Three Signs Your Matchmaker Needs an Intervention
This is definitely not about Barbara Gordon.
Barbara is intelligent, observant, highly competent, and usually right. These are excellent qualities in a vigilante.
Of course, this isn't about her. This is meant for a person who has decided she understands everyone else’s love life better than they do. Not Barbara Gordon.
So, for purely educational purposes, here are three unmistakable signs that your matchmaker does, in fact, need an intervention.
She no longer asks what you want. She tells you what you will eventually realise you want.
You might think you are not interested in dating anyone.
You might even believe that the person she has selected is entirely wrong for you. That is fine. You simply do not have all the information yet.
Fortunately, your matchmaker does. She has examined your personality, your romantic history, your childhood trauma, your interpersonal compatibility, and several conversations you did not realise were being evaluated.
Your objections are not evidence that her theory is wrong. They are merely another stage in the process she has already predicted.
This is not matchmaking anymore.
This is an investigation in which you are the last person permitted to see the case file.
Intervention status: required.
She creates an entirely fictitious surveillance mission so that two people will spend weeks watching absolutely nothing together.
A normal matchmaker might arrange a dinner.
A matchmaker (not Barbara Gordon) who needs an intervention invents suspicious activity, constructs an operational justification, assigns Steph and Wally to conduct surveillance together, and allows them to spend several weeks monitoring a target that does not exist.
There is no criminal conspiracy.
There is no meaningful intelligence to gather.
There is only an empty location, a great deal of unnecessary observation, and two people being given enough uninterrupted time to develop feelings under what they believe are legitimate vigilante circumstances.
The fact that it might work does it alarming. And, in many ways, it makes it worse.
Intervention status: immediate. Take away the earpiece.
She is reorganising other’s romantic lives so she does not have to examine her own situation with Dick.
This is the most serious sign.
Your matchmaker can identify Steph’s unspoken needs, Tim’s emotional blind spots, Jason’s self-destructive habits, and the exact person each of them should supposedly be pushed towards.
She can analyse every glance, argument, contradiction and unresolved attachment around her. She can create plans. She can create backup plans. She can create fake missions that continue for weeks.
What she cannot do is look directly at Dick Grayson and ask herself what exists between them, what she wants now, or why involving herself in everybody else’s relationships feels so urgent.
Barbara is not simply matchmaking because she enjoys solving romantic problems.
She is treating other people’s feelings like cases because cases are easier than vulnerability. Steph, Tim and Jason become puzzles she can organise while her own history with Dick remains safely unresolved.
At this point, do not allow her to open another file.
Prepare for a detailed presentation explaining why everyone else’s emotional crisis is more urgent than hers.
Intervention status: overdue.
The problem is not that Barbara is bad at matchmaking.
(Yes, we must now accept that we might be talking about Barbara Gordon).
The problem is that she's clever enough to make her plans work, stubborn enough not to recognize when she's crossed the line, and persuasive enough to convince herself that ethical issues can be discussed after the fact. All this is seasoned with criticism of each of these things, but directed at Bruce.
Which is, unfortunately, much more interesting.
You can read the fanfic here.
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