When Barry Brodie, 60, got a call from FindYourFaceMate.com explaining that his face and Martha Stewart’s were a perfect match, the talkative, theatre-loving New Yorker was utterly speechless.
“It was shocking. At first, I was very suspicious,” Brodie tells me on his lunch break at New York's Forest Hills High School, where he is a guidance counselor. “My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, are they kidding?!’”
FindYourFaceMate—which discovered the match after creating a celebrity profile for Stewart— wasn’t kidding. His compatibility with the domestic superwoman herself was “fabulous,” a site representative told him. Suspicion squashed, Brodie began dreaming the dream of dating Martha. And he liked it.
“I’ve been sleeping in your sheets and using your towels for a number of years,” Brodie quipped in a mock Martha introduction.
Humorous, bright, and interesting, Brodie sounds like just the type of man Martha—who signed up for Match.com to the delight of the nation Tuesday—has been looking for. A longtime teacher of special education students, Brodie went back to school to get his Master’s degree so he could “get more one-on-one time” as a guidance counselor. On top of devotion to his family (“I love my daughter more than anything”) and self-declared love for animals (“I miss my shitzu-poodle, my ex-wife took her!”), he's got design chops to boot, spending his free time of late nursing a passion for interior design as he tries to art-deco-fy his new digs.“I think Martha and I would have some things to talk about on a date,” he assures me.
Talking points aside, what would a date with the domestic superwoman actually look like? With calm confidence, as if he’s dreamed it all before, Brodie paints a picture.
“We would go somewhere in the city, maybe stroll around Central Park. Probably grab brunch—or maybe even dinner. Pasta. Or seafood.” Brodies assures me, though I didn't ask, that it wouldn’t be all fun and games. “There would be really great conversation. That’s what’s critical.”
Someone's been doing his homework. In Stewart’s now-publicly available Match.com profile, the media maven touts intellect as her most sought-after trait. “While I’m open to all kinds of people, and love to be surprised, here’s what I know I appreciate in a man: Someone who’s intelligent, established, and curious.” (Match.com is owned by IAC, the parent company of The Daily Beast.)
But as any single person knows all too well, attraction is everything. While the two may look great on paper, whether they have the “optimal chemistry” that FindYourFaceMate aims to find is yet to be determined.
The match between Stewart and Brodie, a spokesperson for the website explains to me, is the product of an intricate algorithm that studies 67 points on each individual’s face. The two were paired, essentially, because of their similar facial structure. It’s all a bit techy, yes. But for Stewart, who admits on Match.com that she likes the “efficiency of online dating,” it might be just what the doctor ordered.
As Brodie and I laugh about the about the insane perfection that would likely be his and Stewart’s wedding, I toy aloud with her would-be married name “Martha Brodie.” After a roar of laughter, he chuckles back: “I bet it would be Barry Stewart instead.”