I just saw the trailer for a new A24 film called The Materialists. It stars Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal, and it tells the story of a matchmaker who is torn between two men. When this movie hits theaters in June, Matchmakers are going to be a hot topic.
It makes sense that when people call me because they are struggling to find love, one of the things they always ask me about is whether matchmakers are worth the money. There are a ton of matchmaking services out there, ranging from the big corporate shops like Tawkify or Kelleher International to boutique shops like the Janis Spindel Serious Matchmaking or Perfect 12. To make matters more complicated, the prices are just as varied. You can hire some of these companies for as little as $500 per month, but some of them have packages that start at $50k and go as high as a million dollars.
For me, the idea of paying a million dollars, or even $50k, to a matchmaker with no guarantee that I would end up with the love of my life feels like a bridge too far. The reality is that most of the larger corporate groups are just sales companies that are there to sell you a contract promising x number of dates over a set period of time. They can’t promise that you will enjoy any of those dates, just that you will get them.
The problem with most boutique agencies is that they focus heavily on making you as matchable as possible. That means professional photographers, fashion consultants, and sometimes, there are even etiquette coaches involved. I’m not saying that a lot of people couldn’t benefit from a little bit of polishing around the edges, but there is a difference between helping someone get out of their own way and turning them into the person you think they need to be for you to do your job as a matchmaker.
Online dating vs matchmaking
Admittedly, I’m a bit biased here. I’ve been helping people navigate online dating since 2004. Over the years, a lot of people have come to me AFTER wasting thousands of dollars with matchmaking firms. To me, finding a partner comes down to a couple of key factors. You have to have a clear strategy, and (No, this does not mean I think dating is a numbers game), you need to be in a position where you can be exposed to a large number of the right people.
With matchmaking, you are paying a premium for an expert to help you find love through a very small, but motivated, network of potential matches. There are a lot of benefits to this. The biggest is that you don’t have to do the work. You are paying someone to do it for you. The downside is that most matchmakers do not have enough singles in their stable to give you a good chance at a real love connection. Oftentimes, they rely on the willingness of two highly-motivated singles to settle for each other instead of continuing alone in life.
Online dating, on the other hand, can feel overwhelming, and a bit like you’re drowning in a sea of less-than-optimal choices. That is where people get trapped into thinking it’s a numbers game, when really it is just a patience game. At their core, dating apps are just a pile of single people and a tool to sort through them. You don’t have to kiss 100 frogs to find your prince or princess, and you definitely don’t need to swipe right 500 times just to get a match. What you need to do is have a great profile, accurate photos, a strategy on how to approach the people you think might be compatible matches (that is very different from firing a like off at everyone you think is vaguely attractive), and most of all, you need patience.
Aside from lackluster profiles, bad pics, and wasting opportunities with bad first messages, a lack of patience is one of the key reasons people fail. The crazy thing is that it isn’t even your fault. Dating sites are great tools, but they are also businesses. They are designed to keep you grinding because it makes them more money. However, grinding won’t make the right person appear in front of you any faster. I’ve seen people find the love of their lives within 72 hours of joining a dating app, and I’ve seen people spend a year on a dating app without seeing anyone with whom they’d want to connect.
Dating apps want you to think they are giving you an all-you-can-eat buffet of potential romance, but that is not how love works. If we’re being totally honest here, most people aren’t compatible with each other. If they were, no one would be single. If you want to prevent dating fatigue, you need to be patient so you don’t burn out before the right person comes along.
Take my last two online dating relationships as a prime example. My second-to-last relationship was with a woman I met on Match. I had been back on the app for eight weeks before I even found a single woman I thought I was compatible. On that eighth week, I sent out messages to two women. One of them didn’t respond, and the other one did. We hit it off, and we ended up dating for more than six months.
Several months after that relationship ended, I was checking out a new dating site to see if it was worth recommending to my clients. I don’t think I was on there for more than fifteen minutes before I saw one woman’s profile that stood out to me enough that I went from reviewing the dating site to joining it just so I could send her a message. She wrote back, and we celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary last month. It isn’t a question of grinding through the numbers in search of success. It is, however, all about having enough people on a dating app so you have the best chance of finding the people with whom you share the most compatibility.
Does this mean I think that all matchmakers are garbage? No. Matchmaking is literally one of the world’s oldest professions. If some people weren’t doing it right, it would have died out centuries ago. So, with that said, there is actually one whom I trust. Her name is Julie Ferman, and she’s been helping people find love even longer than the twenty years I’ve been writing dating profiles. I don’t make any money to tell people about Julie. She’s just a good person who genuinely cares about helping her clients.
If you aren’t sure whether you want to use a matchmaker or online dating to find the next great love of your life, give me a call, and let’s talk about it. You can call me at 888-447-7634 or message me here anytime.
