Bro Advice: How to Shutdown That Well-Intentioned Match Maker

You mean you aren't dating anyone?

I'm not the kind of guy who wants acquaintances fixing him up.

My friends know me well enough to not even broach the subject. If I want to meet the female friend (or relative) of one of my friends, they know I'll ask. “Hey, can you introduce me to so-and-so?” If I don't utter those words, I'm nyet interested. Nyet, no, no way, no how, not on your life, nein, nada, not a snowball's chance in hell....you get the picture.

For one thing, people who know me have grave reservations about inflicting me on some unsuspecting, fragile female friend or relative anyway. I mean, I wouldn't inflict me on someone I like. Moreover, people who know me are well aware that I am not so much a confirmed bachelor as a commando bachelor. That is, I love my singleness and defend it vigorously. I could see myself developing a relationship from scratch with some unknown female quantity, but I would have to be sufficiently smitten to do all of the hard work and spend all the dough required to attain a relationship status. A long shot, indeed.

If it's not a relationship, I don't need it.

Sometimes the well intentioned will say to me, “But don't you want some companionship? Wouldn't you like someone to have dinner with or go to the movies?” Let me think for a second....uh, no. I have friends and I have a cat. The damn cat I can't get rid of, and I can always track down a friend for some human interaction.

I've reached a point in my life – read that: mellow and mature – when I am no longer willing to invest the time, emotion or cash required to court someone new. It was tough enough 30 years ago when women in my target-age group weren't hauling around the tons of baggage they would carry three decades later.

I can imagine many of you tsk-tsking and shaking your head. Here's the thing: I only have a limited number of hours, days, years left. What is the point of treeing a woman at this stage of my life? To grow old together? I'm already old!

So, I'm not on the market to be fixed up. That, however, doesn't stop some acquaintances from giving it the good old college try. Some people just can't stand to see someone else unencumbered; while others see fixing you up as some sort of good deed as if they are mating missionaries converting  unwashed savages in the jungle of the companionless. These are the worst and toughest to convince their efforts are unwanted. I could always yell, “Please, just shut the ef up!” But that's frowned upon in polite company.

I had a conversation about this issue with a single pal of mine who had a terrific suggestion. When he told me, it was an ah-ha moment. I slapped my forehead with the palm of my hand and yelled, “Why didn't I think of that!”

I wish I would have had this advice a few months ago when accosted by one of those do-gooder busy-bodies in one of my favorite Greenville watering holes. This is a guy I know marginally and will have a casual conversation with whenever I run into him. But he's not a pal and certainly not someone who knows me well enough to understand my revulsion to fix ups.

He began dancing around the margins with innocuous questions about how I spend my time and about my interests. Eventually, though, he got around to questions on whom I date and so forth. Finally, he launched into descriptions of female friends he thought would be “just perfect” for me. Every once in a while he would nudge his wife and attempt to enlist her support for this or that candidate. She prudently stayed out of it.

No matter how many times I told him I wasn't interested – and even a couple of my friends who were there told him to stop wasting his time – he relentlessly continued on and on.

Knowing now what I should do, I could have nipped it in the bud by looking him dead in the eye after talking about the first woman he proposed, and without cracking a smile said, “Wow, she sounds great! However, here's what's really important to me: Can she take a punch?”

If I said something like that to someone who knows me, they'd know I wasn't serious. But anyone who doesn't know me well enough to try to fix me up with his twice-divorced cousin, couldn't be sure.

This is all speculation at this point because I haven't had the opportunity to test it, but I know that, sooner or later, I'll get to try it out in the lab of life. In theory, though, it sounds nearly foolproof.

I'll post the results when I have them.