Date ‘Concierge’ Helps Busy New York Couple Plan Manic Pixie Dream Dates

It takes a lot of effort (or at least attention) to plan dates that don’t revolve dutifully around Amazon Prime, far too much effort for overtaxed young professionals in New York to do it themselves. So, while couples like 27-year-old Bianca Caampued and 24-year-old Aaron Small set about becoming paragons of capitalistic hustle, their date planner Brenndon Knox, who’s ordained himself the couple’s “Secretary of Date,” orchestrates rendezvouses that seem like they’re straight out of a vapidly quirky Focus Features romantic comedy about a workaholic PR-something and the unemployed amateur roller hockey player with a brain tumor she’s fallen for.

According to The Daily, Caampued and Small found themselves entrenched in a new relationship without time to plan the sort of complex dates that would be worthy of their attention, dates like those you’d maybe see on a reality dating show — making gourmet tacos, donning prom outfits and meeting in Whole Foods, or ice skating with the elusive snow dolphins of Central Park (snow dolphins are not what a strictly literal person would call “real”). Rather than simply give up and, you know, start dating when they actually had a little brain space to devote to the enterprise, they posted a craigslist ad for a date planner who would arrange their meetings for $12.50 an hour.

Instead of being sold a moldy mattress or being ritualistically disemboweled by an internet savvy cult, the couple found Knox, who started strategizing their dates with all the tenacity of Rommel in North Africa. (Caampued also brought a Wisconsin college-student named Holly on board to help with some logistical details). Caampued and Small insist that the goal of hiring a date planner is to help enliven their dates and dream up activities take them “out of their comfort zone.” As if to prove just how far out of their comfort zone Knox is willing to lead his overworked clients, the Secretary of Date sports something that we might call a pompadour mohawk, and happily sends the Caampued and Small to foreign films bereft of subtitles or out into the park to distribute flowers to strangers, while all the while the hapless daters are forced to ask themselves, “Are we in love now? How about now?”