Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
A new romance service offers professional daters who will chat, flirt and tear you apart for a fee.
Nov 6, 1999 | All men should be smooth as Gerald. When he fetched me for our date, it wasn't on his bicycle. He brought a buttery yellow rose and opened every door. At the Pacific Ocean Pier in Santa Monica, Calif., he sacrificed the tickets he won at the arcade shooting gallery so I could trade them for a barbed-wire tattoo appliqui like Pamela Anderson's real one. At the first sign of goose bumps, he offered a sweater and at the end of the evening, he didn't try to paw me. Gerald was a perfect gentleman -- for only $75 bucks an hour.
Gerald is an actor by day and power dater by night. He works for Bart Ellis, a Los Angeles social worker and relationship expert who founded "power dating" 10 years ago. The Date Doctor can't promise to cure lonely hearts, but he can up your eligibility if you get a sorry-I'm-busy signal after every date. Ellis sends clients on a mock date with one of his 10 power daters, who then reports back to the doctor on how a client could improve the stakes for finding a mate. Then Ellis delivers the unexpurgated advice. Perhaps a client needs to stock up on her Scope, for instance, or keep his monologues to a minimum. While few amateur dates would ever dare offer such self-improvement tips, these pros are trained to dispense advice readily. One employee wrote that a client's clothing style was "retirement home-ish," before adding, "He was so boring. He prattled on about his family and baseball -- I thought he would never shut up! He's a nerd!"
Unlike the hundreds of singles services and matchmaking businesses, the Date Doctor doesn't pretend to play Cupid. Ellis shoots for compatibility, but he's not running an introduction service. For my date, Ellis asked such probing questions as, "Do you want a sophisticated kind of guy? What about hair, do you want a full head of hair?" Surprise me, I said. As long as the guy pays for our date, I assured him, I would be happy.
"And don't worry, the feedback session is gentle," Ellis added. "It's the sort of stuff a woman tells her girlfriend about a date the next day." Until then I had regarded my adventure into dating education with the blithe condescension of someone who already has a boyfriend, for whom this is just another professional challenge. But Ellis' remark made me nervous. I hoped these daters were more tactful than my friends, who skewer men with morning-after exclamations like, "He had the smallest penis west of Nantucket!"
Clients pay $150 for a two-hour date and critique session, although with Ellis' recent appearance on a French TV show and other media attention, he plans to raise prices to $495 for a 3-hour date.
Ellis recruits surrogate daters through ads or they contact him through word of mouth. "I look for people who can improvise when something isn't going well, like if a client is painfully shy," Ellis explains. "A lot of them are actors, though they're not acting on the date. I didn't want to hire psychologists who would approach the date clinically. The power dater merely serves as a video camera or a mirror." Like his employees, the 60-year-old, happily married doctor peppers conversation with non-clinical observations -- such as "Women are usually on the receiving end of a lot of shit, but that doesn't mean every guy is a schmuck."
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