Amy Laurent on her new book and TV show, Miss Advised

By Beth Mellow

On the rocky road to love, many of us are guilty of getting emotionally attached too quickly, drunk texting at 2 a.m. or letting an undeserving ex back into our lives. In the hopes of becoming smarter daters and finding “the one,” we turn to relationship experts to advise us and matchmakers to help us find someone with whom we’ll click.

But would you choose a matchmaker who is guilty of the same dating faux pas as you, who is single and still on the hunt for true love?
Apparently many would, as Amy Laurent’s booming matchmaking business indicates. The thirtysomething singleton who calls the Upper East Side home has been in business for seven years and currently operates offices in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and London. Additionally, since Laurent appeared on Bravo TV’s Miss Advised, a docu-series that ended its season on Aug. 6 focused on the personal lives of three single relationship “experts,” she claims that her services are in more demand than ever. “I’ve seen an uptick in business. Applications for men and women have increased since the start of the show,” she said.

Laurent speculates that the expansion of her client roster has to do with the fact that viewers relate to her.

“What’s interesting is that while I’m out having a drink or at the gym running on the treadmill, women approach me and ask, ‘Are you that girl?’ They tell me that they totally get what I’m going through,” she said. “I think they identify with me in the sense that, like a lot of other women, I am a workaholic and I’ve gone for long periods of time when I don’t even have a date.”

In addition to the series spotlighting the day-to-day at Laurent’s office, it opened a window on her personal life. Viewers were along for the ride when her notorious ex-boyfriend, AB (pronounced “Abie”), who had left her for a job in Saudi Arabia, returns and Laurent, without hesitating, accepts an invitation to see him. On her blog, she admits that she would advise her clients against doing exactly what she did, then ponders, “So what the hell happened to me?”

Laurent continues to open up about her relationship foibles in her new book, 8 Weeks to Everlasting: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting (and Keeping) the Guy You Want (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012). In the book, she provides practical advice on how to manage the early, precarious part of a relationship, providing examples from the love lives of clients and friends as well as her own experiences. At one point, she discusses her brief relationship with a television writer named “Quinten” for whom she made herself too available, saying yes to any date, even if it was last minute or inconvenient.

“I’m just like you when it comes to my own heart, but when it comes to guiding you, I’m going to be clearheaded. I’m devoted to it,” she continued coyly. “I think I focus on getting people across their obstacles so I don’t have to deal with my own.”

Laurent realizes it might be risky to her business reputation, but felt it was important to honestly portray herself in her book and on the show. “I’m a very real person and I really thought, I’m so tired of all the experts out there creating this myth that we’re perfect,” she said.
Not only has Laurent used her romantic life as a source to draw from when advising clients, it was her dating experiences that attracted her to matchmaking in the first place. The East Coast native was in her twenties, living in Los Angeles and eager to meet guys. After scoping out a few ads for matchmaking services, she applied to a couple and was disappointed in the men she was paired with.

“Women didn’t pay for the service, so, because of that, I felt that I wasn’t really listened to. I thought more consideration was given to the guys because they were paying clients. I knew that there were things I would do differently if I had my own matchmaking service,” said.
Dissatisfied with her sales job at a custom brokerage, Laurent started her matchmaking company with the goal of making happy matches for both the men and women who enlist her help.

“The women don’t pay for my services, but I listen to them as much as my male clients and consider their thoughts and feelings as just as important,” she said.

Her approach, according to her company’s statistics, has been working. To date, Laurent’s matchmaking has resulted in 27 marriages, with an 80 to 85 percent success rate in finding relationships for her clients. Also, though men pay to be part of the service, Laurent and her team don’t accept poor behavior. In her book she admits to jettisoning one client for making lewd comments to dates and saying sayonara to a guy who would “grill the girls in a passive-aggressive way.”

While Laurent’s reputation for being a fair-minded matchmaker has been great for business, she admits it’s not always great for her already imperfect dating life. She explains that discussing her profession with a potential beau at a cocktail party can be awkward. “I think it’s very intimidating for a lot of men,” she said. “A lot of guys think I will be analyzing them and that it will be weird.”
Nevertheless, Laurent continues her own pursuit of love and sees the television show and book as learning experiences.

“You don’t have to be perfect to be ready to date, but you have to be open and honest. It’s been scary and I felt vulnerable, but I had to be honest with myself,” She said.

For further information about Laurent, visit amylaurent.com. Her book, 8 Weeks to Everlasting, is in bookstores and available at Amazon.com.

I flew to Los Angeles with a big backpack filled with trail mix, granola bars, chocolate, cheese and a tent. My father met me there and drove me down to Campo at the Tijuana-California border. He left me at the fence, dust puffing from his tires like drab clouds.

There was a border monument marking the southern terminus of the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail—a trail that fades in the mist and lush of northern Washington then ends in Canada. I would walk the length of the country.

I walked north from the Mexican border fence; the trail was well marked with rusty signs and scattered with lazy rattlesnakes baking in the sun’s warmth. I was eating a green apple, I remember, when I nearly stepped on the first one. I shrieked and ran south a hundred yards. I bit my apple, breathed, ate that apple—my last piece of fresh food; everything else was processed or salted or junk. I was fine. I walked back north, stepped over the snake, kept walking, stepped over another and another.

Within a few hours, I had met a dozen hikers, all attempting the same trans-country journey on foot. They seemed kind—young men, retired couples, a 30-year-old woman with big curly hair and good teeth; the curly lady smiled at me. I was curt. On my second day on the trail, I met a 20-year-old man—a former professional mountain bike racer from Switzerland. We hiked together for 700 miles and five weeks and then let the miles between us grow. He hiked faster than I did. I didn’t love him.

I made friends—a twentysomething girl with a ukulele and an angelic voice and face and a photographer with a master’s in psychology he had never used and didn’t want to. And packs of fit, hungry hikers, happy to hear my stories. Happy to know me.

In Bend, Ore., 1,970 miles north of that border monument dull with Campo dust and 1,500 miles from spiny pastel plants and rattlesnake teeth and venom and sadness, I met Justin. We were in town—the verdant, river-cut trail town of Bend—and we knew a handful of the same hikers. A big group of us went to dinner at the Deshutes Brewery. Justin sat next to me, close. He smiled a lot. I smiled—tried not to but couldn’t help it. Under the table, his knee brushed mine.

I lifted my hot hand, moved it slowly through the space between us like a teenaged boy would when trying to float unnoticed to second base; I pressed my trembling palm against Justin’s sweating beer, squeezed the glass. Lifted and carried it through the air to my mouth. Took a sip. I was 19.

Justin knew.

He was amused, contorted his face like he disapproved—but I knew he didn’t.

I was pulsing, invigorated. So fit from the miles and miles, unarmed and no longer unhappy.

I felt an illogical desire for Justin—my body, high on attraction and quivering, betrayed my mind.

We walked, together, 600 miles into Canada.

I remember our first day hiking together. Rain had poured down in sheets, smacking the soil, tearing up the trail. Earth washed away; roots loosened, left soaked and exposed. Lubricated with water, everything shone in the gray light.

Justin and I shouted over the downpour, shared childhood stories and our ambitions as we walked. We were saturated with rain to the bone, both of us, but I was giddy and on the verge of laughter.

My walk with Justin ended in the mist-dense Cascade Mountains on a garden stage at the end of a lily-lined aisle. Storm clouds, gray, navy and low, illuminated the flowers, the fine clothing, the glassware in soft, important light. The mist was backlit by sunlight, bathing the Cascade foothills in silver.

Justin and I read our vows and grinned and cried on a stone stage over the Cascade Mountain garden, lightning flashing like a camera. Camera flashes would have been invisible under that sky. My parents were there in the garden, happy and warm and not too nervous.

A scene from Darling Companion

The bucolic look of Lawrence Kasdan’s Darling Companion is an indication of its fine sensibility. Kasdan evokes the natural, wooded landscape of Alfred Hitchcock’s idiosyncratic comedy The Trouble with Harry. The colors here are not autumnal nor quite as vibrant, yet Kasdan affects a similar tone of respite.

His three harried couples (Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline, Richard Jensen and Dianne Wiest, Mark Duplass and Ayelet Zurer) explore the communication tensions of love relationships, from habitual complacency and mature passion to first attraction, respectively. It is a lightly charming, minor film.

One would like to praise Kasdan for making an awesome comeback, but the gentle insights and genial tone of Darling Companion merely pick up where Kasdan left off with the immensely appealing (though slight) mystery Mumford—the best film of its kind since John Cromwell’s Small Town Story. Kasdan is not a master of provincial etiquette and amiable social conflicts, he’s just one of the few contemporary filmmakers interested in such niceties.

With nothing profound to say about marriage or parent-child relationships, Kasdan (who co-write the script with his wife, Meg) at least says it calmly and without the self-congratulation of a lewd, immature, Judd Apatow wallow.

Darling Companion is conceived around the man’s-best-friend conceit of middle-aged Beth (Keaton) adopting a dog to take up the void caused by her husband’s (Kline) involvement with his medical practice. At a retreat in the woods, the three couples’ search for the runaway dog becomes an exploration of their own intimacies, dependencies and misconnections.

The conceit is thoughtful, if not quite sophisticated. It never rises to the remarkable level of the affecting man/pet metaphor in We Think the World of You where Alan Bates memorably acted out the prudent gay desires of the pre-Stonewall era. Instead, this is Kasdan’s typical middle-class circle game, as in The Big Chill.

But occasionally, Kasdan tips into profundity with Zurer’s claims of clairvoyant intuition or the sense of faithfulness embodied in the searchers all wearing red dog whistles the way early Christians carried fish signs. (Kasdan’s cutest metaphor has the bickering Keaton and Kline getting lost in the woods and encountering a pair of rams.)

Without the profundity of Mike Leigh’s middle-age exploration Another Year or the classical form of the Warren Beatty farce Town and Country, Kasdan comes off second rate. It has none of the outright satire of Wanderlust, only a sensitive, more mature sense of quietude and resolve.

It’s an old man’s movie (Kasdan is 63), which makes it a blessed rarity in today’s film culture. Finding comfort and fair-exchange value in the compromises that mature couples make, Darling Companion answers back the anxieties that once haunted the middle class, as in William Inge’s archetypal domestic melodrama Come Back, Little Sheba. Kasdan attempts to use his sensitivity about humans and knowledge of life to create a sane entertainment.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Despite universal notions and theories, at the end of the day, attraction remains idiosyncratic to the individual. Often, this works to a romantic’s benefit—you need only people watch in the Big Apple to validate the “there’s somebody for everyone” saying.

When it comes to attraction, our body’s reaction is often the most trustworthy measure. It doesn’t matter if your blind date is smart, successful, good looking and charming—if you don’t feel it in your bones, it ain’t a match. However, it is also possible that our bodies are not always a reliable gauge of whether we are truly attracted to someone.

The uniqueness of attraction is one of life’s most elusive and fascinating facets of study. There may be several types, but passionate attraction is what sets the stage for love. This may be characterized by two factors: first, that physiological arousal occurs due to an increasing heart rate and second, the notion that another person is the cause of our racing pulses. If our beating hearts are indeed due to the presence of a new love, our attraction to him or her is appropriate.

However, in the event that something else is to blame for our vibrating heartbeats, we may be experiencing a phenomenon known in psychology as the misattribution of arousal. This process usually occurs when we experience a rapid increase in heart rate from anything from running fast to participating in fear-inducing activities like skydiving or watching a scary movie. When in the presence of an attractive individual, we may mistake our beating hearts for indicators that we are attracted to this person. In other words, we’re misplacing the source of our attraction and our bodies are talking out of turn.

To test what sets our hearts aflutter, social psychologists created two distinct situations. In a condition generated to induce arousal, men were asked to walk alone across a shaky bridge suspended by wire hundreds of feet above treacherous boulders. In the second scenario, men breathed easily as they strolled across a stable bridge placed just a few feet off the ground. In both circumstances, walkers were approached by an attractive female researcher who showed an ambiguous picture and asked participants to create a story based on his interpretation. Subsequently, the attractive researcher handed participants her digits and invited them to give her a ring if they needed to follow up.

The results indicated that men who walked across the precarious bridge reported higher levels of sexual content in their stories. Furthermore, these men were also more inclined to later call the research assistant. Although the men who walked across the safer bridge encountered the very same woman, they reported less to nearly no sexual imagery in their stories. Interestingly, those who walked along the stable bridge were also less likely to phone the woman. Evidently, the adrenaline bridge intensified feelings of arousal.

With this in mind, it should have come as no surprise when I frequented a different bridge for some heart-inducing exercise, a run, and instead found myself focusing on everyone’s body but my own. After completing a 7-mile trek, I noticed that I had never both been attracted to so many people in so little time. As my heart calmed and the sun shone brighter, I realized that perhaps I had been seeing things with adrenaline goggles.

The hottie in the hoodie seemed shorter than at first glance, and I could have sworn that the guy on the light-up rollerblades had been on a bike. Alas, perhaps it wasn’t “real” attraction after all, I sighed. There were other factors at play. However, even if my beating heart wasn’t due to the surplus of men around me but instead to my long run, perhaps this is OK. What if participating in more fear-inducing activities and enhancing our heart rates actually makes us take more risks and fall for people that weren’t initially on our radar?

At the end of the day, it might be difficult for psychologists and lay people to isolate the true source of attraction. But even if initial attraction is misattributed, perhaps it can evolve into real attraction. Since greater potential for love can be found via heart-pounding activities, I’ll see you on the tallest bridge in the city.

Word travels around the dog community fast, and pretty soon Matthys had a website (leashesandlovers.com) with an online community connecting dog lovers from all over the country.

Matthys also started hearing great stories about how pets had affected owners’ relationships, in both good and bad ways. She started recording these stories and, three years ago, realized she had enough material to write a book.

Leashes and Lovers: What Your Dog Can Teach You About Love, Life, and Happiness (Leashes and Lovers L and L Media, $19.95), discusses the many ways in which dogs and other pets can affect human relationships, from friendships to dating.

“It’s all about starting new relationships and rekindling old ones,” Matthys said. “Dogs can help us do both.”

The book launched March 31, and Matthys held a special event at the venue BLVD on Bowery to mark the occasion. Raffle proceeds were donated to the American Humane Association.

Matthys also announced a new partnership with the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, a coalition of rescue groups and shelters that is working with Animal Care & Control of New York City to move city shelters toward a no-kill policy. Leashes and Lovers events during the spring and summer will feature dogs available for adoption, through the Mayor’s Alliance.

Matthys said one of the surprising things she discovered through her work is that little dogs aren’t always the best city dogs.

“It’s not about the size of the dog in the city. Great Danes and Mastiffs are great. Greyhounds are perfect apartment dogs,” Matthys said. “They are low maintenance and not high energy.”