YOUR LAST FIRST DATE

A Hollywood matchmaker serves up the tricks of the trade.

Samuels Kuba has long been a screenwriter, best known for her work with Seth MacFarlane on the animated series Family Guy and American Dad. Her matchmaking “side hustle,” as she puts it, has been more successful still; as she writes, gamely, “When I think of how I want to be remembered one day, it’s not for penning fart jokes for Liam Neeson: it’s for helping people find their forever partners, the ones they’re comfortable farting in front of.” Her long experience has given her a categorical sense of whom she’s dealing with, men and women of financial and sometimes artistic success whose personal lives are a wreck or a drag, and whose “dating personae” run a generally unhappy range from Babblers (they just can’t shut up) to “Stiffs” (“we sit up straight, sip our drinks, and adopt a general attitude of ‘formal is normal’”) and “Workaholics” (who work their cell phones while ignoring their dates, with the author kindly suggesting that “they might need a little help unwinding”). Although being a Miss Lonelyhearts might seem a little, well, predatory (a word she uses herself), as it turns out Samuels Kuba does good service by helping her readers, male and female, concentrate on who they are as people and what they really want, while also teaching useful social skills such as mirroring the behavior they’d like to see in a potential partner (“If you want your romantic interest to call you instead of text, for example, then you call them first”). She’s also a formidable screener, highly useful in a dating milieu in which all too often women experience threats of violence or stalking from unsuccessful matches.

All in all, a good primer for setting realistic but actionable romantic goals—and without making Hollywood bucks.