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 ishappily 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.
