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Though Gothamist is not the exact target, we couldn't resist commenting about self-help meets chick-flick-plotline, Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned in Harvard Business School, which was featured in the Post this weekend. Author Rachel Greenwald applies marketing tactics, like direct mail and telemarketing, to dating, for the greatest efficiencies:
- Make Thanksgiving cards asking friends to hook you up
- Take criticism from pals to revamp your appearance
- Embark on an "exit interview" after a failed date, so women know how and where their "product" went wrong
But why stop there? Maybe women should recruit guys for focus groups. Gothamist will moderate: Each of the guys will have gone out with the woman, and Gothamist will do a SWOT on the woman. Or Gothamist could do some "media buying" consulting: "For the greatest possible reach, considering your intended target, put your online personal on Nerve/Match/etc. and go to these bars..." Gothamist thinks what Greenwald really learned at Harvard Business School was how to come up with a great gimmick with built-in appeal. (And Greenwald is happily married is happily married.) And it seems like law school is also where you can work on your yenta abilities: Alicia Silverstone plays a lawyer by day, matchmaker by night, in the upcoming NBC series, Miss Match.
Ironically, this hype comes when Gothamist is reading our good friend D.A. Miller's book, Jane Austen or The Secret of Style. Miller looks at how Austen (a defining word on how society views women and marriage, if not the defining word) had to subvert her own personality in her writing, because she was the absolute opposite of her heroines: An old maid.
Jane Austen is always inspiration: Clueless, Bridget Jones' Diary, and anything with a woman trying to get married, pretty much.
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A SWOT analysis to end a date -- even when solicited that would be a hard one to pull off in a gentlemanly fashion. Then again, I'm sure I could use one every now and then to check up on myself, a performance review of sorts. I wonder if I'd get "plays well with others" or "doesn't work up to potential."
It's all about leaving the city and finding "a country man."
Karru, that's why you need a third party to step in and ask all the questions. I'm working on a business plan right now for Gothamist to do so, and we'll serve it up in a pretty PowerPoint presentation.
Aaron, how right you are. Austen's eligible men are all landed gentry types.
Ooooo . . . pretty PowerPoint! Is there anything that program can't do? Hmmm, I think if I was "landed gentry" there would be no need for a SWOT analysis since the S would be pretty clear.
Interesting. I don't want to have any kids so I don't plan on getting married until at least 35. That is also when women get despirate to get hitched.
There's an exception to Austen's heros -- Frederick Wentworth is a man of very limited means, so Anne Elliot is persuaded not to marry him (this is "Persuasion" of course). He later turns up a wealthy naval officer, but still not "landed."