Silicon Valley. You came in an Uber, summoned with a tap on your phone. You could even use the app to choose the playlist on the car’s stereo, thus ensuring the driver didn’t talk to you. As you crawled through the endless traffic you found yourself reflecting that, really, no one needed robots or driverless cars, when human beings were already this automated.
Megan’s offices were much as you expected. A water feature burbled in the reception area. There were fresh flowers in alcoves, tasteful art was hung on the walls, and the magazines in the lobby ranged from MIT Technology Review to The Economist.
Megan herself, though, was a surprise. You’d been expecting someone like Judy Hersch the news anchor, coiffed and brittle. But although Megan is equally well groomed and even more expensively dressed, her eyes are shrewd and humorous.
“I used to be a headhunter, filling leadership roles in start-ups,” she confides as she leads you into her office. “But so many of my clients asked if I had any friends they could date, I realized there was no one catering to that side of their lives. Tech people might be able to write the code for a dating app, but they’d be the very worst at using it. They don’t have the social skills to decode profiles, they tend to choose on appearance rather than personality, and when they do date, they often have no clue how to behave. So my pitch to them is, no swiping, just old-fashioned matchmaking. Besides, I’m good at it. I’m curious about people. And I genuinely believe that everyone, however strange they may seem, has a soulmate out there somewhere.”
You realize something else about Megan: She’s one of the very few people who immediately talks to you like a person, rather than a machine.
“What about Abbie?” you say as you take a seat on one of Megan’s two enormous sofas. “Was she Tim Scott’s soulmate?”
“Well, he thought so. And he’s my client, so…” She smiles.
“But you weren’t sure?”
She hesitates, then leans forward. “Look, I probably shouldn’t say this. But I knew two things the moment I met Abbie Cullen. First, that Tim was going to fall in love with her. Heck, he was already in love with her. That’s why I made a point of going to talk to her that day. He’d just ignored every single one of the women I was trying to pitch him and gone on and on about this incredible artist he’d hired.” She sits back again. “And second, I knew it would end in tears.”
“Why?”
“Do you know what I mean by Galatea syndrome?”
You shake your head.
“The men who start tech companies…they tend to be a particular type. First, they have impossibly high standards. Second, they have a vision. Which is to say, a view of the world. Often they like nothing better than to impart that view to some receptive, impressionable young person. If the young person is fresh and sweet and drop-dead gorgeous, too, so much the better. And, to be fair, the younger person is often just as keen to learn as the older one is to teach.
“But fast-forward a few years, and the dynamic has shifted. The older person still has the vision, but the younger one has heard it all before. And they’re probably not so sweet and fresh anymore, either. So, inevitably, they move on.”
“Why’s it called Galatea syndrome?”
“From an ancient Greek myth. About a sculptor called Pygmalion, who rejected all the women of Cyprus as frivolous and wanton. Until one day, he carved a statue of a woman so beautiful and pure, he couldn’t help falling in love with it. At which point the statue came to life and loved him right back. He called her Galatea. I guess today we’d say he fell in love with an ideal, rather than a person.”
“I think I know how that feels. On the receiving end, I mean.”
Megan nods. “I did suggest to Tim that jumping into marriage with a woman a decade younger than him, someone he’d only known for a few months, wasn’t wise. But Tim believes in being decisive. The best I could do was get the two of them to sit down and talk through a prenup.”
“I did wonder about that. I read it this morning. It seemed quite…draconian.” You’d wondered if Megan even deliberately set the marriage up to fail, hoping for repeat business.
“The point of the prenup is never the prenup,” she says flatly. “The point