Love Connection

Over a lunch meeting in Manhattan's swanky Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a matchmaker showed her client photos of five beautiful women also looking for love.

When her client, one of the world's wealthiest men, turned them down and requested to see other photos, Eileen Fisher decided to run a saucy experiment: At their next meeting, she presented him with pictures she had snapped of airbrushed models from the pages of Vogue and Mademoiselle.

"He still turned them all down, saying they're not good enough for him," says Fisher, managing partner of the New York office of Elite Connections. "I looked him right in the eye, and I said, 'I want you to know something. You will be alone or with the wrong person the rest of your life. Don't waste my time, and don't waste yours.'"

In her 12 years in the industry, this no-nonsense New Yorker has seen it all. She says that she's channeling her experiences into a new TV series currently in the proposal stage and tentatively titled, Confessions of a New York Matchmaker.

"At first, I was working on a book, but people kept saying, 'Your stories are so amazing. This should be a show!' It's about how I find real matches for people that they would have never otherwise met," she says. "Some of it is funny, and some of it is sad. Sometimes, I find my women in the lobby of my apartment building; all my doormen are in on it, too!"

Only Fisher's male clients pay for her services. Over the years, she's done everything from teaching them how to dress to steering them toward age-appropriate matches. Before entering the profession, she helped both her brother and her college roommate get married. In fact, she met her own husband while trying to set him up with someone else.

"That was 23 years ago!" says Fisher. "He told me I gave him the wrong number for the woman I was trying to get him to meet. Now we have two beautiful children.

"I truly find my happiness from matching people I get a high when a man calls to tell me he's found the one." O