It’s been a tough year personally and professionally for former Irish Voice music columnist Mike Farragher, but he’s chosen to take the bad and make some good with the start of his new venture aimed to help people find love.
We're Irish. We have big hearts, even bigger mouths, and we know everyone and everything about everyone.
Like, we know yer wan just broke up with that half-boiled eejit that no one in the family liked anyway and might now be on the market for new love. The itch to do some matchmaking is in the blood and as a race we are (rightly) acknowledged for our matchmaking skills from Europe to our own backyards.
Being an Irish writer with a few humorous books under my belt and a nose for a good story, I’ve been tapped on the shoulder over the years to scribble a witty ‘n flirty dating profile on the back of a bar napkin for the heartbroken punter to my left. I’m just sitting there anyway, and who doesn’t love being part of a story with a happy ending, right?
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Happy stories and happy endings have been in short supply during this strange year. For myself, I lost my mother-in-law and corporate job on the same day to COVID-19. There’s barely enough time to grieve both because the scenery whizzes by fast in 2020, and your choice is to either reinvent immediately or crawl into a ball in your spacious new refrigerator box of a home.
During intense times of prayer and meditation, the big life questions bubble up. What are you good at? What brings you joy? What can you do to create joy in others?
The list of answers has two things on it, and a middle-aged, high-priced male escort who snores like a tractor when he’s finished up is immediately ruled out for reasons obvious.
That leaves writing. But what? Dating profiles? Really?
Mike Farragher.
Introspection and necessity converged to form my new venture LoveLetters Profiles, taking the way with matchmaking words that have been battle-tested on countless bar napkins, and going digital with it.
Since barstool whispers are ill-advised in a pandemic, the process starts with a 10-question survey full of fun questions that both yourself and your best friend answer together. I go to work crafting the dating profile within the words on the survey.
The survey is like the block of marble that gets whittled away so that your authentic romantic self emerges; think of me as Michelangelo if he had an insatiable thirst for Jameson and an inability to draw anything but stick figures.
To say putting these together has been a gas and a giggle is an understatement. A sample:
“A Catholic Cougar looks to prey: sexy silver single cleansed of sin and a two-timing ex-husband, looking for a good man to stay in bed with on a Sunday morning, provided we make it to five o’clock Mass the night before. I need new sins to fry the friar in the Confession box.
“Not looking for a man to turn loaves into fishes; if you treat me like a lady, and show up on time, that’s miracle enough for me. After a messy divorce, looking to turn a lifetime of Sorrowful Mysteries into something joyful. Wink if interested.”
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There have been sightings of that deadly big cat prowling The Villages in Boca with a hapless groundskeeper that is decades her junior in her merciless jaws, but those reports cannot be corroborated.
Everyone I’ve worked with has been dating after working with me. Everyone. One client already fell in love and married since July! Not a boast, a fact. What causes a 100 percent success rate?
The survey begins to unlock an inner playfulness followed by a video interview in which the initial draft is presented. In the process, new confidence emerges.
I am continually dumbfounded by people I work with who report back that they found love without ever putting a dating profile online. They say the process elevated the guts needed to call that ex or one that got away once and for all.
In some ways, this new digital matchmaking venture is a throwback to what’s ancient and floats in the water of our blood. Lisdoonvarna, that small spa town in Co. Clare where visiting gentry came to “take the waters” and looked to mingle their offspring and bloodlines with someone of similar social stature over the centuries, still hosts the most popular matchmaking festival in all of Europe. With the harvest safely in, many bachelor farmers began to flock to Lisdoonvarna for a spa town vacation and a new wife.
The characters that come out to match them up have had their Hollywood treatment over the years. I was there to take it all in about a decade ago and saw with my own two eyes the mastery of Willie Daly, a third-generation matchmaker who has arranged over 3,000 marriages in 50 fifty years in the business.
Legend has it that the simply laying hands on his book of love profiles, aged 150 years and passed down among generations of Daly men, will guarantee new love within six months. That definitely gives this scribbler something to aspire to!
The venerable Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival was canceled in 2020, which is no excuse to wait a whole year to find love. Hop onto LoveLettersProfiles.com and let’s usher in the New Year with new love!
For those of you that found love but are out of work, we can help there as well. As a hiring VP in a Fortune 50 company for decades, I have a passing knowledge of what gets applications and resumes noticed in this digital AI world.
Log onto careerletters.com I can apply that know how to attract the career of your dreams with a smart resume and a career profile on LinkedIn to match.
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