anis Spindel is on her way from her office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to a nearby cafe to meet a gorgeous guy.

”Gorgeous,” she tells me. ”Unreal. He’s just my type — 36, Jewish, Ivy League, successful. And gorgeous. Just gorgeous.”

A decked-out and eye-catching 49-year-old, Janis is, by her estimation anyway, the reigning queen of the matchmaking world. She says that she has been responsible for 715 marriages in the past 10 years and a thousand long-term relationships that haven’t quite made it to the altar. (Confidentiality, she says, makes it impossible to verify these numbers.) Janis comes across as a comically exaggerated version of a Jewish mother: exuberant, zany, voluble, enthusiastic, affectionate, unstoppable. She makes no bones about the fact that you (whoever you are) have waited far too long to marry (or remarry). And since you have already failed at finding your mate, she’s taking over, and she’s going to get you married right now. Although she’s motherly, she’s not your mother, so her bullying feels caring rather than controlling.

Gorgeous (the description proved accurate) is lounging in one of the cafe’s deep velvet armchairs when we arrive. Janis has a collector’s eye for a certain kind of man, but as he stands, I see this one didn’t require perspicacity. As he and Janis talk, I idly study him under the lamplight, contemplating whether his looks are fully leading-man material or more suitable for TV. He insists on getting our drinks, with the debonair air of someone who has an easy time pleasing women.

Gorgeous was intrigued when Janis strode over to him a few days earlier at the same cafe and boldly introduced herself as a matchmaker. He was impressed when she backed up her introduction by pointing toward the goods — a bevy of beautiful women in the corner she had just finished interviewing to see if any were suitable for matching with her clients. Although Janis originally represented both sexes, now she has only male clients. Virtually all are wealthy and successful, of course, but occasionally she gets the kind that makes her lick her chops: wealthy, successful and handsome — the kind she can marry off, as she puts it, ”in a New York minute.”

Gorgeous gets down to business: What are her fees?

Janis is a persuasive sort. She has the glitzy confidence — and look — of someone who moves a lot of oversize jewels on QVC. Although she likes to put off the monetary specifics until after more chitchat, she doesn’t blanch. Janis Spindel Serious Matchmaking Incorporated’s fees begin — begin! — at $20,000 for an initiation fee, plus $1,000 for a one-year membership that includes 12 dates. That also includes a background check and a home visit, during which Janis spends time with the client, to get a sense of him and verify that he is who he says he is (i.e., rich or very rich). Her image consultant also comes to inspect his wardrobe and, if necessary, make plans to revamp his look. Janis has many clients outside the New York area (in Tampa, Miami, Los Angeles, Toronto, Las Vegas). An out-of-town client must fly Janis and an assistant first class and put them up in a hotel for the home visit. Additionally, a marriage bonus is expected — sometimes it’s a car or extravagant jewelry; other times it’s cash. She has received gifts in the $75,000-to-$250,000 range.

Gorgeous tries to negotiate the price, but Janis flatly refuses. Then he says he’s uncomfortable with the general idea of paying for dates and wonders what kind of women would date a man who needs to pay to find her. He doesn’t want to be set up with ”shrews” or women who are interested in him because he owns a successful business.

This strikes me as an extremely realistic concern. How else to describe the women who, Janis says, pay $750 for a 30-minute meeting to audition for her databank of women (6,800 of them, Janis claims) who want to marry a man rich enough to pay for her services? (Janis will waive the fee if an attractive woman organizes a group of six to eight friends, because she says that attractive women have attractive friends — and, conversely, homely types often stick together. Attractive friends of homely women, however, are out of luck.) When Janis’s database proves inadequate for a specific client’s needs, she holds ”casting” parties, for which she advertises in publications like New York magazine, at which hundreds of women show up to fill out her questionnaire and hand in their snapshots, which she and her staff will vet for the anonymous Prince.

”No, no, no, no,” Janis now tells Gorgeous in her rapid-fire style, in which she doesn’t so much address concerns as try to blow them away. ”I have quality women, professional Ivy League women. I’m not setting you up with shrews and gold diggers.”

Gorgeous asks if he’ll be able to see photographs, and Janis again says no. Like other matchmakers, she does not allow clients to pick or be picky about their dates: that’s her job. She promises to set him up with any kind of woman he wants, but he has to trust her to screen and select.

After he leaves, I ask Janis what kind of women she would set Gorgeous up with — and if one of the ones I met earlier that day was suitable. In particular, I wondered about a petite, young Jewish woman in a dark pantsuit — a sorority sister who had recently graduated from a state school in upstate New York and now worked in product development. When Janis asked how tall she was, she swore she always wore heels, sticking out her little pointy shoe as evidence.

Janis dismisses my suggestion quickly: ”It’s not happening for her,” Janis says. And I see what Janis is getting at. Short is pretty, but she’s not glamorous or memorable. Although Janis keeps a small pool of short women for short men, for which she might consider Short, she wasn’t going to give her to Gorgeous. Although Gorgeous hadn’t said much about what he was looking for (just the usual ”fun,” ”nice,” ”smart”), I instantly realize Janis is right: he wants someone happening.

I assume that this meeting will be the last Janis will hear of Gorgeous anyway. Why would a dreamy 36-year-old shell out the price of a compact car for a handful of dates whose pictures he can’t even see, when thousands of women would be available to him through friends and acquaintances and on the Internet?

But this was not the last Janis heard from Gorgeous. A few days later, he called. He was interested. He was very interested.

”It would take me meeting 100 girls to find the one who clicks,” Gorgeous later explains to me. ”I think Janis has already met those 100, and I’m paying her to save me the effort of sorting out who is and who is not right for me. Janis is a screener.” Moreover, he says, ”I’m scared of the Internet. The women could be crazy.”

How did he come to have more faith in Janis’s ability to filter than in his own?

”It’s harder to see yourself as you truly are,” he says. ”Janis was absolutely relentless in the way she pursued me, so I know she’ll be absolutely relentless in finding the right girl.”

Souring on the Internet

Until recently, dating services were thought to be for — as another professional matchmaker, Samantha Daniels, puts it — ”desperadoes.” But the rise of Internet dating made the dating business sexy, respectable and ubiquitous. For those who don’t find computers romantic, however, or are too concerned about their privacy to advertise their singleness, or are overwhelmed by the prospect of sorting through Match.com’s 15 million members, personal services are increasingly attractive. High-end matchers have seen a rise in their business in the last few years. ”After 9/11, people didn’t want to be alone,” Janis says, explaining why she thinks her business has been booming. Expensive matchmakers, she says, have recently opened shop in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Washington, Chicago and Minneapolis.

For many of the matchmakers’ clients with whom I spoke, Internet dating had curdled. (Last year, the online dating business grew at a much slower rate than it had in the previous two years.) The bitterest complaints were that prospects misrepresented themselves, and that, although the deception was often immediately apparent, the clients would still have to sit through — and even pay for — a drink or dinner they felt tricked into.

But there are also deeper, more psychological reasons that draw people to a matchmaker. After years of dating, still-singles may begin to wonder if they are really their own best advocates in the search for a partner. Some may not find the lovers they want, or, more troublingly, the lovers they choose may be repeatedly, chronically wrong. They begin to distrust their own judgment. They are weary of being alone with their confusion. They need an intercession. They need a Cupid to point her arrow.

The Mother

No one points more clearly than Janis. Although Janis offers her clients a dozen dates, more than 90 percent of her clients, she claims, settle on one of the first three matches. If they don’t, they owe her a good explanation.

”I listen to what men say they want, and then I give them exactly that,” she says. She describes her reserve of beautiful women as either ”street smart” or ”book smart” (since no one says he’s looking for a dummy). Some are musical or are runners or golfers or are endowed with specific matchable hobbies.

Janis’s women fill out a brief questionnaire in which they answer basic personal questions (religious beliefs, number of children they want, what they like to do on the weekends) and then characterize themselves: Party Girl, Sophisticate, Intellectual or Domestic. They also have to check off the kind of man they like: Bad Boy, Life of the Party, Jet-Setter, All-American, Brainiac, Guys Guy, Family Man or Other. Then — if they make the grade — the women go into her databank.

”If you give the client beauty — and brains and athletic abilities, if he wants those — it’s pretty much a done deal,” Janis tells me definitively.

A done deal? Aren’t those categories awfully broad? What about character, temperament and sensibility — the ineffable qualities that capture a lover’s imagination?

She looks at me curiously, as if I hail from a different planet, where people search for temperament and sensibility — but since no one is sure what those are, everyone stays single forever. (Welcome to my borough!)

After the first date, Janis will elicit feedback from her client, and if the woman doesn’t please, she’ll refine the search and try again. For example, if her client says that the woman was too talkative, she’ll send someone quieter. If the woman was too shy, she’ll send someone livelier. If the client doesn’t know what the problem was — he just wasn’t excited — she’ll offer a second or third match. After a third woman, however, if the client doesn’t have a specific complaint, ”if they say, ‘Oh, I don’t know Janis, I just can’t put my finger on it,”’ she tells me, sounding like a scolding mother disappointed in her beloved son, ”I’ll say: ‘Exactly what finger can’t you put on it? Are you like a little boy in a candy store who can’t decide? Because I’m not here to provide candy. Do you want to get married or not?”’

Clients usually shape right up, she says, and focus on their (her) goal. If a client starts dating a woman, however, but doesn’t become engaged or seriously involved in three months, Janis will call him up and tell him to stop dillydallying.

Interiors vs. Exteriors

Matchmaking requires a peculiar, innate talent, as rare a gift as being able to shoot a basketball through a hoop again and again. No one does it flawlessly, but some people are much better than others.

Obviously, part of the secret of a matchmaker’s success is that by the time clients write those fat checks, they are highly motivated to settle in order to settle down. But, of course, most of them have been highly motivated for a long time and have failed to find a helpmeet through other dating methods.

I love to matchmake. (I have had a hand in four marriages — as well as many failed setups.) But when I match, I match from the inside out. I think about the inner landscape of my friends. I contemplate questions of intimacy: boundaries, neediness, expressiveness, self-awareness, sexuality, the effect of their childhoods on their romantic relationships.

But professional matchmakers match exteriors. They have a finely honed ability to instantly classify people anthropologically, according to socioeconomic type, and pair them off accordingly.

Behind this kind of matchmaking lies a deep distrust of romance, as we usually imagine the word. Matchmakers believe that people should stop their agonized search for soul mates. After all, a soul mate can be glimpsed in many inappropriate objects: the soul may be located in someone who is too young or too old or too poor or the wrong religion or a convicted felon who is married to your sister. Half of literature concerns the perils of falling for a soul mate: the Victorian heroine runs off with the gardener; Romeo decides he can’t live without the daughter of a family with whom his is feuding. And these tales always end badly, with disgrace and death, so that the normal order of society can be soberly restored.

The new matchmakers take a traditional approach. They believe that people do and should marry within their tribes. The count’s daughter is not going to be happy as a gardener’s wife, no matter how mad she was for him at first, whereas a person from affluent Millburn, N.J., will find comfort in a spouse who grew up in nearby Short Hills and went to the same tennis camp. They will speak the same dialect. They will move back to New Jersey and send their kids to that tennis camp. The matchmakers themselves need not necessarily speak their — or any of their clients’ — languages. Rather, matchmakers are like linguists who recognize the sounds and structure of many languages and then get the natives together. And if the clients protest that their hearts aren’t beating fast enough (Short Hills? Near my parents?), the matchmakers will insist that the pairing is right. Once they commit and start building that long-delayed life, they’ll be happy — or happier, at least, than when they were single.

Of course, you wonder if these kinds of matches actually last, or whether a few months or years after that hefty wedding bonus has been paid, one of them starts saying: Do we really communicate? Sometimes I wonder if you really understand me. Does the man think, What about all that money I paid for you? Does the woman wonder, Should I have a profitable divorce and marry for love the next time?

None of the professional matchmakers keep track of their divorce rates (or would admit it if they do). But since half of Americans who find their own turtledoves let them go, there is no reason to think that match-made marriages don’t do as well — or better.

The Ultimatum

Janis’s initial consultation often takes place over lunch or dinner. The potential client picks a restaurant and wines and dines Janis, showing her how he behaves on a date. She also screens for pliability.

On a recent afternoon, she was having lunch with a 47-year-old man from Westchester who desperately wants to have a family. He’s a fine-looking fellow with a good job — an executive at a large company, where he has worked for two decades. He doesn’t understand why women on the Internet keep blowing him off.

”I see the same women on the site, year after year, getting older, no longer listing their goals as having a family, he tells Janis. ”It’s sad. Yet they wouldn’t meet me for a cup of coffee.”

Westchester makes a lot of jokes, which do not seem to amuse Janis. When the bill comes, he signs the check and shows it to her, saying facetiously, ”Good enough tip?” — which Janis finds declasse. If he becomes a client, she tells me later, she will definitely discuss that with him.

Janis asks a few questions about what he wants (”nice,” ”down to earth,” ”regular,” ”Jewish”). ”Street smart or book smart?” Janis asks, nodding when he settles on street smart. Janis tells him that she pays a home visit to new clients, and he protests that his studio isn’t fixed up for visitors. He says he hasn’t had a girlfriend in a while, and if Janis finds him one, he’ll decorate.

No, Janis tells him, if he hires her, he has to get his place ready for her immediately. Then she begins to quiz him about why he is living in a studio in Westchester anyway.

He likes Westchester, he explains; it’s quiet and pretty. He has lived there a long time.

Is he ”where he wants to be” with his job, Janis queries (i.e., can he afford the city?).

”I think so,” he says.

”No Manhattan woman is going to date someone in Westchester,” Janis says. ”In a studio.” Cowed, he agrees to consider moving.

When Janis tells him the price of her services, his face falls. Is there any guarantee? Could he pay part upfront and see what she does for him? What if he doesn’t end up with so much as a kiss?

Janis dismisses the idea with a wave of her hand. ”Look,” she says, ”it’s not working for you. Do you want to continue on, or do you want to make a change? It’s that simple.”

I see from his pained expression that Janis has struck a nerve. The force of her presence is so great that suddenly we are in Janis’s world, and there is only one way out of his loneliness. He must come up with the money or resign himself to his solitary, studio fate.

The Audition

Although Janis’s clients are all male, her new book, ”Get Serious About Getting Married: 365 Proven Ways to Find Love in Less Than a Year,” is directed toward single women: the kind you often find gathered in her living room auditioning for dates.

This afternoon they are sitting primly, their legs crossed, in outfits as careful as their smiles. There are two average-looking New York professionals — a blond real-estate agent and Short, the woman Janis rejected for Gorgeous. And then there is an anomaly. The anomaly sports a platinum blond wig, a florid face and a tight white sweater with a white fur-lined hood. As she leans forward, her breasts graze her thighs. Her breasts are so large, they look like pets. For a moment, I think I have never seen breasts like those, and then I realize I have: in pornography.

Indeed, it emerges that the woman works as a model for Penthouse and Hustler and other porn magazines.

Janis wastes no time. ”Are those real?”

”Well, I had large breasts,” Buxom says plaintively, as if to say that her identity is not completely fraudulent. ”But I had them enhanced for modeling.”

Janis asks about her hair, and she admits that she is wearing a wig ”because it is cold out.”

”What color is your hair normally?”

”I can do any color,” she says timidly.

Janis snorts. ”Normally. What are you normally when you go out?”

”Blond, I guess,” she says uncertainly. She plays with her white hood, pulling it up over her head.

Buxom’s goals are the same as those of the other women: she wants a nice, rich, handsome husband, and her job isn’t the right place to find him.

After she leaves, Janis calls a client. Although she doesn’t usually send pictures, when Buxom’s (brunette) picture came in a few days before, it was so steamy, Janis impulsively told her assistant to send it to a client she knew would appreciate it.

Now she’s on the phone with the man. ”Forget it,” Janis barks. ”I met her, and she’s a porn star.”

They argue for a few minutes and then Janis hangs up. ”He wants to meet her.”

A Matchmaker’s Intuition

While Janis is proud of her work, to her dismay, her clients are not. They pay their bonuses quietly — and no one (no one!) has ever invited her to his wedding. She returns to this disappointment often: how she is cheated again and again of the realization of the fruit of her work, on which everyone else feasts on the wedding day. Yet she does often foresee that day. How does she pluck the future bride from her databank?

”I’m clairvoyant,” Janis says. ”I remember once I was sitting on an airplane, and I said to my friend, ‘I’ve got it — I know who Andy is going to marry.’ And I was right. I introduced him to her, and they got married. It used to spook me, but it’s happened so often now.”

As with many of her male clients, Janis found Bookish on her own, through the extensive grapevine that feeds her information on affluent, eligible single men. One day, Bookish says, she called him at his law office. She refused to say who she was or what she wanted — she just kept repeating that he should have lunch with her and find out. Recently divorced, he assumed that it was an anonymous setup. At the appointed time, he went to an intimate French restaurant in SoHo and uncharacteristically ordered himself a glass of white wine.

”Then Janis walked in, in all her splendor,” he recalls. Bookish has an understated, well, bookish look; he sat, staring at Janis, confused. He was even more confused when he saw her wedding ring. When she explained that she was a matchmaker, he was amused. Although he told her he wasn’t interested, they had fun at the lunch, and he had ”a sense she was a good person — she has a warm heart.”

A long, romantically bleak year later — having attended a ”hideous” singles event, after which he cried out of alienation and despair — he called her. Most of his dates had been setups by friends who ”had their own agendas or didn’t get mine.” He didn’t like the Internet, and as a partner at a large firm, he didn’t have time to go to lots of social events searching for women.

”I trust Janis,” he says, and ”I like her,” and he says he believes that she genuinely cares about him. It took her a while to understand him, he says, but her setups are ”getting warmer.”

He also got to know her husband, a personal trainer who sometimes works with Janis’s clients, whom he thought was ”a great guy.” Janis’s great guy — a handsome man I had seen in her house, playing with their 5-year-old daughter while Janis worked — did not appear to be the typical Alpha-male executive that Janis represents.

”Perhaps she married for love,” Bookish says with a laugh.

The Mitzvah

”Matchmaking is the world’s second-oldest profession,” Janis likes to say. And, of course, she’s right: after God matched Adam and Eve, with a common rib, parents, relatives or a designated member of the community took on the sacred task of arranging for a young person to create a new household, thus ensuring the continuity and stability of society. Although in much of the world that tradition continues, in our mainstream culture of individual choice and romantic self-determination, finding your own mate is a rite of passage, an exercise in autogenesis.

Among certain immigrant groups in this country, like those from Southeast Asia and Africa, ancient traditions of arranging marriages continue. In the Jewish tradition, arranging three marriages secures you a place in heaven. Ultra-Orthodox marriages are routinely arranged, and conservative communities often have informal matchmakers.

Or sometimes a town is just lucky and someone has a calling. Florence Berger is the kind of old-fashioned matchmaker who used to exist all over but is now regarded as a kind of archaic angel. Florence — a recently retired professor at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration — is famous among the Cornell population of Ithaca, N.Y. She married the daughter of Cornell’s former president Frank Rhodes to her former graduate assistant. She married the son of friends to her husband Toby’s cousin’s husband’s brother’s daughter, and they are now expecting their third child. She even matched her gay secretary (although they eventually broke up).

”One might ask if there is a matchmaker gene, because her matches seem so intuitive,” comments a woman whose husband Florence found 25 years ago.

Unlike the high-powered businesswomen of the matchmaking world, Florence does not accept payment for matchmaking, although couples may give her a gift, like sending her to a spa, when they marry. While her own two children married young, depriving her of the opportunity to pick her son- and daughter-in-law, she knows that plenty of other deserving mothers have not been as fortunate. Such women often call Florence and beg to be on her ”list.” But Florence has to feel inspired, and she doesn’t choose a new person to match very often — once a year or so. Although she will match non-Jews, she doesn’t usually match anyone under 30, because she says they will not be sufficiently ”marriage minded.” What is most unusual about the 25 couples Florence has united over the past 25 years is that none of them, as far as she knows, have divorced. And she’s still in touch with many of them. (She even matched a few couples outside the United States when she was on leave in Japan and France.) Unlike Janis, whose clients keep her role in their lives secret, Florence is the guest of honor at every wedding, and she is thanked all over again each time a baby is born.

Florence is a short, cozy, dark-haired 60-year-old whom people describe as ”an iron fist in a velvet glove.” She made her first successful match shortly after she married her husband, Toby. Her husband’s brother was a brilliant mathematician. Florence wanted to secure the right sister-in-law, but brilliant mathematicians are quirky and can’t be matched with just anybody. She found him a fellow brilliant, she says, and now they have brilliant children.

She had invented a rule for the setup: the couple had to promise to go out twice, regardless of how they felt on the first date. Florence’s two-date rule proved ingenious: first dates depend on people who are skilled at self-presentation — and even those may feel apprehensive knowing, as the professional matchmaker Samantha Daniels puts it, that ”you only have one chance to be positive and interesting and fabulous.” On the other hand, knowing that even if you fail, you’ll still have dinner next week makes everyone relax.

On first dates, people are heavily influenced by perceptions of appearance, Florence says. Yet everyone has had the experience of finding their dates’ appearances metamorphosizing during the course of an evening: their faces rearranging themselves like a Picasso painting into something compelling or ugly. On the second date, Florence says, people start to see the way they are really going to see each other. And Florence’s theory has been confirmed: many of her couples told her they would not have gone out a second time if that hadn’t been the bargain.

Twenty-five years ago, Florence chose a new colleague at the hotel school to match. She was 32 and single. Although Florence and Chosen barely knew each other, and Chosen did not ask Florence for help, Florence took her situation to heart. Chosen was tall and did not want to have children.

”All summer, I walked around the Cornell campus, looking for a tall man who didn’t want to have children,” Florence recalls. Everywhere she went, she thought, Could that be Chosen’s husband? Then one day, she was walking past the school of management and saw one of the deans in his office window. She had recently been to a dinner with some friends that he was at and remembered that he was tall.

”I am fearless when it comes to matching,” she says in a way that leaves no room for disbelief. She called the friends from dinner and suggested that Dean be set up with Chosen. The friend was hesitant — she did not want to be held responsible for a bad date — but Florence was insistent, and the friend agreed to give Dean Chosen’s phone number. He called the next day. When Dean and Chosen got together, they discovered overlapping biographical details that Florence hadn’t been aware of: they both grew up in the Midwest, less than 30 miles apart, rooting for the same basketball team — the kind of serendipity that confirms the matchmaker’s philosophy that like marries like.

Once Florence inscribes someone in her head, she doesn’t cross him or her off until he is wed. A divorced corporate lawyer in Princeton recalls how, six years ago, Florence approached him at a wedding. She took him aside during dinner and told him she would like to find him a wife. ”I was incredibly touched, flattered and surprised,” he recalls. He didn’t meet many single people in Princeton, and he worked all the time. ”I’m happy with my life,” he says. ”If someone comes along, great, but I’m not unhappy.” The idea of searching for dates on the Internet makes him feel as if he is needy or lonely and does not fit his idea of the fortuitous way romance should occur.

Florence’s interest, on the other hand, made him feel nurtured. He wasn’t randomly searching for a needle in a haystack; he was accepting a gift.

Although Florence doesn’t know many women in his area, once a year or so she sends him a new woman and — although he wasn’t interested in any of them — he is always pleased to realize she hasn’t forgotten about him.

Persuasion

Florence matches the same way that the high-end matchmakers do, with the goal of creating stable families by finding partners with similar values and backgrounds. She shares the same essentially conservative philosophy: get married.

At times it strikes me that she talks about marrying as if it were shopping for a dress. Everyone knows that when you go out looking for the perfect dress, you can’t find it. You drag your friends to store after store. The event grows closer; you’re still shopping. How about this one, your friends ask, or this? Any of these would look lovely. The event has started; you’re still in the store. Better to buy an imperfect dress than to miss the party entirely, your friends counsel. You cave. Then you go to the party and have a great time and get compliments, and you can’t remember why you agonized so long.

I first heard of Florence through her son, Larry, who is a friend of mine. When I initially e-mailed her, telling her I wanted to write about matchmakers, she did not seem interested. Instead, she wrote back: ”Larry tells me you are not interested in being matched. I told Larry, Don’t be so sure about that!”

In the following months, I was unable to shift Florence’s attention to the article I was writing. If the journalist is single, she must be matched. What kind of single person refuses? Then she thought of Princeton. Why couldn’t I date Princeton? she wanted to know. After all, we live near each other.

I demurred. Nothing against Princeton, I explained, but an absence of a sense of potential for deep connection.

Did I imagine that he wasn’t literary enough? Florence wondered. ”He is a good catch,” she wrote. ”He is very smart. You could marry him and have a friend who has more literature DNA.”

When successive e-mail messages over the course of the year revisited the subject of Princeton, I tried to be clearer. I am not interested. No interest. Not. And neither is he.

But interest for a driven matchmaker is neither here nor there. ”Please just consider some bourgeois perturbations to what you’ve been thinking,” Florence wrote. ”I know this will make you angry, but . . . I’ve made some people angry on the way to making them happy.”

Although I had denied it, Florence was convinced that I was not drawn to Princeton because he was a corporate lawyer. She knew that I had once been engaged to an artist and liked poetry. So she decided that I imagined I could be captivated only by a poetic type. But ”tortured poeticness may ultimately be a shallow contributor to love,” she wrote. Then, with a neat rhetorical trick, she declared: ”This is not to say that there aren’t tortured poems that are worthy of love. It is to say that those poems can be part of your marriage by owning the book and taking it off the shelf when the children are sleeping. . . .

”I am wondering,” she concluded, ”if you should consider changing your model. . . . ”

The Socialite

Although Samantha Daniels comes out of the same Jewish matchmaking milieu as Janis and Florence, you won’t hear it from her. ”I hate the word ‘yenta,”’ Samantha says. ”I am the opposite of how people picture a traditional matchmaker.” Samantha is a spin machine. She styles herself the cool matchmaker: a sexy Upper East Sider who says she is 35. She touts a large social network of people like her, who might — for a price — count you in.

Samantha was once in Janis’s databank. (Janis says she believed Samantha was interested in being set up, but now speculates that Samantha may have been researching the business.) Samantha charges a minimum of $10,000 to set clients up on 12 dates with people she has handpicked from her pool of thousands of eligible acquaintances, she says. It’s as if the client is an outsider she is befriending and bringing into her glamorous world. She takes clients to parties and benefits, chatting up single women for her male clients and vice versa. (Fees for these extra services are negotiable.) She arranges for extensive makeovers, including recommendations for haircuts, teeth-bleaching, contact lenses, Botox and nutrition counseling.

Upstairs at Barneys one wintry afternoon, Samantha was doing a shopping makeover with a woman, for which she would charge $350. ”I won’t accept her as a client until she dresses more suitably,” Samantha tells me. ”She looks too ‘downtown.”’

Downtown is examining a skimpy miniskirt when we arrive, though nothing in the store is as short as what she is wearing. A cashmere sweater with a black-and-white image of a nun knit into the chest is stretched across her breasts, so that the nun appears to be dissolving in her voluptuousness. Downtown says she likes to dress like ”a rock chick, like Pamela Anderson.” Each rack is a struggle. Downtown pulls out a short powder-pink-rabbit-fur jacket, and Samantha holds up a white wool pantsuit, which Downtown observes looks like something from a ”Virginia Slims ad.”

”You’re still going to look sexy,” Samantha assures her. ”But guys don’t like it when you can see it all upfront.”

”I get a lot of compliments — I can’t walk by a doorman without being whistled at,” Downtown says defensively.

Samantha gives her a you’re-not-going-to-be-dating-doormen look.

Samantha describes Downtown as ”a bit of a lost soul.” She worked in the music industry in Los Angeles for many years but recently moved back to an Upper East Side apartment, where she is trying to write a screenplay and buying vintage clothing and jewelry to resell on eBay. In her mid-30′s, she is still dating the kind of men she gravitated toward a decade ago — aspiring actors, artists, writers, hipsters, guys who like to live on the edge. Internet dating was ”worse than her worst nightmare” — encouraging her tendency toward disastrous affairs.

She thinks now of the boys she knew at her prep school — nice, bright, hard-working ”vanilla boys” whom her parents would approve of, and she therefore disdained. ”Even a year ago,” she would have rejected them, she says, but she regrets that attitude now. For the first time, she has a sense of needing intervention. She needs someone to take her under her wing and bring her into a social circle she has never considered desirable — introduce her to the vanilla boys who have grown into marriageable lawyers and doctors and financiers, with whom she could have the life she was brought up for. She needs someone to circumvent her own desires and help her make better choices. Downtown’s mother suggested Samantha, with whom she had a social connection. Downtown was resistant but agreed to a makeover so she would at least have clothes to wear to cocktail parties with her parents.

Samantha’s Pitch

Samantha says she became a matchmaker because she wanted to be in ”a happy field.” After graduating from Temple University Law School, she worked in Philadelphia as a divorce lawyer for her father, but she didn’t like dealing with the stressed clients, who were always ”at their worst.” Then she moved to New York and continued to work as a lawyer and increasingly turned her attention to what she liked to do best: giving parties. She would persuade a bar to lend her space early in the evening in return for a cut of the door, and she would have someone stand at the door to collect $20 and business cards. At her parties, she would have a sense of potential couples and make introductions. Later, she would hear that the couples were dating, or had even become engaged. Before long, she says, she had thousands of names in her little black book and decided to make a living out of her favorite hobby — socializing.

In 1999, she set up shop, Samantha’s Table, an Upper East Side matchmaking business. A year and a half ago, with business growing, she expanded to Los Angeles and now claims 48 marriages (though, like Janis, she won’t produce anything to back up those numbers). Her funny, mean roman a clef, ”Matchbook: The Diary of a Modern-Day Matchmaker” — which Samantha claims to have written herself — was recently published, and she was the inspiration for the main character in ”Miss Match,” an NBC television series that ran in 2003.

Most of Samantha’s clients are in her peer group — age 27 to 50. ”Almost all of my male clients make over half a million dollars a year,” she says, ”and many make over a million.” She says that she represents 50 to 75 clients at a time (at $10,000 a pop, that puts her in the same financial category as her clients), whom she meets at her office: an appointed table at Manhattan hotels, usually the Regency, where the waiters know her favorite drinks (cranberry juice without ice, hot chocolate). During an initial $400 consultation, she tells potential clients that she will think about whether she can match them. (She keeps the fee whether or not she accepts them.)

”I don’t work with people who aren’t popular and interesting,” she says. ”I work with people who are social. My clients are overachievers who have a lot going on, who travel, attend charity events, have interesting hobbies, run triathlons. They are C.E.O.’s, actresses, doctors, lawyers, real-estate developers, advertising executives, producers, directors.”

What happens — I ask — when a client’s problem finding love is more than a shortage of time? What about folks who are hard to match because they are difficult, depressive, fat or shy? Does she reject them?

”Those people don’t come to me,” Samantha asserts without missing a beat. ”You can only work with the people who come to you.”

Samantha’s matching method, like Janis’s, is frighteningly simple. After the clients sign, she has them fill out a one-page questionnaire and asks them basic biographical questions about their background, family and interests, as well as their income level. (The lowest category is $50,000 to $75,000.) She finds out what schools they went to and what summer camp. She tells them to bring pictures of their exes and asks them to list the qualities they want in an ideal mate.

However, she tells me tartly, ”they can’t put 20 things on their list.” When clients say, ”I must have this, I must have this,” she asks whether all those things are critical. ”Maybe you can’t have those things,” she tells them. ”Which can you survive without? What if she doesn’t play golf but would go with you to a golf resort? What if she’s not Jewish but would convert and raise kids? Is Judaism really important to you personally or just to your great-grandmother?”

Clients generally, and particularly female clients, cannot afford to be picky. ”If she says, ‘I want a man 5-foot-10 and up,’ I say, ‘What happens if he’s 5-foot-8?’ I make them be realistic. I don’t have a button on my computer where I can manufacture men. I need to be able to make a match happen.” If the client ”whines she wants all of them,” Samantha points out that she’s not getting any younger and if she keeps waiting around for everything in one person, she might just die alone.

”Clients have to commit to listening to what I say,” Samantha says. ”I run a tight ship.”

Samantha’s clients, like the clients of other matchmakers, like having their romantic lives managed — feeling someone is captaining their boat and steering them into port. Interestingly, unlike Janis’s, Samantha’s success is not a product of her personal warmth or expansive enthusiasm. She can have a peevish, critical air and seems easily annoyed. But rather than detracting from her appeal, snobbishness seems essential to it. She’s like the ringleader of the popular group in school, who tells initiates she could bring them into her circle — if they do what she says.

After a consultation with a client, Samantha goes home and starts looking at her lists: Museum Type, Sexy, Natural Looking, Easy Going, Petite, etc.

How she picks the most likely prospect for the first date is hard for her to describe. ”The way I really match is on a vibe. If you don’t laugh at the same things and find the same things annoying, it’s problematical.”

Samantha not only picks the dates; she also sets the time and place of the meeting (which is always for drinks, for which the man pays). She does not allow clients to speak or see pictures of each other before meeting, because when she did problems arose. Sometimes the man wouldn’t get around to calling the woman for weeks, by which point the woman would already feel rejected and hostile, or they might have a bad phone conversation or not like the sound of each other’s voices and call Samantha and complain that they didn’t want to proceed with the date.

After the date, Samantha calls both parties and gets feedback. Often she can’t fall asleep, she says, until she gets the postdate calls. Then she passes the feedback to her clients. For example, she says, if the man found her client insufficiently sparkly, ”I will call her and tell her that in the future if you can’t be positive and smiley, because you’ve had a bad day at work or whatever, then you should cancel, because you only have one chance.”

Simply having a matchmaker, she says, can help clients. With female clients, she says, ”often their whole disposition has changed because they’ve assigned me their social life. They don’t come across as intense or anxious or goal-oriented” to marry (although, in fact, they are more so).

Her dating advice has been finely honed in the last six years. ”I know what men like and don’t like,” she says. If the client is thought to be quiet or dull, she instructs him to have a reserve of appropriately vapid date conversation: about ”a fun play in the city, a new restaurant, a funny” — not poignant — ”childhood anecdote, a great vacation.” If she hears a second time that the client was boring, the client gets a talking-to. Sometimes the client breaks down and cries — some of her least-favorite moments as a matchmaker. But afterward, Samantha says, they dry their eyes and pay attention to what she says. ”I give people good advice, and they take it.”

Chatting

I recall her advice a few weeks later at the Guggenheim Museum’s Young Collectors Council Artist’s Ball (code: people rich enough to be collectors if they have any interest in contemporary art — which none of the people I meet do). Samantha moves around the room, dressed by Christian Dior in a skimpy leopard-spotted top with a fur ruff, which, with her long tousled hair, gives her the appearance of ”Gilligan’s Island” meets ”Temptation Island.”

”Hey, Sam,” a group of guys call, and she turns and gives them a studied smile. ”Here are some eligible bachelors that I might set up with clients,” she says, introducing them. From their beautiful suits and references to corporate jobs, I guess that they are on her high-earners list. As Samantha drifts away, it turns out that we don’t have much to say to one another. I try politics, with even less success than contemporary art. Then I recall Samantha’s list of approved conversational topics and test out great vacations (which all of them take). We move on to new bars and restaurants, and the rest of the conversation is smooth sailing.

It isn’t the actual topics, I realize: no one cares what I think about bars. But when I tried to formulate a thought about Abstract Expressionism, my brow furrowed; when I moved on to Iraq, it furrowed farther, and I put down my drink. But complaining about the dearth of groovy eateries on the Upper West Side (where I live) while extolling their neighborhood — the Upper East Side — made us want to refill our glasses.

So Samantha’s advice had been right — for her market.

Advice

Behind all of Samantha’s counsel is a simple message: if you want to marry, don’t blow it. Play ball, don’t rock the boat, avoid controversy, get along, don’t drag her or him into heavy conversations. Go out, have sex, take trips. Eventually, you’ll become comfortable, and attachment will grow, and pretty soon you’ll be cruising on a lane toward that tollbooth, and it’s harder to get off than to go forward. It’s not just that you should delay turning on that bright light of serious scrutiny (Is this really the right relationship for me?), which inevitably produces ambivalence; you should leave it off forever.

Samantha likes to micromanage her clients’ relationships. She strategizes. She’ll tell a female client to play a little harder to get while telling her boyfriend he needs to show more devotion. She smoothes over misunderstandings. For example, she tells me, suppose a female client is hurt because the man didn’t include her in a family gathering. Samantha calls the man and tells him that it is important to women to be included in family events to make them feel like girlfriends and give them hope that one day they might be a member of that family. And (she says) clients listen. ”A lot of times without me, couples would just break up.”

Believing

One morning at the Regency, Samantha and I role-play a consultation. After scolding me for being late, she examines my clothing — a cashmere sweater set that was a gift from my mother — and it thankfully passes. I would have thought there was nothing anyone could tell me about my romantic life that I — and a dozen of my closest friends — didn’t already know. But it is a startling experience to be forced to summarize your romantic history to a chilly stranger: not the inner story, in which it is so easy to become entangled, but the facts. Samantha is impatient with details; she only wants to know whom did you date, how old was he, how old were you and why did it go so long if you weren’t going to wed? If you don’t have a solid answer for your last seven serious relationships, she pounces.

In my mind, (almost) all my relationships have been dear. It’s not simply that you discover new things about yourself in different relationships, but you become a new self in each relationship, and that self is not lost when the relationship is. Relationships have an innate logic: they blossom and flower in their own time, whether it’s a year or three or a lifetime. You don’t want to snip them in the bud just because you know they might not last forever; you want to treasure the blossoming.

I believed that I would spend my life with my ex-fiance. But we didn’t marry, and although that is poignant and complicated, my ex-fiance and I still value our engagement because it was a beautiful thing at the time, and now we are friends.

This, at any rate, is the way I understand my life. But this is not the way Samantha understands life, and in part, you are hiring her for her understanding — for suspending your own worldview and adopting hers. And in her view, a broken engagement is like skidding off the road when you were en route to the only place that matters: marriage. I can see from her face (and the horror with which she asks, How close was it to the wedding?) that for her the idea of valuing a trip that ended before the altar is as bizarre as sentimentalizing a bloody car wreck.

Yet she is single herself, I point out: surely she doesn’t see her own relationships — each with its world of private particular meaning — as simply a series of failures to marry?

But apparently she does. A look I have never seen before — dreamy and wistful — softens her features as she says, ”Just because I’m a matchmaker doesn’t mean I have an express lane to the promised land of marriage.”

Although everything about modern culture has shown that vows do not guarantee happiness, stability or even a future, for all her savvy posturing, Samantha is a deep believer. Every day she strives to bring her clients to the threshold she hopes to one day cross herself. For a matchmaker, that’s where romance begins.