By Nancy Rugart Plummer, Columnist, The Times
“Nancy, your last column convinced me a dating coach could fix my process. But I keep seeing matchmaking services too, and honestly, paying someone to set me up feels old-fashioned. Isn’t that what the apps already do for free? What could a matchmaker possibly offer that Hinge can’t?” Bill, Berwyn – 62
What a wonderful question, Bill, and I’ll let you in on a secret: matchmaking isn’t old-fashioned. It’s the original technology, and it worked for thousands of years before anyone swiped anything. What’s actually old-fashioned is expecting an algorithm that profits from keeping you single to hand you the love of your life.
Let me explain what I mean.
The apps are in the attention business. Every hour you spend scrolling is revenue for them. A matchmaker is in the outcomes business. I only succeed when you delete the app because you don’t need it anymore. Think about which of those two you want working on your love life.
Here is what that difference looks like in practice.
A matchmaker vets people. An app verifies emails. When I introduce you to someone, I have spoken with that person. I know they are single, I know what they are looking for, and I know whether their life matches their profile. Nobody in my world shows up two inches shorter and ten years older than advertised, because I’ve already met them.
Everyone in a matchmaker’s pool is serious. The apps are full of people who are bored, half-out of a relationship, or collecting matches like trophies. When someone invests in matchmaking, they have made a decision about what they want. You are no longer fishing in a lake where most of the fish aren’t hungry.
You get a feedback loop. When an app date goes nowhere, you get silence. When one of my introductions doesn’t click, I hear from both sides, and I use what I learn to make the next introduction better. Every date makes the process smarter. On the apps, every date just resets to zero.
Your privacy stays yours. No photos floating around for your coworkers, your ex, or your kids’ friends’ parents to stumble across. For many of my professional clients, this alone is worth the fee.
And the biggest one: someone else carries the burden. My clients are accomplished people. They run businesses, raise families, care for aging parents. The one thing they don’t have is twenty hours a week to swipe, screen, chat, and get stood up. Matchmaking gives you back your evenings and hands the searching to someone who does it for a living.
I have a new client who spent a year on the apps before he called me. He is successful, the kind of successful that shows up on a balance sheet, and the apps figured that out about him fast. Every woman they served him was in his same bracket. Impressive titles, impressive homes, impressive everything. A year of that, and none of them fit his criteria. He had started to believe the problem was him.
So we sat down and had a real conversation, the kind I have with every person before I introduce them to anyone. Thirty minutes, just the two of us. About twenty minutes in, he started telling me about his mother, who taught second grade for thirty-one years and knew every child in the building by name. He talked about doing his homework at the kitchen table while she graded papers. He lit up. Nothing he had said about a single one of those app dates had made him light up like that.
Then I asked him what he was actually looking for. He said, “Someone sweet. A woman who shows up for people, quietly, when there is nothing in it for her.”
Nobody had ever asked him. The algorithm had just looked at what he had and matched him accordingly. That is not matchmaking. That is sorting.
Now, I’ll be honest with you, because honesty is the whole point of working with a person instead of a platform. Matchmaking is not magic. No matchmaker has a soulmate in a filing cabinet, and anyone who guarantees you love is selling something else. What a good matchmaker guarantees is a better process: real people, honestly represented, seriously intentioned, thoughtfully chosen for you, one at a time.
The apps hand you a haystack and wish you luck. A matchmaker’s job is to hand you needles.
So no, it isn’t old-fashioned. It’s just human. And after a decade of watching what the swiping economy has done to good people’s hope, I’d argue human is exactly what’s due for a comeback.
The right person is out there. Let’s go find them together.
And if you would like to be considered as a candidate for one of my matchmaking clients, fill out this quick form: allaboutconnecting.org/candidates. There is no cost to join my candidate network right now. I do the work of finding your person. You just tell me who you are.
Here’s to finding the love of your life and building the life that you love!
Nancy Rugart Plummer, M.Ed., is the founder of All About Connecting, a dating coaching and matchmaking practice serving professional singles on Philadelphia’s Main Line and beyond. Learn more at allaboutconnecting.org.
