The Mating Game

ON a misty late morning the Tuesday after Labor Day, Patti Stanger, namesake star of the popular Bravo reality program “The Millionaire Matchmaker,” was standing in her Marina del Rey, Calif., office — a raw industrial space with red-painted walls and matching red chairs shaped like lips — preparing to douse one of her clients in the cold water of her now-notorious realism. 

“Today we’re going to do an internal makeover on a girl,” Ms. Stanger told me, as she forcefully flipped through an issue of Life & Style magazine in search of an ad in which she had posed for Sensa, the appetite suppressant responsible for her recent 25-pound weight loss.
“She can’t seem to get from A to B, and she always listens to my advice and doesn’t do it,” Ms. Stanger continued about the refractory client, a persnickety woman in her late-30s who pays for dating advice as part of Ms. Stanger’s real-life, brick-and-mortar matchmaking business, the Millionaire’s Club, on which the show is based. “Today’s going to be tough love with her,” Ms. Stanger said. “She needs to straighten her hair, for one. She can’t get arrested with her rat’s nest.”
When the client arrived, she perched on one of the lip chairs to wait while Ms. Stanger gave a phone interview. Dressed in flared jeans and brown wedge shoes, the client projected a ’70s vibe, enhanced by her hair, a mass of wild dirty-blond curls, and undermined by her French-manicured toenails. After a testy exchange about her hair — “Is it working for you, the curly hair?” Ms. Stanger queried — the woman said her romantic life was “abysmal.” Ms. Stanger dug in.
“What are you doing to attract men?” she asked. “Are you smiling?”
“I always smile!” There was sadness in the client’s voice.
“O.K., so where are you meeting guys?”
“Out and about, doing things, activities.”
She told Ms. Stanger she met a man at a restaurant and went out with him three times, until she got “bored.” Ms. Stanger pounced. “What do you expect, people to entertain you like a puppet show?”
The woman confessed that she ultimately wasn’t attracted to the guy because he was “meek.” Ms. Stanger charged on, advising, “Don’t judge it till you kiss it,” and ordering the woman not to come back “until you find someone you’re sexually attracted to.”
“That’s going to be a long time,” the woman told her.
“Oh my god!” Ms. Stanger hollered. “Let’s just be soooo negative!”
This abrasive-to-the-point-of-abusive style of matchmaking has made Ms. Stanger famous, and her show, whose fourth season had its debut on Tuesday, a hit. “I can’t tell you the amount of times I watch the show, and my jaw is on the floor,” said Andy Cohen, Bravo’s senior vice president for original programming and development. “I can’t believe what comes out of her mouth.”
Last April’s finale garnered a series high of almost 1.6 million viewers. Even those who generally consider themselves too refined for reality TV — the microwave dinner of the entertainment world — are closet fans. “Watching Patti rather savagely describe what’s wrong with these guys and why they have trouble getting/keeping themselves in real relationships is strangely invigorating,” wrote a blogger for the feminist magazine Bitch before fretting: “Can I continue to watch this show and write for Bitch in good conscience?”
This season, Ms. Stanger and her goth-attired associates moved their enterprise from Los Angeles to New York City, where they confront clueless millionaires who, much like their California analogues, believe that wealth should guarantee them a young, gorgeous mate. Alas, this is not true on either coast. New York makes ‘Sex and the City’ look like a “cakewalk,” Ms. Stanger announced during the first episode, in which she attempted to pair off Bryce Gruber, the captious, tightly coiled millionairess owner of theluxuryspot.com, and Derek Tabacco, an endearingly amenable Staten Island Internet entrepreneur. (Later in the season, Ms. Stanger will contend with Freddie Mitchell, the retired Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver, and Judith Regan, the fallen media queen, of whom Ms. Stanger says: “When she dates, she’s an angel.”)
In the practical, thoroughly Darwinian universe of Patti Stanger, anyone in search of a partner should simply follow her guidelines. Women must enhance their appearance by whatever means necessary: religiously caring for their skin (“I don’t care if you’re tired — do you want a husband or not?”), or growing out and straightening their hair (“Men like long, flowing locks. They just do”). Men, for their part, need to remember that a woman must be wooed. “I don’t care if you have to take me to Olive Garden,” she said, “you’ve got to take out the c.c. you know?” In other words, the credit card. And both men and women must adhere to the dictum on which Ms. Stanger refuses to budge: No sex without an “exclusive, committed, monogamous relationship.” (The producers make sure to capture the expressions of the men as they process this wholly radical idea.)