Untied: How did you get into matchmaking?
Pattie Novak: Well, actually, I started matchmaking at the ripe age of about 12, maybe even 11 in the 5th 6th 7th and 8th grade, in my 8th grade graduation class I was known to be the next Anne Landers ‘cuz I was always problem solving and matching and helping them get through their dilemmas with these boyfriends. I wasn’t the cutest kid on the block so for me I was living vicariously through my friends. So when I couldn’t get my own boyfriend I lived though them and helped them.
Then I got into a world that is um, that that ah, I did many things before as, as a matchmaker, but it’s an intangible world, ah matchmaking, um you can’t touch it, you can only feel it, ah, you can breath it, but I match whether I’m on an airplane, whether I’m on a bus, although I don’t take the bus very often, a train. It doesn’t matter where I am; I even stopped a guy one time in NYC he was putting in construction, I was there for business for TV actually, and I had just left my hairdresser and I said oh my gosh he’d be perfect for her. And we started to talk to him. I think it’s a sixth sense. That’s why there probably isn’t that many “real matchmakers”; they’re hard to find.
Untied: So when did you start dating if you were matching people?
Novak: I met my ex-husband when I was 19, I finally got a little cuter, some of us are late bloomers. I met him at 19, and I married him at 21, I had my daughter at 26, ah we were married 17 years, divorced now, almost ten years. And I got remarried October of 08.
Untied: So you decided you wanted to be a matchmaker. How did that process work, I mean did you just put up ads or did you already sort of know a lot of people who . . .
Novak: Well, I’m a born and raised Buffalo girl, so obviously I knew people but I also did marketing. I’m not going to give you my how I did it, I’m going to teach anybody to be a matchmaker, I’m already doing that for the next six months with this great girl here. It was a tough time those first couple of years, ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly.
In November of ‘03 the Buffalo News wrote a great article about me. That is how A&E found me, then Oprah, CNN, The Today Show came and Rachel Ray and the book and so on. I’ve been blessed. I have one divorce out of all my marriages, so that means it works.
Untied: How many people about have you set up to get married?
Novak: Hundreds. I don’t know exactly. Not everybody chooses to get married, Although, I would say 75 percent do, some people are still living together six or seven years later.
Untied: Could you elaborate on the different types of people that come in as your clients?
Novak: Well, you know I see the shallow dater, in my book, Get Over Yourself: How to get Real, Serious and Find True Love, I deal with the shallow dater and it’s not necessarily gendered by male or female, I’ve seen it in both sexes. I think that that comes from a sense of insecurity, that we’re trying to find something in somebody else to complete us when the reality is we have to complete ourselves, we have to love us first before someone else can, which is something I’ve been trying to say in the book.
Untied: In your book you said a lot of you say chemistry can grow. What do you mean by that?
Novak: I think chemistry is physical in appearance, it’s when we look at somebody and get looked at where there’s something magical. Can there be immediate attraction? Yes. Can chemistry be lopsided by one person? Yes. Can chemistry grow? Yes! But does that mean it’s always going to? No. As we get older, we’ve been there, done that. Now we’re looking for more. A chemistry that creates intimacy. Intimacy is not sex, girls.
Intimacy is a level of raw nakedness between two people that can only be developed with a full chemistry, not just a physical chemistry but an emotional chemistry, that comes through, through it comes through talking to somebody, getting to know them, it doesn’t happen in a year. That’s why the booty-call thing is bullshit.
Untied: Don’t you think that women might seek out booty-calls for self-esteem?
Novak: Yeah, it, it’s a something men have been doing for years is equating sex and love. And clearly, they’re different. To men love can be sex. For women we’re not set up that way. We can’t have the ultimate sex life if we’re not emotionally there. The women who are pretending that’s the case are fooling themselves into thinking they can think like a man and they cannot. Men are men and women are women and I guess thank God for the differences.
Untied: Do you have any kind of anecdotes where someone did something completely wrong on a first date?
Novak: I can give you something interesting that happened on a second date. She was a very successful, independent, feminist, strong women and that’s great. We’re beautiful, successful; creatures today and we can be anything we want to be but if we like men? And want to hang out with men? We have to realize that, in our evolvement in the last fifty years, they were still raised by women that weren’t as strong as the fathers. So she’s on her second date. She really likes the gentleman. He’s running late due to, to bad weather. He says, ‘I’m on my way but I’m running late.’
She remembered from the first date that he liked Italian food and red wine. And he turned around and when he got there his food was ordered and his red wine was chosen for him. Bad. Well, they never had a third date, needless to say. She was controlling. So these are for women who are successful, divorced, looking for love again. Let the guy let the guy open the pickle jar. Let him order his own red wine and his own dinner.
Untied: So I don’t want to ask for your secret but how do you match people? What do you do?
Novak: How come some children are born to play classical music and be grand pianists. I don’t know why I’ve been given a gift. I follow my gut real well. Look inside your eyes and clearly get a get a bit of a thought about you before you’ve even talked. That’s just an ability that you’re so intuitive and you’re bit of a people reader. And then when I start making a match, it’s funny because I’ll make this match and the staff will say, ‘No don’t, no are you kidding Patti?’ I’m like, ‘Just make it. I feel it. And I don’t why.’ I can’t explain it.
As a matter of fact, even if I had the secret tucked, written away somewhere, which I don’t. I don’t think I can teach it without putting somebody through an apprenticeship. Okay? I don’t think it’s something you learn in two days or three days.
Untied: You say you turn away some clients. Why?
Novak: I turn away about twenty to twenty-five percent. First of all in the state of New York, you’re governed by the attorney general. I have a certain limit where I can’t go a certain time without matching somebody or they’re entitled to a pro-rated refund. Well, quite frankly, I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t I wasn’t going to take somebody’s money just to give it back to them. For example, a shorter man is hard to help. Women care about a man’s height. Crazy but they do. On the other hand men are fussy about a woman’s weight. I had one gentleman in here, he had three teeth.
I said to him ‘Go to the dentist and get your teeth fixed and come back.’ What would have happened if I took that man on, took his money knowing I didn’t have one lady that wanted to date a man with three teeth. So my integrity’s there. That’s why I can’t help everybody.
I would like to think that that’s a more positive thing than a negative. Unless and I take somebody’s money knowing that she needs to lose a hundred pounds or that he needs to lose a hundred pounds or that I don’t have the kind of people that we’re ready to match that woman or that man with those difficulties. That’s why my interview is free. I don’t charge people for my interview because I want to reserve the right to say no.
Untied: I’m not sure about divorced women, but for my age group at least, I dated quite a few guys who seem like the same type. They’re wrong, in the same way. You’re going back to the same type and I was sort of wondering…
Novak: It’s huge. One out of three clients, male or female, walk in not because they can’t get a date. It’s about picking out the wrong person over and over again. It happens a lot. Then, you need to go back, was it, is it your father’s traits that you’re, that you’re marrying . Are those traits healthy? Why are you attracted to the bad boy? What is it about you? It all goes back to what we think we need. Then we continue to make that same mistake. One out of three women fall victim to narcissism. The New York Times just did an article on it. Ah, the traits of a narcissist.
I would like to tell every woman in college who hasn’t found the right guy yet they’re up and down like rollercoaster mood swings, they’re jealous, they’re suspicious. Don’t forget suspicion lies in the eyes of the guilty. There’s usually a vice issue. Drugs, alcohol or both. Not necessarily alcoholics, I may add, just abusers of it. They’re like being around eggshells, you never know when it’s going to crack. And, there’s a lot of great, great websites that can help women understand. It’s a growing problem. I don’t know if it’s because the divorce rate over the last thirty years is so high.
I do know one thing, with clientele it’s about one out of ten men. So that the moral of the story is that it’s out there. Remember that this country’s charmed by the charming. So why is that we’re so charmed by the charming? And I’m not sure I have the answer to that. I’m as guilty as everybody else. It’s buyer beware. Be careful because they’re out there and they’re dangerous and there is such thing called malignant narcissism. So there is no pill. It’s a lonely place to live.
Untied: Women who are narcissists, then only look for attractive, like guys who are really
Novak: No there’s more men narcissism. According to my research one out three women are victim of narcissism. So for you divorced women, who thought your ex-husband was boring? Be careful when you’re out there looking. Doesn’t mean that fun and charm means narcissistic, but it does mean that you’re charmed. And what you see in the first six months might not be what you’ll get in the next six months. And if I’m seeing it one out of three then I have reason to be concerned for the girls out there.
Untied: So once you take them on as a client what are the steps they go through? What kind of rules do you have for them as clients?
Novak: Well, once I take them on and we process and get our charts together we call in their matches. I make the match. We call in the match and follow up with them. We intervene up to the third date. We move onward and I match once a month.
Untied: So I have to ask, why did you name the book ‘Get Over Yourself?’
Novak: Well, because, I think that as a matchmaker, as a woman who has listened to thousands of hours of peoples different histories. That the one thing that I came up with, that is the biggest problem for folks out there is all the selfs. Self-love. Self-worth. Self-respect. Self-kindness. And I wanted to really talk how someone, instead of playing the blame game and why you broke up or why the marriage didn’t work go back to yourself. Find your answers within your own world. Find that love that you need so that you send out the right signals, the right energy. It will come back to you.
Untied: But the title of your book is ‘Get Over Yourself.’
Novak: That’s right. It is go to the core. If I had a long enough time I’d help you. ‘Cuz you’ve got some stuff to get over. Don’t you? Yeah you do.
Untied: Probably. I mean who doesn’t?
Novak: Exactly my point. There isn’t a person who walks into this room that doesn’t have their demons for a lack of a better word. So get over it! Revisit it, say you’re sorry, forgive the people you need to forgive.
Untied: And yourself.
Novak: Realize the things that you need to fix to make a difference for you first. And then if we forgive we get forgiveness. What is our core? It is our soul. Alright, and so that’s, those are all the selfs. Self-love. Self-worth. Self-respect. Self is what builds, what makes our core. So I want people to get over their self.
I want people to go back to those places that hurt them whether it’s a divorce situation. Whether it’s being the kind of fugly in high school or grade school and realizing that you’re not like that anymore. But getting over the fact that you still feel like that person? Whatever, your not being the popular girl or guy? How about sports for boys? How about those boys who couldn’t swing a baseball bat,? Get over it, right?
Stop worrying about it, stop worrying ‘cuz guess what? I have a news flash for ya. If high school was the peak of your world you’re in for a long life. So for those folks who didn’t just make their greatness in high school? That’s okay. But everybody has something that keeps them from being the best that they can be. And that’s what I try to do with the book.
Untied: One things you talk about in the book is how up-front you are with people. You don’t beat around the bush. Do people get upset?
Novak: No. They must feel I’m genuine because no, people don’t get mad at me. One girl was dealing with a weight issue with every client I introduced her to. She wasn’t size 24, you know? She might have been like a size 16? Something where I, I think, you know, I could deal with that. There are some men that are open to it. But she was having a problem. And I didn’t want to waste her membership months anymore.
I wanted her to get down just one size, what’s that ten or fifteen pounds? It’s not end of the day. And, you know, she’s like ‘I just want people to love me for me.’ And I said ‘I understand that, but they’ve got to get to you first. And what they’re seeing is that extra fifteen or twenty pounds and it’s affecting your dating world.’ And something I said to her, she started to laugh so hard and I remember the staff looking at me and going ‘If I had said that to her she’d had been so angry.’
But because of my approach, I guess I use humor. I use humor and kindness, I’m genuine. I was out on a lead not too long ago and they said I’m very accessible. I don’t know why I can do that. Other people can say the same thing and get slapped. You have to be able to enforce in a kind way some tough notes. Like, “I’m sorry but this is what I want you to do.” I’m not going to take you on until you get a makeover.
And I’ll send them for makeover. Or you need a new look, you need a new hairdo. You need a new makeup. You’re not wearing any makeup and you’re my age! You need to wear makeup, you don’t have to wear a ton but you have to wear a little bit! Thank God we have it, us girls.
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Matchmaker Podcast
