People bemoan the death of the monoculture, but on X, the everything app, it seems like there’s still a character of the day — or, at minimum, a discourse of the day, one that you can go around the office and ask people about. On Tuesday, that character was matchmaker Blaine Anderson; or, more precisely, one of her jilted clients.
In a post with more than seven million views on X, Anderson recounted a matchmaking attempt gone wrong. Her male client — 32, jewish, finance, “medium handsome — had suggested a first date at a restaurant whose signature offering appeared to be a giant soft pretzel. The woman — 26, “amazing family, sexy + refined” — bailed; she had wanted something more upscale.
The post shot to virality, and the internet immediately convened a struggle session. The woman was shallow, the man had dodged a bullet, he should die alone, Anderson had scammed him. One replier even proposed taking women to the city dump to shoot rats.
But for Anderson, it was just another day at work.
Economists who like to see the world as an amalgamation of markets have long described marriage and dating as a matching market. But it is a peculiar one; having more money does not simply let you buy a better product, because the product usually has preferences of their own. A man can pay Anderson $100,000 to search harder, vet more women and make better introductions; he cannot pay $100,000 to make the woman he wants want him back. That leaves Anderson actually operating in two markets at once. In one, she is paid to discover what men and women actually want from one another. In the other, the extremes of those preferences become content, then that outrage makes the content travel, and millions of people learn what everyone else supposedly expects from dating. Sometimes the second market even reshapes the first.
The bald tax and the short tax
“I thought people would at least have opinions on it,” she told Fortune. “But I didn’t realize quite how opinionated and passionate people would be about it.”
Anderson, who runs Dating By Blaine, has built an unusually lucrative business out of precisely the discourse that her post exposed: modern dating is messy, expectations are impossible to keep up with. She charges exclusively male clients between $35,000 and more than $100,000 for six months of matchmaking, pricing the package based on how easy she thinks it’ll be to secure him a match.
For example, Anderson has one client who’s 35, good looking and tall and in finance, who also wants a gorgeous and intelligent girl. “It’s not easy because that woman is hard to find and hard to get in touch with,” Anderson said. “But when I find that woman, she typically wants a date with him.” So she might charge him closer to $35,000.
Another client is 40, balding, 5’6. Good personality, but still, unfortunately, getting hit with what she called the “bald tax” and the “short tax,” something closer to $100,000 or above. “I hate to say that… that doesn’t actually impact their value as a partner” Anderson said. “But it’s just, their search requires more time and care simply because we just have to talk to more women to get them the same number of dates.”
Her team of five matchmakers spends up to 50 hours on a match, finds women through friends, professional networks, Instagram and LinkedIn; sometimes, for particularly difficult searches, she will send someone into a city to meet women at coffee shops, run clubs and events.
What the pretzel reveals
To some of Anderson’s fiercest critics watching Pretzelgate. To these people, a man paying tens of thousands of dollars only to be rejected over a pretzel looks like evidence that Anderson was bad at her job, or worse, a scammer. But in a way, she said, the rejection reveals precisely what he’s paying for: the price of a preference.
Modern dating discourse has developed its own grand theories for why heterosexual courtship has felt so miserable. One corner is the internet’s creative use of hypergamy: the contension, popular in male-dominated dating discourse, that women increasingly compete for a narrow upper tier of taller, richer, more attractive men (remember last summer’s jingle of “finance, 6’5, blue eyes”). The actual term is narrower, and research has found traditional hypergamy declining as women’s educational attainment has risen.
In the other corner is heteropessimism, the term coined by writer and academic Asa Seresin for the hopelessness with which people, particularly women, talk about straight relationships even as they continue to pursue them. Social media is especially fertile territory to ritualize that performance, what with the rise of “loneliness influencers” who make content about their living alone with no friends or kids, and with Gen-Z’s embrace of celibacy.
Pretzelgate was sort of the perfect material for both camps. To one side, the woman was another entitled “dater,” demanding that a man demonstrate wealth, even before she had met him. To the other, the man’s restaurant choice was one more example of men failing to meet women’s apparently modest expectations.
But for Anderson, the trial is also marketing. While initially an Instagram user, she began posting seriously on X while on maternity leave in 2025, after realizing the CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs who make up much of her clientele were spending their time there.
“It is my customer acquisition channel,” Anderson said. “I’m constantly looking for, like, okay, what’s content I can post? Like, what’s something I can talk about here to get eyeballs?”
She watches what goes viral and tries to do more of it. The most combustible stories, she has learned, are generally those in which somebody violates a contested norm: a woman expects an Uber to be sent for her, another hit tweet from last week; a man chooses a first-date restaurant that seems too casual; generally, someone’s standards strike the other half of the internet as entitled.
“People like to be angry online,” Anderson said. “If there’s something that someone can arguably be angry about, you better believe they’re gonna take that opportunity.”
But she insists she’s not intentionally ragebaiting. Virality is only useful if it reaches people who might eventually trust her; millions of viewers calling her a scammer do not necessarily make good customers.
Yet, her posting the stories does even something further than simply amplifying the dating market’s existing resentments: it can change the preferences within the market itself.
She pointed to the fixation on tall men. A woman who had never particularly cared about height can watch other women valorize it online, and begin wondering whether she should. The same thing happens with the other rituals of dating. “One girl makes a post about how she expects an Uber for all of her dates,” Anderson said, and suddenly women who had never considered it are asking themselves, “‘Wait, like, I should be asking that,’ or ‘Should I be asking that?’”
A good chirp
Sometimes the second market even changes the first. After another recent viral fight over whether a man should send his date an Uber, Anderson’s matchmaking team added the question to client onboarding: Would a woman expecting a car be fine with him, or would that expectation itself make her incompatible?
“The reality is, dating is hard and confusing whether or not I talk about it,” Anderson said. “The reason I have a business is because it’s frustrating whether or not I say anything. If anything, sharing these stories and bringing humor to it helps people realize they aren’t alone—there’s nothing wrong with them just because they’re struggling.
The client at the center of Pretzelgate took becoming the internet’s main character relatively well. Anderson said his friends quickly recognized him despite her attempt to anonymiyze the story. He may not have loved watching millions of strangers adjudicate his choice of restaurant, but he did have one note on Anderson’s description of him.
“He has a good sense of humor,” Anderson said. “He said, ‘Medium handsome was a good chirp.’ “I stand by it.”
