Cute and nice and smart....

I'm now single and apparently fair game for yentas.

Well, not yentas in the adorable Jewish matchmaking grandma sense you might think. Instead, my yentas are my friends and family that live in New York. None of them are grandmas and the vast majority are Catholic. But still, I coordinate enough Jewish weddings at work to borrow the term for blogging purposes.

For the most part, I'm thankful for my yentas. After being in the same relationship for the last five years (including a short-lived "break"), I don't have a ton of experience playing the field and virtually no experience pursuing a man. I don't mind the idea of somebody else arranging an introduction, assuming they "get" me well enough to pick a winner.

Last week, one of these yentas made a move. She invited my potential match to a concert we had planned to attend. First, she talked him up. He's supposedly (this was second-hand information) really cute and smart and nice. Second, we looked him up on Facebook.

It's moments like this when I would like to rewind six years to our Facebook-free lives when online profiles didn't serve up so many opportunities for vicious pre-judgement. I'm all for judging a person after meeting them but perusing pictures, interests and notable quotes before you even speak leaves too much room for misinterpretation. If I'm ready to dismiss a guy because there's one picture of him fist pumping on a dance floor who knows what information on my profile is equally disqualifying? He just might be parodying MTV's Jersey Shore (which I'm hoping also explains the way too unbuttoned shirt). He just might be hilarious, but I have pre-judged and there's no turning back.

This yenta's potential match (not the fist pumper) seemed cute enough, so I agreed to meet him, just meet him, no other promises.

Turns out he was nice enough too. We only chatted for about ten minutes after the concert, but nothing about him made me run for the door.

Later, I Facebooked him and, mad props for me, I was bold enough to invite him to an upcoming event at my restaurant via Facebook message.

He declined. Some schedule conflict.

Either way, I'm proud of myself for stepping outside of my comfort zone.

Yentas, keep 'em coming.