The Authoritative Matchmaker, Dana Peach

In real life, The Authoritative Matchmaker is Dana Peach , a 52-year-old family therapist and the founder and principal of a Tucson-based singles workshop. For the last three years, as the creator and Webmistress of the site that bears her penname, The Authoritative Matchmaker, she has brought her masterful advice on love and dating to cyberspace, addressing the new phenomenon of online courtship.

Peach first learned what it meant to be "truly single" in her 40s when her 10-year marriage ended. "For four frenzied years after my divorce, I dated with flamboyant determination," says Peach. "I came to understand that my experience of relationships as a single woman had everything to do with my own choices and very little to do with the opposite sex or the state of our culture."

As the ThirdAge Dating Center's resident expert on online dating and romance, Dana brings a positive, activist approach to the serious business of finding a new partner in the ThirdAge of life. "Dating is about creating and managing choices," she says.

Through her workshops and consultations, Peach has worked with thousands of men and women whose goal was a long-term, monogamous relationship. "Along the way, I did some hard time in the dating salt mines as a professional matchmaker in a pricey videomatchmaking service," says Peach. "Gradually, gradually, gradually, I built an empirical expertise in a domain for which there is no formal training."

Peach combines this real world experience with her lifelong interests in social history, anthropology, ethology, psychology and human systems theory, along with an "astute study of Cosmopolitan and The National Enquirer and a few years of watching 'Seinfeld'."

She writes a weekly column for The Tacoma Reporter and contributes regularly to several singles magazines, including Atlanta Singles Magazine and Friends and Lovers Magazine.

Peach holds a B.A. in history from the University of California at Davis, and two master's degrees, one from Northeastern University in Boston and a second in counseling and guidance from the University of Arizona.

In addition to her work with ThirdAge, Peach maintains a private consulting service for singles, which she provides by email from her site, "The Authoritative Matchmaker."

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