Successful Matchmaking Depends on You!


As a matchmaker, I’m often stumped as to how to get clients to stop treating the matchmaking process the same way as they treat internet dating because successful matchmaking depends on you! What do I mean? Well, typically when singles go to dating sites, they enter their search criteria and start skimming through the photos looking for someone who fits their preferred “look”. This immediately eliminates a lot of great possibilities that don’t have a chance simply because they don’t pass this hasty and superficial stage of elimination. Sure, we all have a preference for what appeals to us in the looks department, but a profile photo is not the best way to judge whether or not someone will appeal to us “in-person”. Just scroll through most dating profile photos – they are typically NOT the best representation of what someone looks like, and crucial factors that draw us to another person – such as confidence, personality, and the individual mannerisms that make up a BIG portion of our attraction for someone just don’t come through in a one-dimensional photo. This is why photos are a terrible method of determining physical attraction. You’ve GOT to meet in-person before making this type of judgement.


But I’ve talked about profile photos before, and that is not the topic of this post. The topic of this post is how to get clients to stop treating the matchmaking process as a dating site, so I’ll continue… On a dating site, if someone passes the photo test, their profile is then read – or should I say scrutinized – and often, it’s not scrutinized to find similarities, it’s scrutinized to find all the reasons why this match won’t work, and why he/she shouldn’t be considered.


It boils down to a very few profiles that actually pass these physical and written “exams” (as if one could ever possibly get a genuine impression of another complex human-being based upon one or two photos and a basic description of their likes and dislikes). The very few who pass all of this scrutiny may then be contacted and if neither person says or does anything off-putting during this tentative period, the two singles may finally meet in-person.


This is also how most clients handle our journey together. I send a photo/profile of someone I feel could be a good match, but instead of the client trusting my intuition and my reasons for the match, they respond to the information just like they respond when surfing dating sites, by finding all sorts of un-informed and superficial reasons why the match is not worth contacting. Matchmaking is not online dating. Clients come to me because online dating is NOT working, so why treat the matchmaking process the same way? Doesn’t that almost guarantee that the matchmaking process won’t work either? Well, yes!


The most successful client is someone who receives the profile and photo of a potential match and trusting my intuition, agrees to be in contact with the match to better determine if the person has potential of being a “fit”, and optimally to make a date to meet face-to-face where one can realistically judge whether or not there is a physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional connection with this person. There is just no other valid way to make this determination! Ruling someone out based on the profile alone is a very lazy way to treat the matchmaking process. If you’ve gone to all the trouble to contract a matchmaker and forked out the cash for the matchmaking fee, don’t you owe it to yourself to get every single ounce of potential out of our time together? I think so!! 


I encourage clients to do exactly what I’ve described in this post, yet many simply do not take my advice.… So, I’m baffled, and instead of beating my head against the wall, I’m expressing myself here. Maybe one of my readers can provide the solution?