Patti Stanger, center, and her "Millionaire Matchmaker" team with a potential match. The "Matchmaker" reunion airs 9 p.m. tonight on Bravo.Patti Stanger remembers the first match she ever made. It was at the Christ Church dance in Short Hills. Still in middle school, she managed to fix her best friend up with a boy.
“The priest said to me, ‘No one’s talking to anyone.’ I walked over and I picked up the guys — one of the O’Connell brothers — for my friend.”
Stanger, now 50, is Bravo's "The Millionaire Matchmaker." The show has proven successful in featuring what Stanger calls her "knowing" — something passed down from her grandmother and mother — to sense connections between people.
On the show, she attempts to find love matches for financially stable men and women.
“I’m here to reestablish you as a commodity,” she tells her clients. “You have choices; choose wisely. I’m your fairy godmother.”
Within a matter of days, she has to find real potential in a casting pool, arranging mixers for the millionaires (or millionairesses, as Stanger calls her female clients) so they can select their desired dates. They narrow their picks down to two and after two short minidates, end up going on one “master” date.
Her real-life matchmaking business, Millionaire's Club, is based in Los Angeles, but attracts those seeking mates from around the country. There, the process isn't as much of a pressure cooker as it is for the show — she has more than a year to set someone up, something she's been doing on her own since 2000, after having worked for other dating and matchmaking services.
A 1979 graduate of Millburn High School who lived in Short Hills until she was 21 — she currently lives in California — Stanger does come back home to visit, to see cousins in Livingston and North Bergen.
And "I gotta go back for Nero's (Grille, in Livingston)!" she says.
Stanger also knows a thing or two about the dating profile of New Jerseyans, she says. What are our good qualities?
Stanger with friend Jenny McCarthy, her expert for one of this season's episodes."Anytime you see anyone from Jersey, Bruce Springsteen on down, we take no prisoners. We tell it like it is. We're worse than a New Yorker." Yet such frankness does not always make for the best relationship material.
“It works in business, it may not work in love,” says Stanger, who has been known to be a little in-your-face herself, telling her clients when they lack style or presence (sometimes both), need to lose weight, or have an ugly dress or undesirable hair color. She has taken criticism for using generalizations in her televised critiques: “Jewish men lie” was one doozy. (Stanger was raised in a Jewish household.)
She also criticizes her clients’ possessions. For example, a Prius, says Stanger, sends an ambiguous message. “Not sexy!” she says, favoring an SUV or Maybach (if you can afford one) instead.
What’s the problem with millionaires, even if they do have that Maybach?
“They’re narcissistic,” says Stanger. “Their way is the highway. Time is money. Sometimes they’re cold, aloof and indifferent. Sometimes, they lack the art of etiquette in courtship.” They also might have a big sense of entitlement, whether it’s because they were the guy who didn’t get the cheerleader in high school or they grew up with the expectation that they’re owed something, a characteristic she says is endemic among the wealthy, men and women alike.
The hardest person to set up is a millionairess, says Stanger.
"They have unrealistic expectations," she says — they're looking for a guy with a Bill Gates success story and the face of Brad Pitt.
“Matchmaker” concludes its fifth season tonight, with the final part of a reunion show that looks at how Stanger has fared over the season, both matching up her millionaires and in her own love life.
For the first time on the show, Stanger let her staff — married matchmakers Destin Pfaff and Rachel Federoff, with the help of Stanger’s friends — set her up on some dates.
“The people that set me up don’t know how to set me up,” she says. She suspects this is because they know she’s less accessible to them business-wise when she’s in a successful, serious relationship.
"They gave me metro men. I hate metro men. I want Aidan, the rugged woodchopper from 'Sex and the City.' "
Her previous long-term relationship, with Andy Friedman — who she was with for seven years — ended in a breakup after their engagement.
“I kind of ruined my good years on that,” says Stanger. “I felt safe with him. We’re better friends than lovers.” On the second date, Friedman said he wanted kids. Years later, he had changed his mind. That, she said, was a dealbreaker.
Stanger says she expects casting for the next season of the show will change, bringing in a better pool of potential love matches.
“I think it’s going to change the dynamic for the show,” she says.
Stanger mingling with two potential matches, this time for herself. More millionaires and matches aren’t the only thing in Stanger’s future. Having actually studied screenwriting in school, she’s shopping a screenplay with Pfaff, her fellow matchmaker, as well as additional reality programming.
But she’s also still looking for love, and a family of her own.
Though Stanger left Essex County a long time ago, she holds a fondness for New Jersey family life, having lived here with her adoptive parents. She says she still prays every day that records revealing her birth father will be released.
“I always try to get back to Short Hills, in my mind,” says Stanger. Maybe not the weather, but the “energy of a small-town feel,” she says. “I want to get married. I want children ... I will wait for my number to come up.”
"The Millionaire Matchmaker" reunion part 2 airs 9 p.m. tonight on Bravo.
Stanger's matchmaking service is at millionairesclub123.com; Patti also invites any readers to ask her questions about love and relationships on Twitter: Follow her @PattiStanger
Follow Amy Kuperinsky on Twitter @AmyKup
Patti Stanger, Bravo's "Millionaire Matchmaker," grew up in Short Hills. Stanger says her psychic “knowing” about lovers who are right for each other works for regular millionaires and extends to the red carpet set, too. Her takes on Hollywood’s relationships?
Troubled marriages
Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher; Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries
"I'm grieving for Demi and I'm grieving for Kim," says Stanger. "Kim did the right thing, though. What she did was really smart. She's a very strong girl. She's stronger than all of them in that family. She'll get married again. I'm not worried about her. It's Demi I'm worried about. Ten up and 10 down is all you can date (in terms of age)," she says — saying that she saw the split with the much younger Kutcher coming a while ago.
Good matches
Youngsters: Gavin Rossdale and Gwen Stefani
The marriage made in music has outlived the revelation that Rossdale had a child with another woman.
"They bond perfectly," says Stanger.
Mature: Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson
"Her wisdom is beyond," says Stanger of Wilson. "They got each other," she says of the Hanks-Wilson marriage of 23 years. "It's just one of those."