Relationships June 18, 2018
Looking for love in the right places?
It’s 11:47 p.m. on a Friday. You find yourself opening Tinder, prepared for a night of swiping until you pass out from sheer exhaustion.
Ah, modern romance.
When did dating get so difficult? How do people even meet anymore? It’s wild to consider that at one point in time people didn’t have the internet to aid them in their romantic endeavors. You just met people at work, or school, or in a cafe or walking through the park.
I don’t know, I didn’t grow up in that era.
But the thing about Tinder and Bumble and the whole array of what dating has become is that rarely do you encounter someone who has a positive experience with it. There are the few people who actually somehow meet someone they click with, but they seem to be fewer and far between.
What about the rest of us? At this point, using apps like Tinder reveals the disappointing state of the dating pool. Before this becomes too bleak, I have to mention — there’s another option out there: matchmaking services.
No, I’m not talking about that friend who wants to set you up on a million and two blind dates because they swear they know your dream guy or girl. I’m talking professional matchmaking services.
The basic model is that interested candidates contact a matchmaking service, which then leads to an interview, which then leads to them being put into the company’s network. From there, companies choose potential matches from within their own network, while others work in collaboration with other matchmakers. You get paired and meet your date. There’s some slight variation between companies, but that is the basic setup.
Technically, it seems like anyone can really become a matchmaker, but, there is an actual Matchmaking Institute that offers classes and certifications for businesses.
When you go to a matchmaker, you have a face-to-face interview so they really get a sense of who you are and what kind of partner you’re looking for. As one LA-based service, Catch Matchmaking says, they want clients to feel like they’re your friends. That’s how personal the experience should be.
Many services have different levels of their services, with higher pricing meaning more attention and prioritizing of your potential matches.
This isn’t the $10 to $20 fee you might pay for some online dating websites. Costs can range from $100 to $50,000. Of course, the higher end of that spectrum represents celebrity matchmaking then it would the average person.
That end, of course, is going on a date. Anyone who’s used an app or site can tell you rarely do exchanges of flirty messages actually yield dates much less good dates.
Many matchmaking services promise you at least three dates. Even if they don’t lead to anything, you can have the experience of going out and meeting someone new.
It seems like this should go without saying, but using a matchmaking service doesn’t guarantee lifelong happiness. It certainly seems that it makes it easier to find someone you click with, but putting in the effort of meeting up again, making everything actually happen — that’s still on you.
There’s no magic service for love, but it seems like right now matchmaking might be as close as it gets.
