Get the family on your side immediately. “Hi, may name’s Paul. Let’s call your parents! Hi ‘rents, I’m rich and I’m a great guy and all I want in the whole world is to take care of your beautiful daughter! See, she likes me so much she made me call you! I must be the one!”
• Third trick - Force a commitment at a ridiculously early moment. “Now that you’ve spent the last two hours in mortal terror on that helicopter ride you didn’t want to take (and may I remind you I was a perfect gentleman the whole time), this seems like a perfect moment to propose. Oh, you’d need a ring? Here, take my frat ring, it’s Sigma Chi you know. I just happen to have it on me.”
• Fourth trick - If you can’t convince ‘em, confuse ‘em. “But you were the one who said your family would be so happy to see you married. You were the one who called them on our very first date. You were the one who mentioned that your friends got married on a helicopter once. You did sign up for the millionaire matching service. What else was I to think? This was obviously all your idea”
• Fifth trick - Isolate, isolate, isolate. Cidney is now dating Paul by default. I’ll give you two guesses whether he changed his life one iota so she could continue to live near her close knit family, or whether he insisted that she move to Las Vegas, where she has no connections, to be with him full time.

Sure, Cidney could have said “no” to all of these things. Oh wait, she did. Paul just went right along with his plans anyway. Now Cidney is in a position where she has to come up with a reason why she won’t date this great guy who she introduced to her parents on their first date, who is rich, tall, reasonably attractive and wants to marry her and make rich, tall, reasonably attractive babies. Good Beverly Hills girls just don’t say no to a chance like that. And don’t think Paul, uh, or some guy who isn’t Paul, doesn’t know it.

The Downside:

So that’s the scoop. Patti got her payday, Paul has whatever he wants, and Cidney somehow finds herself living in Vegas with no family and no friends, just wonderful Paul. Dollars to donuts he knocks her up in a matter of weeks… because he can’t start smacking her around until she’s good and committed. How embarrassing would it be for her to call Grandma then? So we say good luck, Cid, you’re gonna’ need it. By the way, the National Domestic Violence Hotline number is 1-800-799-SAFE. And from now on, stay away from people who hock toys to millionaires and refer to themselves as “The Mother Theresa Of Matchmaking.” She might have someone’s best interests at heart, but it sure as shitake ain’t yours.

More About Domestic Violence:

Domestic Violence (DV) is so common in the U.S. that the National Center for Disease Control (CDC) tracks it. The CDC estimates DV costs the U.S. nearly $8.3 billion per year

Experts estimate that somewhere between one million - three million women in the U.S. experience DV each year.

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