There’s a difference between knowing the secret of true love and using that knowledge to find true love. I’ve been told the secret, and to my surprise, it came from some of the professional matchmakers in this town. I can tell you the secret, but I wouldn’t try to play Cupid, not seriously. But the matching services say they can do this, and do it well. They ask to be paid, of course — usually quite a lot.

Have you tried the Millionaires Club, Jim Soules, Great Expectations, Compatibility Unlimited?

Buddy Hickerson

Dan Rust, for example, wants $1250 per person. That’s the price for a one-year membership in the San Diego chapter of the Millionaires Club, of which Rust is the general manager. The name “Millionaires Club” is purest balderdash. Anyone of any income level can join, as long as they have the cash, or the credit, or some tenuous combination of the two. But the phrase “millionaires’ club” goes a long way to counteract the image of “lonely hearts club,” which image Rust and his associates are most eager to avoid. No one pays the big bucks to hang out with a bunch of desperate old maids and men. They spend that kind of money to join the elite company of savvy, healthy, successful winners, directed to the man or woman of their dreams via the technological wonders of video and computers.

"Women fudge on their age and weight. Men do it on their weight and height."

Buddy Hickerson

Located in one of the far reaches of University City, near the junction of Governor Drive and Interstate 805, the local club's headquarters reinforces the positive name and image. An attentive, well-dressed receptionist sits just inside the big glass front doors, screening visitors. Those who get beyond her find themselves in a softly lighted lounge filled with plush furniture and brightened by bouquets of silk flowers. Art prints decorate the walls. An expensive stereo system playing soft rock greets the attractive young people who flit in and out. This place hums, fueled in no small measure by Rust’s presence.

Rust says he used to be a nuclear engineer for the navy, but it’s hard to believe; he lacks the introversion that inhibits most engineers. He says he abandoned his former career because he wanted to work more with people, and now, “I eat, sleep, and breathe” the matchmaking business. As a salesman. Rust has a lot going for him: he’s quick, polite, and authoritative, but the thing that really sets him apart is his energy level, so high it’s nearly messianic. “There are hundreds of thousands of single eligible people in San Diego,” he declares, eyes gleaming. Though the Millionaires Club has been relatively inconspicuous in San Diego up to now, “I’m going to overpower the market in a couple of months,” he states, his demeanor immensely confident. “Every day I’ve got literally 2000 to 3000 names [of prospective members] coming in. This may sound crazy, but I’ll say it. By December I want to be enrolling 1000 people a month!”

As part of the high-pressure sales pitch to get prospective members to join. Rust and his co-workers readily disclose, for free, the secret of true love. “We’ve done a lot of research on compatibility, on what makes a relationship work or not,” Rust says. Those studies show that the longest-lasting, most satisfying love relationships are based on four components: common goals, common interests, similar sexual attitudes, and similar religious or spiritual attitudes. And further research has revealed several major obstacles to the average person’s ability to have an “ideal relationship.” The first is simply finding potential love partners. At this point in the pitch, Rust pulls out a piece of Millionaires Club literature with a blank pie chart already printed on the paper. “In all of San Diego” (he gestures to the pie chart) “there are probably hundreds of men with whom you could have a successful, lasting love relationship. If you could find just one of them, he would probably do it for you for the rest of your life. Now, where do you live?” he asks. “Pacific Beach?” In one of the slices of pie, he writes “PB” and then draws tiny circles — potential ideal love partners in the Pacific Beach slice. “Maybe there are three in Mission Beach,” Rust says labeling a Mission Beach slice, then a La Jolla slice and a Del Mar slice. There’s something comforting about seeing all those Mr. Rights in black and white — they’re out there, waiting! — but also something daunting about seeing how few of them live in Pacific Beach. How could the Pacific Beach resident seeking true love find those three particular men? “We at the Millionaires Club do an extensive search continuously,” Rust answers the unasked question. “It’s an all-out effort to attract quality single individuals.”

Rust boasts further that the club doesn't throw those individuals into a figurative pot, shake, and hope for longterm love success to follow. That’s what happens in the bar scene, he says, where people tend to mask their true selves to win approval. Simple physical attraction also commonly pulls together men and women with widely disparate goals, interests, sexual drives, and belief structures. Only over time do their true selves surface — and then the relationship begins to tear apart.

So the Millionaires Club administers to every new member an extensive battery of tests. There are the hard-core, wheat-from-the-chaff questions asked by every dating service in town: Will you date a smoker? someone who has small children living with them? a short person? a Jew? a black? someone who earns less than $15,000 a year? Then come the attitude probes, fifty-five of them: “My mood is generally a) down, b) in between, c) up,” “If a friend made a bet with me, then refused to pay when he lost: a) I’d forget it, b) I’d insist he pay, c) I’d tell him if he didn’t pay. I’d never bet him again.” The Millionaires Club further tests “intellectual alertness” (twenty-seven questions), vocabulary, financial and current-events knowledge, and more. From the mountain of answers are prepared.“perfect match profiles,” dossiers that disclose everything from a member’s (proclaimed) weight to his “emotional maturity” to what he thinks of mandatory prayer in public schools.

Millionaires Club members are then supposed to come into the office and study all of the other members’ files (arranged alphabetically by first name), mentally rejecting anyone who’s too young or old (club members currently range in age from nineteen to ninety-one) or otherwise not to their taste. Once they’ve found someone with whom they think they might be socioeconomically, psychologically, and physically compatible, they’re supposed to then turn to the video library to view a five-minute video interview with the prospective romantic partner. But when someone shouts Eureka! a date — let alone love — is still not assured. The finder tells the club he or she wants a date with that person; then the club phones or sends a post card to the one selected, who then is supposed to come into the club to review the finder’s profile and video and thus make an informed, rational evaluation of the person before going out for coffee with him or her. If this all sounds awfully complicated, remember, true love is work. But Rust dangles this carrot: he says, “I’ve never, ever seen someone join and not see it work” when the person has a positive attitude, makes selections and asks for dates diligently, and takes advantage of all the supplementary parties and seminars the club offers.

There are people in San Diego who have joined the Millionaires Club and walked away dissatisfied — people who feel they failed to get their money’s worth. Rust would simply say their lack of success was their own fault, that these individuals lacked a positive attitude or failed to take full advantage of the club’s services. Some of Rust’s competitors point out this is the great drawback of the Millionaires Club’s approach. You can pay all that money and not get a single date (if you never ask anyone to date you and no one ever selects you, or if all your selections reject you). There are no guarantees whatsoever at the Millionaires Club. What Rust and his sales people don’t point out, though it’s certainly true, is that if this prospect bothers someone, there arc plenty of alternatives available among the matching services.

At least ten different businesses in San Diego play professional Cupid, and the variety among them is dizzying. The least expensive of the bunch charges only thirty-five dollars and sells the service with cheaply printed brochures sent out in answer to phone inquiries. The most expensive is the ten-year-old video service, Great Expectations, whose fees range up to $1950 (for a super-duper package). Every one of the businesses seems to offer its own twist, but the approaches fall into three broad categories. Some claim to test the client psychologically, then, on the basis of that information, to match him or her with other psychologically compatible candidates. Others assemble a library (usually video) about all their clients and let each one try to win favor among the others. The final category, and in many ways the most colorful one, includes those individuals who claim to rely solely on their own judgment and intuition to match would-be lovers.

“I’m not perfect, but I sure get a lot of bull’s eyes. And that’s the name of the game,” says Jim Soules (pronounced SOO-liss). Though not the only one in town, he’s the granddaddy of the intuitive (versus psychological testing or video) matchmakers; he likes to say he’s been in the matching business longer than anyone else in San Diego, nearly twenty years. Like Rust at the Millionaires Club, Soules says he entered the business from a dissimilar field — in his case, education. After working as a Los Angeles city schoolteacher, he moved to San Diego County around 1964 and became a dean at Palomar College. He says he taught classes in business supervision there, and he enjoyed directing students into male-female pairs to facilitate livelier discussion. Over the years, he says he got quite a bit of feedback about romance developing from these whimsical academic pairings. When Soules heard about someone who was seeking a partner in a dating service business, he was interested. The partnership never materialized, but Soules tried working at another service in his spare time, and he found, “I could just look at somebody and know a lot about them. One gift of mine seems to be a highly evolved sixth sense about people. And people trust me. They like me. It (the dating business] was just a very easy thing for me to do.” So Soules decided to walk away from his job with the college and start his own dating service.

If that sounds a bit eccentric, Soules shrugs and says, “I’m kind of an impresario.” His personal style is completely different from Dan Rust’s revved-up urgency. Soules instead cultivates a folksy, avuncular charm that * makes his spreading paunch and receding hairline seem like assets. With them goes a voice as mild and soothing as warm milk. Yet this is a man who also clearly enjoys a touch of the offbeat. Soules occasionally performs as a stage hypnotist throughout Southern California, and he also has dabbled in the nightclub business here. He says he’s written plays since the age of thirteen. He also has a flair for selfpublicity; over the years, his name has been touted repeatedly in local gossip columns and on local television. The self-promotion helps to counterbalance the modest, even fraying look of Soules’s office, located across West Morena Boulevard from Kelly’s Pet Motel.

Soules says he gets anywhere from five to fifty calls a day from people seeking mates. The volume of business “depends on when the grunion are running and where the moon is in the heavens,” he jokes. “Let me tell you, honey, I have learned so much from this business. This is a postgraduate course on life. There’s just nothing that su*‘ prises me anymore.”

With all that experience under his belt, Soules says he can generalize about the people seeking romantic partners. His ongoing play writing act: vibes make him think in terms of Hollywood characters, and he says, “At the risk of sounding silly, the phone calls usually generate four types for me. It’s come to that.’’ Those four types come in male and female pairs. On the positive side, Soules says he sees a lot of Johnny Carsons, “laid-back, easygoing, affable’’ men who are balanced on the female side by Loni Andersons. “A lot of wholesome American moms come in. Very sweet ladies.

“I get an equal number of Lee Iacoccas — very high powered, almost officious. ‘I'm a very busy, important person,' ” Soules mimics, adding that the female analogue is “the Suzanne Pleshettc types. They’re the polished, glamorous lady executives: selective, powerful women.’’ Soules says he also hears from two rather malevolent pairs. “I get a lot of calls from people who remind me of Jack Nicholson in The Shining; this is a person who’ll sit there and look at you with a perpetual smile on his face and his eyes kind of glazed over. And there’s really not... that... much to smile about.” His counterpart would be the Lizzie Borden type. “She comes across rather soft-spoken. But there’s a tremendous intensity in the eyes. Uptight body language. This is a woman who could be anything.” Finally, Soules says, he hears from “the Danny DeVito type — they’re very rambunctious and probably have been wife beaters. His female counterpart would be Bette Midler: the very tough, very physically oriented woman who would be a husband beater. I’ve met a number of those over the years.” Other characters find their way to him from time to time, but Soules says variations on the four main ones occupy the center of the bell curve.

Whenever any of them calls in response to his advertisements or publicity, Soules chats over the phone for a minute. He claims to discourage any member of the two negative pairs.

Also, “I want to know that they’re literate. I want to know that they’re understandable. I want to hear the emotional tone in their voice. If they don’t sound healthy to me, it’d be a waste of my time.” He says he also turns away people who lack the social skills to have any hope of marriage. “That’d be like Peter Lorre looking for Loni Anderson. No way! He’s got to work his way up to a potential Mrs. Lorre type.” Yet another filter is the price; the wily charm doesn’t come cheap. For seven guaranteed introductions over the course of seven months, Soules charges $795; he also offers a twelve-month package of up to twelve fix-ups for $995.

But perhaps the most striking filter of all is Soules’s insistence on working exclusively with wife- or husband-hunters. Soules says years ago he was content to work with casual daters, but his thinking evolved over time, particularly in the last five years. “We live in a very impersonal society,” he concluded. “And it’s sad. I think it has an awful lot to do with perpetuating the destruction of the social fabric. We used to have family units. Now it’s disposable units.” Finally, Soules says, he came to feel “like I have a responsibility to be a stable unit in the community thaf people can trust.’' These days when people call his taped informational number, they hear Soules ask, “Are you a relationship-minded person? Because if you’re not, I would prefer that you didn’t even call.”

For all the screening, Soules says that he has “several hundred” county residents in his “inventory” of marriage seekers. When you try to pin him dow n on how he decides who should meet whom, Soules lapses into generalizations and inanities about matching Johnny Carsons with Loni Andersons. “I use my many years of experience and intuition, which are very, very accurate,” he states. “I do it on a personal level. I know everyone’s background. I know what they do. I know their attitudes.”

But if he's vague about the basis for his matches, he’s extraordinarily specific and structured about the mechanics of them. Soules says for each match, he prepares a set of “dating slips" that list only the name and phone numbers of both people. He sends the original to the man and asks him to call the woman between 6:30 and 9:00 p.m.; the woman gets the copy of the written match-up. The two are required to meet in a well-lighted, neutral place — somewhere other than their homes. Soules likes to recommend that people go out on dinner dates. Before he will introduce a client to a different match, Soules requires him or her to fill out a numerical evaluation of the first person and a “hand-written note from the heart. Now tell the matchmaker: how did you feel about this person? If there’s any correction that I need to make, it’ll show up there," Soules says. “Once in a while. I’ll slip, put a smoker with a nonsmoker who has specified that they don’t want a smoker. But on the other hand, I make deliberate mistakes because my intuition tells me there’s a possibility. Sometimes it works, and then they say, ‘Gee, fm glad you didn’t adhere to my restrictions. Because I’m in love with Tom. Who happens to be a chain smoker.’ ”

Soules says he used to try to keep track of the marriages that resulted from his matchmaking, but he gave that up as being too cumbersome. People rarely like to admit meeting their spouse through a dating service, he says, “and many more people will try living together before they get married." Soules adds that he doesn’t recommend premarital cohabitation. “Sometimes it becomes marriage, and other times it’s simply exploitation. It’s like a number of men and women have said to me, ‘Why buy the cow when you get the milk free?’ ’’

Soules may lack the ultimate feedback, but he says the information he does require from his clients makes his service intensely personal. “I’m like the old family physician who once upon a time we used to have — where you went to one person all the time and he knew who you were and got an idea of your idiosyncracies.” He says he tried to supplement his service with videos a few years ago but abandoned that tack because it was so impersonal, and further, it offended his own taste. (“You know, someone sits in a booth. You don’t know who in the hell is looking at you.”) He also rejects computer matching as being a gimmick that doesn’t work, partly because people provide false data. “The women fudge on their ages and weight; the men will do it on their weight and height. You’ll get a five-foot-five fellow who puts himself down as six feet tall. Then they see each other, and they’re both aghast."

Soules’s criticism of the computer matchers sounds like praise compared to the invective Jeffrey Ullman hurls at them. In 1976 Ullman founded the Great Expectations video dating service in Los Angeles, and three years later, an existing video service in San Diego paid him a fee to become part of the Great Expectations chain; today the chain boasts twelve locations nationwide (with eight more opening soon), making it the oldest and largest video dating service in the nation. Although video was his cornerstone, Ullman says for years he was excited by the prospect of augmenting the video with well-founded psychological testing. “Great Expectations has spent more money than any other company in the country trying To develop an effective compatibility-matching program. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ullman says passionately. “I hired Ph.D.s up the ying-yang! I chose the best research and the best experts in the country, and the best was shit.

I finally came to the sad conclusion that psychological matching is no more effective than throwing wet noodles against the wall to see what sticks. The shortcomings were awesome.” Compatibility matching is easy to sell because people tend to believe in “the god of technology” he says. “The pitch is, ‘Hey, single person, we'll take care of you. We’re the experts.’ Hog wash! Horse poop! Love takes time. It’s a lot of hard work.” Ullman’s own pitch is that the video system he devised for Great Expectations makes for “smart work.” That system strongly resembles the one used at the Millionaires Club, minus the detailed compatibility testing the Millionaires make so much of. At Great Expectations, clients first look through dossiers that contain photos, vital statistics, and personal statements from the other would-be daters. They’re supposed to review these and then turn to the video interview (in which subjects are asked about their values and interests). The video gives you lots of information in a compact, discreet way, Ullman argues, and he says that throughout the years, the system has led to more than 2500 marriages. In the Mission Valley offices of the San Diego branch of Great Expectations, director Victoria Parker elaborates. “Wouldn’t you rather look over 1000 [prospective dates] when they’re not around?” At any one time. Great Expectations has information about 1000 women and 1200 men, according to Parker. “Wouldn’t you rather have your first date with someone when they’re not around?” she asks. “No one can bug you. No one can hustle you. Everyone saves money that way, and time. This is your way to be two places at the same time. You’re activating yourself socially even when you’re at work or doing something else.” By the time you finally go on a flesh-and-blood date with someone, you know a lot about them, Parker says. All you need at that point is for the proper chemistry to develop.

Bob Walcher says probably the biggest complaint Great Expectations clients have voiced over the years is simply the failure of that chemistry to materialize once the couple has met. Walcher and a partner founded the San Diego business to which Ullman ultimately sold the franchise rights, and Walcher owned the franchise until last year, when he finally sold out to Ullman. Though Walcher still believes heartily in the concept of dating services and thinks video is the best approach among them, he talks candidly about the business he left behind. Walcher says he once was more idealistic about how people should use the videos; he argued for a while that the dossiers should not contain photos (so that clients would first screen prospective dates on the basis of their nonphysical attributes). “Forget it!” Walcher now says. He used to watch clients reviewing the files, and invariably they would first look at the picture. Then the age. Then the occupation. Then they might skim the other information before asking to see a video. Despite this pattern, Walcher still bristles at the often-repeated criticism that video dating is grossly superficial. “Meeting someone in a bar is not superficial?” he counters. “Being introduced to someone is not superficial? Why do people dress up, try to look nice? We’re always being judged by other people. What’s not superficial?”

Given the importance of appearances in the video-dating approach, Walcher says he tried not to accept as clients people who wouldn’t have much chance of being chosen, fat people for example. Walcher rarely accepted men under twenty-five or women over forty-five or fifty, because of the tremendous disparity in the ratios of male to female within those age groups. The video dating services are in a bit of a bind in this regard. There’s financial pressure to take everyone’s money, and it also sounds a little crude to state openly you won’t accept ugly people. So why not accept them? First, many people would not want to join a club that accepts large numbers of unattractive people. Furthermore, it’s the ugly (or fat or old) people who stand to lose the most by indiscriminate acceptance into clubs where you have to be attractive to someone if you’re going to get any dates at all.

They stand a much better chance at those clubs that guarantee members a certain number of introductions, match-ups that are based either on the matchmaker’s intuition or on psychological “compatibility” scores. And at Compatibility Unlimited, San Diego’s biggest compatibility matching service, personal appearance is never a bar to acceptance. (“We were told that for every toad, there’s a little toadlet out there,” says one former salesperson for the firm.) Michael Taylor, the local office manager, tends to downplay the whole issue of personal appearance, except to point out how it restricts the opportunities for those who pay for the services of his video competitors. “The problem with video is that you really have about ninety percent of the people looking at ten percent of the people,” he says.

Taylor argues that many social forces have pushed us to the point of needing dating services. “Seventy-five years ago, divorce was almost unheard of,” he says. “It was like cancer. If you got divorced, the whole town talked about it.” Before getting married, people knew much more about each other, and commitment was universally valued much more highly. Today, Taylor asserts, “Society has pretty much stacked the deck against successful relationships.” People are far more transient, and institutions ranging from nofault divorce to prenuptial contracts reinforce the notion that less-than-perfect relationships should be abandoned in the hope of finding something better.

But most people still yearn for longterm lovemates, and Taylor says compatibility matching is the scientific way to find them. He has a simple method for dealing with his competitors’ (particularly Ullman’s) criticism of such matching: he simply says the critics are wrong. According to Taylor, Compatibility Unlimited’s testing program, which was developed with the assistance of a San Diego psychologist, identifies no fewer than seventy-two areas of compatibility, areas that are weighted and given varying points, totaling some 226 possible points in all. Taylor proudly shows off a chart that illustrates how friendships are usually based on at least 130 to 150 points of compatibility. Best friends tend to share 150 to 170 points, while lasting love relationships are based on 170 points or more. Taylor mentions that additional research has been done that reveals that most couples who get divorced would score below 130 points (that is, they’re no more compatible with their ex-spouses than they would be with a casual acquaintance). The lesson is clear: if you want your marriage to last, pick someone with whom you share at least 170 compatibility points. Taylor boasts that Compatibility Unlimited counts an average of three to five marriages per month among its thus-matched clientele.

He keeps close to his desk a photo album full of wedding pictures and invitations that seem unarguable proof that the service works for some spouse-seekers. What’s more disputable about Compatibility Unlimited is its representations about the use of computers, according to Doug Hickok. Hickok started working as a salesman for Taylor in October of last year and swiftly rose to the position of sales manager, in which he trained all new sales personnel. He stayed in that post until April of this year, when he and Taylor parted, bitterly. Hickok felt the boss wasn’t providing the sales force with enough potential clients and was using and discarding employees “like Kleenex.’’ Hickok also had begun to suspect that the compatibility matching wasn’t being done with computers, as the company had represented. Compatibility Unlimited’s office on Bonillo Drive near the intersection of College and University contains no computers at all, and Hickok says he received complaints from two people to whom he had sold the service (for $595) who described to him mismatches so gross that Hickok thought a real computer could not have made such an error. One of them, a young woman who works in law enforcement, was matched with an active drug dealer, for example, along with several other men with whom she shared virtually no interests.

Compatibility matching can be done either by hand or with the aid of a computer, Taylor retorts. He says last year when Hickok was employed by the company, Compatibility Unlimited was sending clients’ test scores back to a computer in the Compatibility Unlimited office in suburban Washington D.C. (the company also has offices in Houston and Los Angeles). But Taylor says six months ago, the San Diego office switched to comparing clients’ test scores manually (setting up matches among the most compatible), a process he says takes more time but may yield better results because of the greater flexibility a human matcher can introduce into the system.

Taylor points out that he fired Hickok. At the time of their parting, the two men wrangled over money (the former sales manager finally won a judgment in small claims court against the dating service boss). So Hickok admits he has an axe to grind with Taylor. But he still loves the concept of a service like Compatibility Unlimited. Even more notable is the fact that Hickok, despite his contempt for Taylor, also continues to endorse wholeheartedly the sales pitch used by Compatibility Unlimited, even though it ranks among the hardest of hard-sell tactics. “It’s psychologically designed to be very devastating and very powerful,’’ Hickok says with admiration.

Insight into that sales pitch is interesting because hard-sell marketing is a crucial feature of the dating service industry, at least among the higher-priced businesses. Although Hickok worked for Compatibility Unlimited, he underwent the Great Expectations sales training at one point, and he was startled by the similarity between the two companies’ sales presentations. The Millionaires Club’s “script” also uncannily resembles those of its two main competitors — even to the point of using some of the exact same phrases. And that reliance on a hard sell isn't all that surprising, according to some industry observers, given the high cost of the service being sold.

So although Hickok talks with greatest familiarity about Compatibility Unlimited, he says the basic sales presentations are common to all three of San Diego’s largest matchmakers. Those presentations most commonly take place in the homes of the potential clients (or “prospects”). The prospects are told that the session will last between an hour and a half and two hours; more commonly they consume two and a half or three, according to Hickok. The salespeople are trained to control completely the interview, even on the most subtle psychological level, he says. To assert their authority, salespeople are instructed to choose their own seat in the room (rather than the one the prospect suggests) and to ask the prospect to fetch them a drink of water.

Right from the beginning, the salesperson works hard to establish a certain tone. Part of it implies that the company representative is there to judge or “qualify” the prospect (rather than to sell him on buying a high-priced product). The other major thrust is that this is a one-time chance to sign up. The salesman works to sustain both suggestions throughout the lengthy session. Hickok says the carefully scripted sales process is a little like the process used to herd cattle, in which the animals are directed through a series of gates, into smaller and smaller enclosures, until they have no choice but to get on the truck that will take them to the slaughterhouse.

As the Compatibility Unlimited “interview” begins, Hickok says the salesman asks the prospect to answer fifty questions for a sample psychological profile. The salesman then calls his office and submits the prospect’s responses for instant processing, and he has the prospect fill out an extremely detailed financial disclosure statement. While it may look like the dating service is concerned about the prospect's creditworthiness, Hickok says the information also will later serve as a critical tool in the salesperson's arsenal. “The interviewer is trained to figure out how much money you have and what’s available” to be spent on the service, Hickok explains.

Before the subject of costs ever comes up, however, before the salesperson even begins to describe exactly what it is that he is selling, there begins what Hickok calls “the interview portion,” a series of carefully formulated psychological probes. He says the intent is to drop the prospect down through various levels of psychological defense until he finally admits openly to being lonely and dissatisfied (something most people don’t immediately confide to strangers). First the salesperson discusses the general concept of romantic compatibility and asks for at least twenty specific qualities that the prospect is seeking in an ideal mate. Then he asks if the person deserves someone with those qualities;

if the person says no, Hickok says the salesperson is advised to use a powerful selling tool called “the takeaway.” In effect the salesperson threatens to leave, a ploy that invariably forces the prospect to revise his negative answer, according to Hickok.

“The whole process is designed to support and nurture the impulse that caused them to contact a dating service in the first place,” Hickok says. The salesperson then asks why the prospect’s ideal mate would join a dating service. “You work till you get them to say, ‘For the same reason I could because I’m not a loser,’ ” Hickok says. The salesperson then pushes for an answer to why the prospect hasn’t yet achieved permanent romantic success. “At .first you tend to get surface answers, like they’ll say, ‘I guess I’m not going to the right places.’ So you ask, ‘Why haven’t they worked?’ You just keep asking why, over and over again, until they finally say, ‘I don’t know. Nothing’s worked and I don’t know what will work in the future.’ ” The prospect gets a brief respite from the psychological battering when the salesperson asks about dating and entertainment patterns; once again the hidden purpose of such questions, according to Hickok, is later to allow the salesperson to argue that the cost of Compatibility Unlimited’s service is less (or comparable) to what the subject already is spending in a (fruitless) search for a mate. But then the interviewer returns to a heavier theme, this time asking in depth about the prospect’s former significant relationships.

The interviewer has the prospect describe each in detail, including the best and the worst moment in each. “By this point you’ve really got their trust.” Many people relay deeply intimate facts and emotions; many cry or express heartfelt anger, and “that’s the intention of it,” Hickok says. “You’re trying to clear out obstructions to a new relationship.”

The interviewer has now reached the most important question of the evening: to ask what priority the prospect places on establishing a successful romantic relationship. Hickok estimates that maybe only twenty percent of the hundreds of prospects he himself interviewed described it right off the bat as being first in their lives, but after close questioning, Hickok says he invariably could maneuver them into revising their answer. “For example, if they said their children were their first priority, you would ask them if it isn't true that their relationship with their children improves when they have a good romantic relationship.”

At this point, “you’ve got that bond doing now. Many of these people have told you things they’ve never even told their best friend.” Armed with that emotional vulnerability, Hickok says the salesperson also has to push hard on another crucial point: to win agreement from the prospect to make a clear-cut decision — either yes or no — on joining the service before the session is over. Even today Hickok offers no apology for thus pressuring people. “Some of them put off making decisions about relationships throughout their lives. Part of the test here is to be able to make decisions and stick with them.”

Only at this point, having won the agreement to make a decision, does the salesperson finally launch into his presentation about how Compatibility Unlimited matches people based on their objectively quantifiable traits. To give the prospect a taste for how accurately standardized questions can assess someone’s personality, the salesperson now reviews the results of the small questionnaire the prospect filled out earlier, and he explains how full membership involves far more exhaustive psychological testing. Once he explains how the matchings work, “you start setting up to close,” Hickok says. The salesman asks if — aside from cost — the prospect would like to participate in such a program. “At this point, you’re right at the neck of that gate, about to get on the truck,” Hickok says, conjuring up the cattle image once again. If the prospect agrees he’d like to join if he could only afford it, “he’s already agreed to join and he doesn’t know it,” Hickok says. The salesman can then draw upon all the financial information he earlier solicited and turn it against the prospect. Using this approach. Hickok boasts he got eighty percent of his own prospects to sign up. Though he was unusually successful, the company wide average was fifty percent, according to the former sales training director.

Today Hickok still sounds a little wistful about leaving behind the matchmaking industry (he’s now working as a recruiter for a local modeling agency). “I could sell that program [the computer-matching service] all day and all night and feel real good about it,” he says. ‘‘People are sitting there screaming at you for help, and you can’t help them by giving them crap.” You have to help them confront the truth, even if it means an encounter with their own dark side, never a pleasant experience. That’s what the hard sell involves, Hickok says, and he’s equally articulate defending the product it’s designed to sell.

“The traditional ways that we meet people in our society don’t work to produce good relationships,” he says; Before becoming a salesman, Hickok had some training as a therapist and developed a small psychotherapy practice in Texas. He talks with great compassion about the unhappiness caused by people’s failure to achieve good romantic relationships. “The absolutely most common statement I heard from people was, ‘I hate to go to bars.’ ” Yet alternatives to bars, such as church groups or classes, present only the slimmest of pickings, Hickok says. “None of them delivers any kind of satisfactory cross-section of people.” Compatibility matching has to work; it is the secret of true love, Hickok agrees. He thinks the only problem with it today is the people running the businesses that pretend to put the secret into practice.