Matchmaking Today!

From a social and historical standpoint, as you probably know, matchmaking has gone in and out of vogue over the centuries and cultures. It was almost universally traditional a century or more ago when marriage was conceived primarily as a social and economic arrangement. In many cultures, parents and families still play matchmaker.

In America, before the internet, there was a tremendous stigma attached to professional matchmaking or placing personal ads in publications. It was seen as overly aggressive and a stamp of desperation, trying to artificially engineer what was supposed to come naturally in bars, clubs, parks, and during the course of life.

But as modern life got more fractured and cities got larger and larger, connecting with people didn’t come so naturally. The internet arrived and on-line dating gradually took off. It took off first in the big American cities where frustrated people knew there was a high probability that there was someone out there for them but had no idea how to access that person. Internet dating has now spread to smaller towns and more rural areas in America, and is gradually becoming more acceptable around the world. There are now over 40 million people internet-dating.

Almost everyone on this planet imagines and anticipates a loving, lasting relationship at some point as part of the natural course of life. It’s almost considered a given, a social and personal expectation and fantasy that’s just part of the general package and timetable of life: schooling, job, a long-term relationship or marriage, and children. Very few humans move into adult life vowing to remain single their whole lives; very few see themselves partying relentlessly into retirement and then getting wheeled into clubs by their nurse.

When you’re in your childhood, adolescence and college years, you are surrounded by peers of a similar age, tons of organic social activity, people hooking up and breaking up left and right, and it’s almost impossible to imagine amid the buzz and promise of youth with your lives stretching before you that you could ever end up alone; you certainly don’t spend a great deal of energy stressing about being single when you are sowing your wild oats.

Some people successfully connect with life partners during these relatively early years but many don’t. Some will have short-lived early marriages and then break up, and then either start looking for number 2, or consciously resolve to stay single.

But to understand the massive popularity of on-line dating and matchmaking, let’s look at the predicament of those who find themselves still single and wanting a relationship as they spend more years in the workforce.

Fast forward a few years past high school and college, and you’re single and no longer surrounded by peers mostly your own age. You are now surrounded by a far more diverse crowd that’s more representative of the broader community, some old, some young, some married, some divorced, some straight, some gay, and some single, but not necessarily appealing to you. You have a relationship here and a relationship there and suddenly, you turn around and your 20s have past, and you realize, “wow, a long-term relationship isn’t quite as ordained as I thought it was.” You start thinking to yourself, “hmmm, I always thought I’d be romantically sorted by now and settled down.”

Adding another layer of complexity to these behavioral and emotional problems is the fact that as people age, the emotional pressure to connect with someone increases as the pool of suitable prospects diminishes with people marrying off. Within this negative psychological and sociological dynamic, both men and women tend to become needier and self-conscious and less secure about our desirability. This is a common predicament for both genders, but it affects women earlier and far more extremely because of their biological clocks. In fact, the biological clock and judgmental social clock work in tandem for women to create an urgency that tends to distort their judgment, behavior and perceptions of their own feelings.

Women suffer from a harsh, inflexible deadline imposed by nature because our fertility starts rapidly declining at 37. A single woman in her late 20s or early 30s, who always wanted to have kids, first has to meet the right guy; now, she’s already been dating for 10 to 15 years and hasn’t met him yet so she’s wondering if, God forbid, it’s going to take another 10 to 15 years in which case she won’t be able to have kids. So she’s got to meet him first, fall in love and then have a relationship of a fairly decent length to get to know each other and give him time to feel comfortable proposing. Now how long is that going to take? When all is said and done, how many years of fertility will she have left to actually have children?

Women start doing that kind of depressing, panic-inducing arithmetic in their late 20s or early to mid 30s, and it continues until they either achieve their goal or give up, whereas men only tend to start those calculations in their 40s and 50s. Biology allows men to have vague deadlines far into the future, along the lines of “well, I’d like to be around when my kids graduate from high school.”

This biological disjuncture overly empowers the men within a single woman’s demographic precisely when she is at her most needy, desperately willing to commit and accordingly vulnerable to making overly hasty or otherwise bad romantic judgment calls.
As single women move into their 40s and are forced to give up on having children, they must contend with single men in their 40s and 50s whose biological and social clocks are now ticking and who are intent on having children and are therefore looking at a younger market of women; alternatively, single women in their 40s and 50s must date divorced men in their 40s and 50s who perhaps have children already along with a full set of financial and emotional baggage and a reluctance to commit for a second or third time.

From the man’s point of view, he goes from being supremely desirable in his 20s and 30s, to maybe a little balding and overweight, and begins noticing that the babes that he has his eyes on are looking for younger men or older men with enough money to compensate for their age.

The differing biological clocks certainly don’t help set emotionally balanced and healthy conditions for bonding with someone.

Add to this the fact that women generally tend to be more romantic than men and feel a more urgent desire to connect that can also distort our judgment; we have so much love to give, we can so precisely imagine ourselves giving that love, that we are in danger of foisting our romantic fantasies, desires and needs onto any poor, unwitting schmuck who just wants to go out for dinner and see how things go. Women are great at diving analytically into why he hasn’t called or why he isn’t calling enough, and I always advise them to take a man’s actions at face value. If he hasn’t called, he’s not into you and the whys don’t matter. If he isn’t calling “enough” by your standards, then you’re already more into him than he is into you and you need to slow down before you start feeling powerless which will affect your desirability. I also advise women with sensitive egos to let men do the calling. Only the most confident woman can call a guy, be rejected and shrug her shoulders and move on.

Most men and women need to try to maintain some objectivity and learn to balance their male and female aspects in order to relate to each other. That’s reflected in the fact that the Buddha is part of our logo. It’s important for anyone who is dating to keep a little objective voice in their heads.

At the end of the day, you have to approach this field with a certain amount of humor. Who knows why certain people connect and others don’t? You can put together two people who make perfect sense on paper and there’s just no spark. The best analogy to use is that matchmakers do is set you up with a buffet of food that you’re not allergic to, and see what you like best.