I’m a Manhattan Matchmaker. 300 Women Formed a Discord Server to Curse My Death.

My name is Mark Carter. I've run a dating agency in Midtown Manhattan for almost ten years.

The business started in a single cubicle. Now I've got a proper office—the kind with a window that looks out onto the Starbucks on the corner of Fifth Avenue. In this line of work, most agencies eventually set rules: no women over thirty-five, that sort of thing. I don't have that rule. My rule is simple: if there's even one thing about a person that makes my stomach tighten, I politely decline. Age has nothing to do with it.

What do I mean by that? A woman who spends forty minutes at our first meeting walking me through her ex-husband's divorce settlement, clause by clause, from memory—that qualifies. A woman who sits down to fill out the intake form and the first thing she asks is who did the feng shui in my office, because she knows a guy who's better—that qualifies. And then there's the type who doesn't say anything particularly wrong, but you talk to her for twenty minutes and walk out realizing you've been holding your breath the entire time. I decline those too.

Over time, you build a reputation. Manhattan is a small town dressed up as a big city. The finance people, the law firm people, the art world people—the circles all overlap. Someone refers a client to you, someone else drags you into a group chat to trash you. You decline enough people, resentment accumulates. But I didn't expect them to organize.

They formed a support group. They called it the "Mark Carter Victims Alliance."

I only found out recently. A long-time client—let's call her Emily; I'd rather not use her real name—asked me to meet for coffee. We were at that little kiosk in Bryant Park. She took a sip of her oat milk latte and said, Mark, you've been posted online. I asked what she meant. She slid her phone across the table. A screenshot of a Discord server, the name exactly what I just said, with a skull emoji tacked onto the end.

My first reaction: that's great.

I said, Emily, you know I've always hoped the people I turn down would figure things out for themselves instead of waiting for someone else to match them. Now they've built their own community. They're meeting each other, introducing each other, waking each other up. Isn't that what I've been saying all along? Self-reliance. Good for them.

Emily looked at me. The expression on her face—how do I describe it? Like watching someone in Times Square throw up a peace sign at absolutely nobody, convinced someone's taking their photo. She said, Mark, you don't actually understand what this group is for, do you?

That night, she sent me an entire folder of chat logs.

I sat in my office, staring at a five-year-old Dell laptop, scrolling for over an hour.

They'd posted my photo in the group. A picture I'd never even seen, pulled from the "About Us" page of our company website. I was wearing my blue suit, smiling like a guy selling insurance. They'd photoshopped two lines across my face. The top one read: THIS MAN IS SOCIALLY DECEASED. The smaller line underneath: "Forward to three sisters to ward off cursed romances."

Someone had photographed the company nameplate too. They'd walked through the lobby of our building, taken a picture of the directory with our suite number, and posted it in the group with the caption: "Save this address. Swing by sometime and spit." A string of replies followed. One person said spitting was too cheap. Another said her office was on the next block and she'd start dropping by every day after lunch.

That's when I saw the dolls.

Not the kind children play with. These were handmade. Someone had posted a video of the crafting process: twine and coarse burlap, stuffed with something I couldn't identify. A small slip of paper was pinned to the doll's chest, my name written on it in red ballpoint pen. At the end of the video, the person took a sewing needle and began pushing it in, one jab at a time. The needle made a soft little pfft sound each time it pierced the fabric. She'd added a cartoon sound effect over it and posted a laughing-crying emoji.

While she worked the needle, she narrated: Alright sisters, giving Mark Carter a little acupuncture session today. May his business fold soon, his bank account empty soon, his hairline retreat to the back of his skull soon.

There were over three hundred people in that group. Maybe four hundred. I didn't count carefully. Some of them were women I'd declined, and I remembered them. One was named Victoria. I remember her vividly because she showed up for her consultation carrying a book of poetry she'd written herself and insisted on reading it to me. For half an hour. I finally said, Victoria, I'm not going to critique your poetry, but you've been talking to me for an hour and you haven't asked a single question about the kind of partner you want. Every question you've asked has been "What do you think of my poem?" She said, how could you say that, I'm sharing the most precious thing I have with you. I said, I understand, but I run a dating agency, not The Paris Review. I politely declined her. She was one of the most active members in the group.

But most of the names in there, I didn't recognize. Where did they come from? Friends Victoria had dragged in? Strangers who'd seen a rant thread on some forum and followed the scent? Or were they just—how do I put this—people who pass a fire and stop to throw on more wood?

One of the schemes actually made me laugh.

The person who posted it had a profile picture of a chihuahua wearing sunglasses. Her screen name was "Queen Bee Herself." She wrote: Sisters, I've got an idea. Let's pick a weekend and all show up at his office together—and then she laid out two options. Plan A: Mass defecation. Plan B: Mass streaking. The advantage of defecation, she explained, was pure disgust. The advantage of streaking was virality. If someone filmed it and put it on TikTok, the group would blow up, and his business would be famous in the worst possible way.

The replies got serious. Someone pointed out that streaking might not work because his office is too close to Fifth Avenue; the cops would show up fast, probably before everyone finished getting undressed. Someone else noted that defecation posed serious logistical challenges—not everyone can perform on command at a set location and time. A third person proposed a hybrid approach: defecate first, then streak, so that by the time the cops arrive you're already dressed again but the evidence remains. Then someone said, can we please stop talking about defecation, this is a public space, is there a legal avenue here—like reporting fire code violations.

The woman who suggested the fire code complaint—screen name "Rational Bella"—typed out a long, detailed post. She laid out the steps: first, check whether the fire extinguishers in his office are expired. Then see if the exit signs are lit. Then check the evacuation route for obstructions. "Nail him on just one of these," she wrote, "and he's in real trouble."

A row of thumbs-up emojis followed.

I read all of this and felt—honestly? The fire code complaint genuinely sent a chill down my spine. But the defecation-streaking proposal, that one actually made me laugh. Not a "ha ha that's hilarious" laugh. Something stranger. A kind of adrenal comedown, the absurdity of it. You're sitting there, looking at a group of people you've never met earnestly debating whether to come defecate in front of your place of business. What else can you do but shake your head and laugh?

The group's daily ritual was a chain thread.

Every evening around eight-thirty, the same person would kick it off. The format never changed. The title was always: "Tonight's Blessing." The first message was an @everyone ping: Sisters, don't forget to send our guy a blessing before bed. Chain starts now! Then she'd go first: Mark Carter, may you choke on your next sip of water. The replies would pile on, each more inventive than the last. May you step in dog shit every time you leave your apartment. May your credit card get skimmed. May every single date you set up stand you up. May every delivery order arrive cold. May a stranger log into your Netflix account and skip every show you're halfway through straight to the final episode.

The person who always started it had a pinned message at the top of the channel. Just my name, followed by a cake emoji and the phrase: "May you croak soon." I don't know who came up with that word first, but by now it was the group's established vocabulary. They didn't say die. They said croak. It sounded lighter, more cartoonish, more like a joke.

They also made a memorial portrait. Black and white. They'd taken my LinkedIn headshot, framed it with a border of white lilies, and written across the top in cursive script: REST IN PISS. Below it was a reaction button—a funeral wreath emoji. Every time someone clicked it, a new line appeared beneath the portrait: So-and-so has sent a white chrysanthemum. So-and-so has sent a funeral wreath. By the time I scrolled to it, there were nearly two hundred entries. Someone had commented underneath: "Saving these for later, when they're needed." Folded hands emoji.

By the time I finished reading, the office lights had been off for hours. Nothing but the glow of the laptop screen. Outside, the occasional car horn on Fifth Avenue. I stared at that flower two hundred people had clicked on, and I thought about the name of the group—the Mark Carter Victims Alliance. I thought: My name is Mark Carter. I own this dating agency. I am being blessed nightly in a chain thread, stabbed in effigy, and mourned under a fake obituary by three hundred women, some I rejected, some I've never met. And I have an office in one of the best locations in Manhattan with a view of a Starbucks. Both of these facts are true. Neither one cancels the other out.

After all this, my DMs roughly tripled.

All dudes. I don't even know which platform they found me through. Uniformly male users, and every single one opened with the same line: Bro, you're sitting on a goldmine and you're not making TikToks? One guy did the math for me. He said, just put those chat logs up on screen, read out a few of the crazier schemes, control your facial expressions, guaranteed viral. He said, you know authentic content gets three times the views of scripted stuff, minimum. He said, you're already getting dragged, why not convert the people dragging you into your traffic? Call it monetizing hate.

Another one, a self-styled content strategist, sent me a long string of voice messages, each pushing sixty seconds. I sat through a few of them. The gist was that he'd already mapped out a full account matrix for me: main account tells the story, burner account does reaction videos, third account posts nothing but the voodoo dolls and the memorial portrait, set to creepy background music, hashtagged #datinghorror #toxicfemininity, the works. He said, Mark, trust me, your kind of content is algorithmic gold right now. Do this for three months, the ad revenue alone will let you shut down this dumpster fire of a business and retire to Miami.

I didn't reply. Not because he was wrong. On the contrary, on the traffic question, he was probably right. But I was thinking about something else. I was thinking about how I'm currently dealing with a group of people on Discord stabbing little dolls of me. Three hundred people, maybe four, and they've already got me sitting in my office late at night, staring at a screenshot of my own memorial portrait. If I take this content and turn it into videos, push it in front of millions of views—what happens then? Are the people typing "you deserved it" in the comments the same kind of emotional expression as the women sending funeral wreaths in the group chat? Or does something change when the screen gets bigger—does hatred get more abstract, do actions require less thought?

Every day now, when I walk through Manhattan, I catch myself scanning my surroundings an extra time. Not paranoia, exactly. Just—someone crouches down to tie her shoe, you think, oh, she's tying her shoe. Someone stops in front of my building to check her phone, you think, oh, she's checking directions. But you can't deny that in your brain, these two observations now trigger a brief associative calculation. And that calculation gets faster every day.

I've gone to the police. The NYPD precinct for Manhattan South. When I walked in, the female officer at the intake desk took the materials I handed her and raised an eyebrow. She flipped through the printed chat logs, page by page. When she got to the defecation-and-streaking proposal, the corner of her mouth moved. Not a smile. Just that micro-expression that appears on the face of someone who's worked in New York her whole life and is seeing a new variation on an old theme.

She said, Mr. Carter, these contents right now—she pointed at the "may you croak soon" line—they fall into a gray area, legally speaking. No specific threat with a timeline. No concrete plan for bodily harm. The chain thread could be covered under free speech. As for the voodoo dolls, she said, unless you can prove that needle actually pierced you, in New York State that counts as arts and crafts.

I said, so I just wait until they actually show up?

She handed the materials back and said, we've got it on file. If anyone does show up at your place of business and commits an illegal act, call 911 immediately. But until then—

She didn't finish the sentence. Neither of us needed her to.

There's another reason I'm not holding my breath. About a year and a half ago, a woman—let's call her Stephanie, twenty-nine, worked as a gallery assistant in Chelsea—came to me for a dating consultation. Paid for the full hour. The topic of the consultation was: "Rate my looks on a scale of one to ten." I thought she was joking at first. I said, Stephanie, we're a dating agency, not a beauty pageant. She said no, I need you to rate me, I want to know where I stand in the eyes of a professional. She wore me down for twenty minutes. Finally, I said, if you're forcing me to give you a number, by New York standards, maybe a seven—but that's not the point, the point is—

She didn't let me finish that sentence either.

Three days later, I received a lawyer's letter. The thrust of it was that I had conducted an "unsolicited physical appearance assessment" on a client, causing severe emotional distress and triggering her clinical depression. Attached was a diagnosis letter from a psychiatrist, stating major depressive disorder, with a clearly identified trigger: appearance-based discrimination experienced during a dating consultation. The fallout dragged on for about two months. It never reached a lawsuit, but that's when I learned the term "trial by social media." During that period, she posted her version of the story across multiple platforms under the headline: "My Dating Coach Rated My Looks." She left out the context. Left out the twenty minutes of her demanding the number. All that remained was the seven. For two months, my business page got carpet-bombed with one-star reviews—roughly two hundred of them. I lost a third of my client base.

How did it finally end? It didn't. It just stopped. No one apologized. No one paid damages. No one admitted they might have presented a version of events that didn't quite match reality. Stephanie later posted an Instagram photo of herself sitting on a bench in Central Park, sunlight falling beautifully across her face. The caption read: "Slowly healing." Someone commented: "You're so brave."

So when the police officer told me "we've got it on file," the image that came to my mind was Stephanie on that bench in Central Park. Beautiful sunlight.

Then one day, I don't know who started it, someone posted a question online.

An old question. Old enough that I remember people arguing about it back when I first got into this business. It's the kind of question that usually comes up after a few drinks, someone sets their glass down on the table, leans back in their chair, and delivers it in the tone of a person about to drop an eternal dilemma on the group. When you're choosing a wife—do you go for beautiful, or do you go for good personality?

When I saw this topic, my first reaction was a laugh. Not an amused laugh. A dry one, just the corner of my mouth twitching. I thought about the chain thread in that Discord server. I thought about Victoria reading me her poetry. I thought about Stephanie on that bench in Central Park. I thought about the two hundred flowers under my memorial portrait.

The question lays out all the options so neatly. Beautiful. Good personality. As if this were a multiple-choice test with two boxes to tick. As if you just check the right box and the rest of your life flows smoothly from there.

Let me tell you something. I've only ever had one answer to this question. In every single setting where it's been asked, in every debate that's been served up on this topic, I say the same thing, and I never say anything else.

First, the person has to be kind.

And I don't mean the kind of kindness where you say thank you to the delivery guy and share charity posters on Instagram. I mean the thing that happens when the power dynamic between the two of you flips. When she's holding something that could hurt you, and she chooses not to use it. That thing. That's called kindness.

I know some of you are going to say, Mark, you've been burned and now you're projecting one extreme experience into a universal rule. Maybe. But let me tell you something else. I've been doing this in Manhattan for close to a decade. I've seen tens of thousands of single people—men, women, young, old, beautiful, plain, rich, broke. I've helped people get together, and I've helped people break apart. I've seen how thoroughly a person can disguise themselves when they're chasing someone. And I've seen what a person reverts to when they've been rejected. The sweetness of the pursuit, the venom of the rejection—that exchange rate, in New York City's dating market, is depressingly stable.

And you're asking me beautiful or good personality? The question itself smuggles in an assumption: that you at least get to pick one of the two. But has it occurred to you that both can be fake? Beauty ages. A good personality can be performed. Only kindness—that thing reveals itself precisely when you and the other person are no longer facing the same direction.

A beautiful person will smile when you tell her she's beautiful. A person with a good personality will be forgiving when you make a mistake. Those are fine things. But they're fair-weather indicators. What you need to look at is the foul-weather version. Watch how she behaves when she's the one being rejected. Watch whether she posts that unflattering photo of you when she has it in her hands. Watch whether she stops herself, at the exact moment she could destroy a piece of you, and chooses not to.

As someone who's been standing directly in the blast zone for a year and a half now. As someone who's sat in a Manhattan office at two in the morning scrolling through chat logs. As someone whose name has been chain-threaded two hundred times, whose memorial portrait has been photoshopped, who has three hundred people seriously debating whether to defecate in front of his place of business—I understand better than you what version the current world has updated to.