Commentators often lament the decline of monoculture, but on X, the platform still reliably delivers a daily character or, at the very least, a daily discourse that colleagues can debate around the water cooler. On Tuesday, that figure was matchmaker Blaine Anderson — or, more precisely, one of her disappointed clients.

In a post that has garnered more than seven million views on X, Anderson recounted a matchmaking misfire. Her male client — described as 32, Jewish, working in finance, and "medium handsome" — had proposed a first date at a restaurant whose signature item appeared to be a giant soft pretzel. The woman he was set up with — 26, with an "amazing family, sexy + refined" profile — backed out; she had been expecting something more upscale.

The post went viral instantly, and the internet convened its customary tribunal. Opinions ranged from calling the woman shallow to insisting the man had dodged a bullet, from declaring he deserved to die alone to accusing Anderson of running a scam. One respondent even suggested taking women to a city dump to shoot rats. For Anderson, however, it was simply another day at the office.

Economists who view the world as a collection of interlocking markets have long described marriage and dating as a matching market. It is, though, an unusual one — having more money does not simply allow you to purchase a better outcome, because the other party typically has preferences of its own. A man can pay Anderson $100,000 to search more aggressively, vet more candidates, and engineer better introductions; he cannot pay $100,000 to make the woman he desires desire him in return.

This dynamic means Anderson effectively operates in two markets simultaneously. In the first, she is compensated to uncover what men and women genuinely want from each other. In the second, the extremes of those preferences become content, the resulting outrage propels that content across social media, and millions of people absorb what everyone else supposedly expects from modern 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," Anderson told Fortune. "But I didn't realize quite how opinionated and passionate people would be about it."

Anderson, who operates Dating By Blaine, has constructed an unusually profitable business around the very discourse her post laid bare: modern dating is chaotic, and expectations have become nearly impossible to navigate. She charges exclusively male clients between $35,000 and more than $100,000 for six months of matchmaking services, with pricing determined by how difficult she anticipates it will be to secure a suitable match. Her fee structure places her at the high end of a growing luxury matchmaking market that has expanded as users frustrated by the gamification and fatigue of swipe-based dating apps increasingly seek personalized, human-curated alternatives.

For instance, Anderson works with one client who is 35, attractive, tall, and employed in finance, seeking a woman who is both gorgeous and intelligent. "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." Accordingly, she might charge him closer to $35,000.

Another client is 40, balding, and 5'6". He has a good personality but is, in Anderson's framing, subject to what she calls the "bald tax" and the "short tax" — pushing his fee 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 devotes up to 50 hours per match, sourcing women through friendships, professional networks, Instagram, and LinkedIn. For especially challenging searches, she will dispatch someone to a city to meet women at coffee shops, running clubs, and social events.

What the Pretzel Reveals

To some of Anderson's most vocal critics, Pretzelgate confirmed their worst suspicions. In their view, a man paying tens of thousands of dollars only to be rejected over a restaurant choice signaled either incompetence or, worse, fraud.

But in a sense, Anderson argued, the rejection illustrates exactly what her client is paying for: the cost of a preference.

Modern dating discourse has generated its own competing grand theories for why heterosexual courtship feels so fraught. One camp leans on the internet's expansive interpretation of hypergamy — the notion, widespread in male-dominated online spaces, that women increasingly compete for a narrow upper echelon of taller, wealthier, more attractive men (recall last summer's viral refrain of "finance, 6'5, blue eyes"). The academic term is narrower in scope, and research has shown traditional hypergamy declining as women's educational attainment has risen.

The other camp embraces heteropessimism, a concept coined by writer and academic Asa Seresin to describe the hopelessness with which people — particularly women — discuss straight relationships even as they continue to pursue them. Social media provides especially fertile ground for ritualizing that pessimism, fueled by the rise of "loneliness influencers" who broadcast their solitary lives without friends or children, and by Gen-Z's growing embrace of celibacy.

Pretzelgate was ideal material for both camps. To one side, the woman was simply another entitled dater demanding that a man signal wealth before they had even met. To the other, the man's restaurant selection was yet another instance of men falling short of women's seemingly reasonable expectations.

For Anderson, though, the uproar also functions as marketing. Originally an Instagram user, she began posting regularly on X during maternity leave in 2025, after recognizing that the CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs who constitute much of her client base 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 monitors what goes viral and attempts to replicate it. The most explosive stories, she has found, tend to involve someone breaching a contested norm: a woman expecting an Uber to be sent for her — another viral tweet from the prior week — or a man selecting a first-date venue that reads as too casual. In each case, one party's standards strike half the internet as unreasonable.

"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."

She maintains, however, that she is not deliberately ragebaiting. Virality is valuable only if it reaches people who might eventually place their trust in her; millions of viewers denouncing her as a scammer do not translate into promising leads.

Still, her posting achieves something beyond merely amplifying the dating market's existing grievances: it can alter the preferences operating within the market itself.

She pointed to the cultural fixation on tall men. A woman who had never particularly cared about height can watch other women celebrate it online and begin questioning whether she should. The same dynamic applies to other dating rituals. "One girl makes a post about how she expects an Uber for all of her dates," Anderson said, and suddenly women who had never contemplated the idea find themselves wondering, "'Wait, like, I should be asking that,' or 'Should I be asking that?'"

A Good Chirp

Sometimes the second market even reshapes the first. Following another recent viral dispute over whether a man should send his date an Uber, Anderson's matchmaking team incorporated the question into client onboarding: Would a woman who expects a car be compatible with him, or would that expectation itself signal incompatibility?

"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 handled becoming the internet's main character with relative grace. Anderson said his friends quickly identified him despite her attempt to anonymize the account. While he may not have relished watching millions of strangers litigate his restaurant selection, he did have one observation about Anderson's characterization of him.

"He has a good sense of humor," Anderson said. "He said, 'Medium handsome was a good chirp.'"

"I stand by it."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.