Secrets of a matchmaker....Insider Tips for the average dater

Secrets of a Matchmaker...

​A weekly advice column featured on Tawkify's blog Heartalytics. Every Friday I will be releasing a trick-of-the trade to help the average dater find love amidst this crazy world of online and offline dating. Comments, questions, and feedback are welcome and encouraged.

One day, after venting some of the frustrations I’d had finding matches for my clients, my matchmaking mentor, longtime Tawkify matchmaker Jules Armet, said to me: “as matchmakers, we take on the pain points of dating for our clients.” This stopped me in my tracks and immediately launched 

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some deeper self-reflection. All the “pain points of dating” suddenly flashed before my eyes, and then faded into the background as my desire to be a great matchmaker struggled into focus. It was like the moment you adjust the zoom lens on a DSLR camera -- my desire to be a good matchmaker suddenly came into sharp focus as all those pain points blurred into subtle background shapes. I realized that I do what I do because helping people find love is important to me. I want to make this crazy game of dating easier so that I can help people achieve the ultimate end goal of the game --  that deep love, acceptance, and partnership that we all seek. 

The pain points are so real that sometimes it’s hard to remember that goal. Close your eyes for a second and recall all the no-shows, the flakiness, the miscommunications around timing and scheduling, the three-day (or longer) text response times, the ghosting, the “unmatching,” the misdirected angry responses, you name it. As Jules also taught me about matchmaking, when it comes to a job, it is not useful to take on the attitude of “this is stressful.”  Instead, it’s important to reframe the idea of matchmaking from one of getting things done or “execution” to “problem solving,” and to look at each new situation as an exciting challenge rather than a botched or failed attempt. 

Tackling the problem of dating from the angle of “this is my job” has been helpful, and it has allowed me insight into the process of dating that would likely not have been possible otherwise -- insights that I would like to share with you in this weekly column. I recognize that for most of you, you would rather online dating NOT feel like a job, and I hope that my learnings can help streamline and optimize the process for you.  

Through my continued conversations with Jules and other successful matchmakers, and through my own evolution in the process, I’ve found ways to make the process of finding matches more efficient, optimal, bearable, humane, effective, growth-oriented, and FUN.  Having reframed my perspective in this way, I’d like to share with you some of the tricks-of-the-trade this matchmaker finds useful in striking matches in a modern world laden with so much interference.

I’ll be releasing secrets each week that I invite you to ponder, question, try on, and assimilate in your own way. I welcome the feedback of daters out there as well as other matchmakers, so that I too can ponder, question, try on, and assimilate your experiences and adjust my approach or advice to adapt to your concerns or questions. After all, that responsiveness and growth-oriented mindset is what this process of modern dating is about (in my opinion.) At the end of the day, we can’t control when we’ll meet our soulmate or how they will act, but we can change how we show up and how we feel in the process. 
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