YOU’VE tried Craigslist and Club Med, and have nothing but flirty e-mail messages and hangovers to show for it. Speed dating made you nauseated, and your Web profile is so exaggerated you barely recognize yourself. Some days, you just feel like crawling home to Mom and Dad.
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John Keegan
In Ali Seidman Hammer’s case, her father came to her.
Ms. Seidman Hammer, 29, who works at a jewelry company in Manhattan, never lacked suitors. But when she and a boyfriend broke up in 2002, her father wanted to help. He reached out to the son of a longtime family friend, Dave Bray, who contacted a fraternity brother, Mike Hammer. They went on their first date in November 2002 and were married in April this year.
“Sometimes,” said her father, Larry Seidman, “it takes a little prodding.”
For some people parental intervention may seem like an arranged marriage. But for today’s superattentive parents, involved in almost every aspect of their children’s lives, dating is merely one more sphere of influence.
Surprisingly, many adult children don’t seem to mind. In an age of electronic courting, where dating can be reduced to a bleary-eyed scroll through lackluster Web site profiles, some see the appeal of Match.mom.
“If you’re going to give J Date a shot, why not give your mother a shot?” said Leslie Arker, 32, who met her husband, Alex Arker, 33, through their parents (their fathers played golf together) in 2000.
Those in their 20’s and early 30’s are, after all, used to hands-on to-the-rescue parents, and involvement doesn’t end with a college diploma.
“There is a very high appreciation of parents nowadays, which is unusual,” said Helen E. Johnson of Chapel Hill, N.C., an author and a consultant on parent relations to colleges.
Where parents were once feared and distant figures, today they are more like friends to their children, some people who work with families said, and that has led to more open relationships.
Manny Contomanolis, the associate vice president and director of Cooperative Education and Career Services at Rochester Institute of Technology, said that the involvement of parents in their children’s lives is occurring more and more, partly because parents no longer trust institutions like schools and churches to be their children’s best advocates.
But modern technology has also brought a revival of the age-old practice of matchmaking. E-mail and cellphones make it easy for parents to be part of their children’s day-to-day trials and tribulations, and to get emotionally involved.
“They’re potentially living their son’s or daughter’s life along with them,” Mr. Contomanolis said. “It creates more instances and opportunities to intercede.”
Critics who advocate a more laissez-faire approach to parenthood may view parental involvement in affairs of the heart as an extension of what generational scholars call “helicopter parents”: those who hover over their children’s every move, hampering their maturation, autonomy and future ability to cope.
But some say a parent’s suggestion to spend Saturday night with the upstanding son of a business acquaintance is not the same as meddling in college admissions or helping complete a term paper to beef up a grade. Mr. Contomanolis said it is not much different from a parent’s suggesting a child call a family friend who runs a company that needs some business administration graduates. It would be problematic, he said, only if parents were carting in potential mates as the parents did in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”
Parents, of course, have been meddling in their children’s love lives since time immemorial. And writers have long mined the subject of arranged marriage in works as varied as “Romeo and Juliet,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Bend It Like Beckham.” But even in “Anna Karenina,” published in the 1870’s, parents questioned their role in their children’s love lives. “It’s the young people who have to marry and not their parents,” Tolstoy wrote, “and so we ought to leave the young people to arrange it as they choose.”
And that was where things were left, in most families. But fathers and mothers may be reclaiming their right to know best.
Michelle Mikos, 31, an engineer from Fleetwood, N.Y., said she allowed her mother to give out her phone number to potential suitors, despite their difference of opinion on the definition of handsome.
“I kind of trusted her to find me a nice guy,” she said, adding, “I stopped asking her about looks.”
Three or four setups did not work out, but in 2004, one did. Ms. Mikos married him in the winter of 2005, and in April she gave birth to a boy, Max.
“I made her my maid of honor,” Ms. Mikos said of her mother, “because she introduced us.”
For many parents, setting up a date for an adult child is not all that different from arranging toddler play dates, only there are beers and bar stools where there were once sandboxes and seesaws.
Darby Corna, 25, of Manhattan said her mother, a radio talk show host in Cleveland, always tries to set up dates for her and her brother, though Ms. Corna has no interest in them.
“I know it is coming when we go to an event, and she tells me to put my lipstick and blush on,” Ms. Corna wrote in an e-mail message. “I get random phone calls in New York saying they met my mom and she gave them my number, and my brother gets calls in Rome, too.”
Lopa Patel, 28, a lawyer in Chicago, said she receives e-mail from dating Web sites that she never signed up for, and she suspects her mother is behind it.
“I got the July newsletter for Indiandating.com,” she said, adding that other people’s parents attempt to play matchmaker on her behalf as well. “I have parents on all levels who apparently don’t think it’s a bad idea,” she said.
But Ms. Johnson, the consultant, said it can be. Many parents and their adult children are already too enmeshed, she said, making the children fragile. And when a person’s most intimate connection is with a parent, he or she is likely to have trouble communicating with peers.
Parental love is unconditional, she said, so children do not learn the art of compromise, negotiation and accepting that they and their partners will never be perfect, skills needed for a “real” relationship.
“It’s hard to meet appropriate people,” Ms. Johnson added. “I accept that and I realize that, and it’s true that your parents do know you in ways that other people don’t, but what I’m concerned about is what happens then if the parents pick out the person. It further enmeshes you in the parental relationship.”
Parents say they attempt to make matches because of the joy in helping someone find love, particularly for those who have happy marriages of their own.
“It’s knowing that maybe you did something good for somebody,” Mr. Seidman said.
The drive to make matches also often springs from a desire to uphold cultural traditions. “There’s more pressure in ethnic communities,” Ms. Patel said, noting that her parents “know what being Indian is” and that “they want the same for me.”
“They know it, and it works for them.” But, she said, she would rather remain single than marry anyone her parents recommended.
Besides, if a parental setup results in a cringeworthy date, getting disentangled can be sticky.
Ms. Seidman Hammer’s mother once set her up on a blind date that made her want to bolt. “He was wearing a fur coat,” she said. “And he was five feet tall.”
But it’s harder to walk away from a parental setup than from someone you met in a bar or exchanged a few e-mail messages with, she said. There are often family and work relationships at stake.
“I had to stick with it,” Ms. Seidman Hammer said.
While a parental setup can create more tension between parents and children, the opposite may also be true, Mr. Contomanolis said. “What was the intent?” he said, “And how was it handled?”
Ms. Arker’s mother gave out her phone number without asking first, but she and her daughter had a prior understanding.
“I said, ‘Mom, O.K., you have permission to give out my number,’ ” Ms. Arker said, “ ‘but you’d better not abuse that privilege.’ ”
The relationship between Ms. Arker and her husband was easy from the beginning, she said, even though they had never met. They had similar upbringings and “an instant comfort level” because they knew some of the same people and places. The couple married in March 2002. They have a daughter, Emily, 2, and they are expecting their second child in September.
“At the end of the day,” Ms. Arker said, “your parents know you.”
Blanche Arker, Ms. Arker’s mother-in-law, said that any good relationship owes a debt to destiny and timing, but she also suggested that perhaps the reason children welcome parental setups is not that they cannot cope, but that they eventually come to realize they could learn a thing or two from their parents.
“When all else fails,” she said, “you do come back to your mommy and daddy.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/fashion/27parents.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5070&en=b0de4a09b785f8e5&ex=1181188800
