Growing up in Maryland, Radha Patel didn’t see anyone in her area using a matchmaker. But she was aware that in India, where her parents had emigrated from, plenty of couples were fixed up—by relatives, respected elders, women in the community trusted to intuit good pairs. For some reason, the idea of it stuck in the back of her mind. It was still lingering there in 2018, when friends, frustrated with dating apps, started asking for help finding love. “I’m not a tech person,” she thought. “What can I do?” Then she realized that she could play matchmaker.
She started setting people up, and that turned into a hobby, which later that year became a business, Single to Shaadi. She and many of the matchmakers she knows saw a wave of new clients in 2020, when the popular Netflix show Indian Matchmaking, which follows a professional cupid from Mumbai, came out. The coronavirus pandemic might have contributed to the surge; especially early on, plenty of people didn’t want to go on more in-person dates than absolutely necessary. And perhaps they also realized that their time was too precious to waste by swiping fruitlessly on dating apps. According to Patel, Single to Shaadi doubled its number of active clients from 2019 to 2020, and again the next year.
The field still has momentum. New matchmaking companies have launched in the past few years, and the matchmakers I spoke with told me they’ve had an uptick in interest recently. Some dating sites have tried to take advantage of the trend, too. In 2021, Match Group, the behemoth company that owns Tinder, Hinge, and several other dating apps, introduced a feature on Match.com through which human coaches suggest two profiles a week for each member willing to pay $4.99 weekly. And earlier this year, a spinoff show hit Netflix: Jewish Matchmaking.
Something about this historical tradition appears to be meshing well with contemporary society. In a time when dating apps give users an incredible amount of control over their romantic life, for some people, letting someone else take the wheel seems more and more appealing.
In societies through time and across the world, people have turned to a third party to find a partner. In Jewish communities, for thousands of years, trusted figures such as scholars and rabbis acted as shadkhan, or matchmakers. In Japan, a nakōdo (“middle person”) was traditionally enlisted to present romantic candidates. Korean families historically visited a jung-me to ask for a pairing, and in medieval Catholic society, the village priest sometimes played a role. In all of these customs and many others, the matchmaker typically worked for the parents of an eligible young person; the families, not just the individuals, were linked. Moira Weigel, the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, told me that until at least the Industrial Revolution, marriage in many cultures was commonly about agriculture: uniting families to share farm labor, and to ensure a next generation that would continue that work.
But starting around the 19th century, Weigel told me, industrialization made that kind of union less necessary for many families; love became a more common ideal. And while matchmaking has remained popular in plenty of cultures, in many others, the search for romance became a more individual pursuit. People still had some informal help; friends and family members might try, welcome or unwelcome, to set singles up. But then came dating apps—an especially solitary form of courtship.
Not only can online dating be lonely—it can be extremely time-consuming. Combing through the apps can feel like a part-time job. In 2016, Hinge reported that only one in 500 swipes on the app had resulted in phone numbers being exchanged. When the company surveyed 300 of its users that same year, it discovered that 81 percent of them had never found a long-term relationship on any swipe-based dating app. In 2018, when the dating company Badoo surveyed 5,000 18-to-30-year-olds in the U.K., it found that users spent an average of 10 hours a week on dating apps.
All of that work gives daters more agency over their love life than they had in earlier eras. They don’t have to wait for a serendipitous encounter, or even leave the house. At any time, they can swipe, send messages, and ask people to meet up. But that sense of control, which for many people is a blessing, can also be a burden—especially if you’re talking with several suitors at once, a common situation on apps. Patel calls it “DIY dating”: All of the analysis and overthinking involved—“What’s not working? What’s right? … Am I waiting too long in between messages? Is the dude on the other end real?—you have to do it all yourself.”
No wonder, then, that matchmakers are having a moment. Many people who can afford to outsource dating labor are eager to do so. Matchmaking services can be very costly: While some companies might promise a few matches for a few hundred dollars, many charge thousands, even hundreds of thousands, for a six-to-12-month-long membership, or for a handful of guaranteed dates. But they advertise a meticulous process, in which experts methodically narrow down a large pool of candidates based on clients’ interests, values, and assessments of past relationships. And people don’t tend to use matchmakers unless they’re looking for long-term commitment, so clients can feel pretty confident that they’re not wasting time on confusing situationships or misrepresented intentions.
A matchmaker can also act as a guide throughout the very vulnerable process of dating. It might be appealing to trade in an algorithm for an intermediary who is warm, comforting, and … human. Unlike the apps, many matchmakers give advice on what to look for in a partner, how to present oneself, when to give someone another shot, even where someone might be going wrong in relationships. I heard about this when the matchmaking company Selective Search put me in touch with their client Connie Weaver, the chief marketing officer for a life-insurance company. She told me she’d been married for more than three decades before her husband died in 2020. When she started dating again, in her late 60s, she didn’t know what she wanted or how to go about finding it. She was a successful executive and people person, skilled at carrying a conversation in any business meeting. “But that doesn’t mean, after 35 years,” she told me, “that I was good at this.” At Selective Search, “I had someone take me by the hand and give me confidence,” she said.
Weaver’s second match was someone she likely wouldn’t have swiped right on, had he been on an app. She hadn’t wanted to date anyone in medicine—his field. (She’d had bad experiences.) But she decided to have faith in the process. “You have to trust that they’re going to draw out of you the real you,” she told me. Four months later, Weaver’s still seeing him; it’s new, but it feels special. “I can’t be happier,” she told me. “Everybody says that I’m glowing. And I haven’t glowed for a long time.”
For people floundering in the dating world, the idea that experienced chemistry professionals could pick up on qualities hidden deep within you—and use them to lead you to someone you might have missed—could be very enticing. But in order for matchmakers to do that, they’d probably need to read beyond what their clients tell them. Humans don’t tend to be very good at deducing what we want for ourselves, Eli Finkel, a Northwestern University psychologist who studies romantic attraction, told me. In some studies, researchers have asked participants what they look for in a partner—and found that their answers don’t predict the type of people whom they really go for. And people tend to be drawn to the same qualities anyway; if you’re searching for someone who’s, say, attractive, nice, and funny, you’re not exactly unique.
Even if matchmakers try not to take clients at their word, Finkel thinks predicting compatibility in advance is inherently an uphill battle. “A whole lot of what makes us compatible with people is emergent,” he told me. “That is, it starts to exist after we’ve met.” Even then, chemistry is complex and mysterious, and based partly on luck. He spitballed an example: Maybe one person on a date says they’re from Arkansas, and the other says, Oh! I went to Arkansas on this road trip, and I went to Joseph’s Mother’s Deli. Have you been there? How well the evening goes might depend, in part, on the answer to that question, because yes and no will spin the conversation off in different directions. Perhaps both people have been there, and they compare notes, and that leads to laughter, to an inside joke, which feels like a spark.
But love’s enigma is part of matchmakers’ allure. If you don’t have the answers yourself, you can at least hope that someone else does. Weaver told me she sees matchmaking as both “an art and a science.” On the one hand, it’s comforting to think that there’s a compatibility code that can be cracked. On the other, we don’t want romance to be too clinical, deduced purely from a couple of interviews or a detailed questionnaire. Michal Naisteter, a Philadelphia-based matchmaker and co-host of the podcast The Yentas, told me that that’s part of why people turn to her—and, generally, to humans rather than algorithms—for help. “Some of this process is miraculous,” she told me. “It’s a little cosmic.”
This is the modern approach to romance: People want efficiency, but also humanity. They want to be independent, rather than relying on family, but they still want guidance; they want options, rather than just choosing from whatever handful of suitors are in the area, but they don’t want to spend hours sifting through them. Contemporary matchmaking sits at the fulcrum of humans’ opposing impulses when it comes to love: It tries to balance modernity and tradition, to outsource labor, and to give people an ally in a lonely dating world, without removing their autonomy.
Patel is just one of the many matchmakers trying to show customers that they can have it all. She gave her company the tagline “Not your parents’ matchmaker,” and she’s modernized her process: She doesn’t match based on caste. She makes a point to work with people of various religions, as well as different sexual and gender orientations. Single to Shaadi doesn’t work with clients’ parents (though Patel has another matchmaking company that’s more family-oriented), and Patel tries to keep her services relatively affordable—starting at just over $100—so that younger singles can pay without involving their families. It looks a little different from the matchmaking she grew up hearing about, but it’s not unrecognizable. She hasn’t gotten rid of the essential perk: the gift of not needing to know exactly what you want, because you’re not making decisions alone.
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