The Cost of Modern Love
I started puzzling over what to write about for this money issue around Valentine’s Day this year – a day on which I happened to read an article in The Cut by Esther Perel, a Belgian psychotherapist focused on unpacking the truths about modern relationships vs the normative ideals… and one of my very favorite thinkers.
In an article titled “Feeling unsatisfied? Blame Romantic Consumerism”, Esther was asked about how, historically, marriage was an economic arrangement between families vs today where it’s seen as an identity project (two individuals seeking self-actualization) that’s made our relationships more or less transactional.
Esther responded with the following, which has stuck with me for months: “In a way, more. We are doing romantic consumerism. I’m shopping for something, and I have a list of what it needs to be. On the one hand, we want to ask more, which is not a bad thing … but we want to pay less. And just as emotional language has entered the business world — where we talk about psychological safety and vulnerability — business language has seeped into romantic relationships. We want “return on investment” and to “hedge our bets” and “this is not a deal I signed up for.”
It got me thinking about how much love has evolved into a true modern marketplace, with almost unlimited options – and a cost to pay for getting in front of the people you’re interested in. Like most things, this probably isn’t fully good or fully bad – it’s just interesting.
And so, I decided to interview a modern-day matchmaker – one of the women behind Modern Love Club (known as the hippest matchmaking service in NYC!) about the cost of finding modern love.
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M: How would you describe what you do for a living?
A: My main responsibility is to take into consideration the kind of romantic relationship that someone wants in their life and do my best to find the right people and to introduce them to that. It should be a mutually beneficial situation for both of them, and they can pursue what they want together. And then along that journey, it’s about listening to feedback about the dates that they’re going on and providing coaching support for ways that I think they could be optimizing their ability to allow love into that relationship and more openness and more generosity. So, in short: connecting and coaching.
M: What does training to be a matchmaker consist of?
A: Actually, it’s a really fun process, particularly for our company, that does pretty analog work. Our founder Amy started as a performance artist listening to people’s stories about love, and she would write down on paper the answers to these interviews. So she literally has a room in her home that’s full of all these binders – thousands of these interviews that she’s done. And one of my first tasks was going through all of the interviews and organizing them, taking in all of this information thousands of people’s romantic histories in New York City and then also learning about the match she’d made. We’ll go out to parties, network, and look through those databases constantly. It’s totally valid to use any resource whatsoever. Like, I’ll definitely look through Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever. People are everywhere, so I don’t want to exclude an avenue for the right person to come to me. I’ll even put out ads on my personal Instagram being like, do you know an amazing person who fits this description?
M: What do you think are the biggest challenges about modern dating? How has it shifted and what are people struggling with?
A: I mean, online dating has provided a whole host of challenges, right? You need to be really clear about your intentions because it’s so easy to see people as a little bit more disposable because it’s a bit like going to the grocery store – with people presented as products, essentially. It’s a challenge for all of us to remember everyone’s humanity and that every single interaction that we have is with a real human being – and just to enforce being kind, in ourselves.
M: Will you talk to me more about how people have become products? I’ve been thinking a lot about dating as a marketplace and would love to hear more of your thoughts.
A: People are literally presented with you flat, with only a few images and a few carefully planned, quippy slogans. So in one way people do present themselves as products, but in part that’s only because these apps only allow us to express ourselves in that way.
But as far as romance and dating go, I am a little bit old school about it. I really think you need to be in someone’s presence and watch their body language and mannerisms and even smell them.
It’s easy to try to present yourself as a product because that’s how people advertise and that’s how influencers present themselves. And so there’s that temptation to be like, Well, if I, like, make the perfect encapsulation of myself – or if I can smush my essence into this one flat representation – I will cut through all the shit and find that person.
M: Why do you think people seem so burned out on dating?
A: Mmm, it’s not as fun because it’s almost like doing a job search in a way. It’s like – oh, I have to go find someone to connect with. I have to use this limited medium and I have to do all these negotiations and I have to say the right things so that they’re going to want to actually meet me in person. And by the time you’ve swiped through tons of people and finally got one that you’re exchanging more than a couple of messages with – there’s a lot of pressure on the actual meeting. There’s that fallacy of expecting to get the same amount out of something as the time you’ve invested in getting it – so by the time you’re actually in the presence of this person, you’re just scanning them for everything that’s right and wrong with them. Like: did I find the right thing? Did I pass the test? Am I going to get the job?
M: I interviewed a young woman the other day in her thirties who was like – my eggs are dying. I need to find a partner. And she was giving herself an assigned two hours to swipe every single day. Getting done with work, and then swiping for two hours. And I was like, jesus, of course you’re not having fun.
A: Two hours. That’s so much. It’s a lot.
M: Are there differences in the types of challenges you see men and women facing in dating?
A: I really feel for the women. I’m just going to be very honest about that. It’s really hard. I feel like particularly in New York City, there are so many impressive, incredible, beautiful women here who are very successful and they have high standards – and they should. And then there’s also what you were just mentioning – about someone wanting to have children and having that kind of deadline that feels imposed upon them.
But overall, I do notice that men are not typically as good at being communicative and patient and sensitive and it feels like their emotional intelligence is a bit lower. And so finding someone for a woman to be able to really deeply connect to in a lot of ways is sometimes a little bit of a challenge.
And then for men – something I’ve noticed is that matchmaking is very expensive. You have to be a certain degree of successful to be able to afford it. One of my partners calls matchmaking a luxury object, and it is. And I’m noticing that men are looking for women who are highly intelligent and successful, but also are going to be really good mothers to their children.
And in order to do that – not all of these women want to give up their careers and attach their lives to this man. They want somebody who’s going to be more like a collaborative partner in life. But I’m noticing that the men are wanting a woman who’s, like, really impressive but also … ready to give it up. You know what I mean?
But for the women who are at the top of their career – they seem to be looking for someone who’s like a collaborative partner at the project of life. Somebody they could start a business with or go traveling with – someone who they can just be very creative and dynamic with. Someone who’s not necessarily attached to the traditional idea of a family and children. And maybe that could be involved, but they could do it in their own way.
M: You talk about matchmaking as a luxury item – how much does it cost usually? And what do you get?
A: The search ranges vary widely. The packages start around $30,000 and go up to $150,000 for six months of searching. And it just depends on how specific and difficult the searches. It’s not like you pay a certain amount to get a specific quality of person. But if someone is looking for someone who is like, Harvard educated, extremely beautiful, comes from a certain place, doesn’t have a child – the more specific a person’s parameters are, the more that we as matchmakers have to pay money out to recruiters to actually be looking for this person for you.
M: It’s like investigating in a way – and sounds an odd amount like my own industry.
A: 100%. Like knowing how to ask the right creative questions, and then finding the right recruiters to find the right guy.
M: Talk to me about the shift to polyamory. Why do you think that’s been accelerating in the last few years?
A: I think partially because of this overabundance of access to the possibility of humans to connect with. I think also it’s kind of economic in a way, because, you know, there’s strong economic reasons why two people lived in a household together and bought a house together, and it made sense for raising a family at that time. But now it’s like – how many of us in this generation are homeowners and can actually afford to do that with one other person?
But I also recognize that we seem to be evolving as a species, romantically. I see humans opening up to a more networked way of existing rather than in these individualized, atomized packets. And so people are recognizing that a connection to one person brings out certain songs in you that another one doesn’t – but that that one brings out a different, beautiful song. And in order to round out the entirety of these portions of consciousness, you need to interact with all these different forces.
Sorry if that was a little woo-woo.
M: Do you see differences in how heterosexual people are approaching dating and love vs the queer community?
A: Oh, yeah, for sure. I perceive queer people as being much more open and generous and almost like, respectful of people’s time in a way where they’re just like, I’m doing what I want to do to make me happy. I want you to do the same. And they’re just very understanding of how they apportion each other’s time. Whereas I feel like when I observe my very, very hetero friends, they really demand a lot from each other. They’re like – you’re my person and you have to be there for me in this way and you have to meet every single one of my needs.
M: What are the stereotypes surrounding matchmaking? Is there any baggage around the field?
A: I think the stereotype would be like if you go to a matchmaker, there’s something very wrong with you because you can’t find someone on your own. And I just disagree with that because what they’re paying for is a curated dating service. We have access to really amazing people and you actually have to be a certain level of amazing for me to think that I want to introduce you to them, you know what I mean?
That’s probably a stereotype that there’s something wrong with you so that you have to, like, pay someone money to do your dating for you. But in reality, you’re trusting someone who has a lot of dating experience and a very wide social network to offer you connections that are going to be enriching to your life. And that’s one of the most valuable things that we can get – period – is other human beings.
M: Something I’ve been thinking about is an Esther Perel article about how words from the business world have found themselves into the love and dating sphere. Like you talk about investment, right? Or efficiency or what you expect on your return or or or or ….
A: I once heard that love follows economic models. So there were the hunter gatherer times and everyone was more tribal and open and probably had like different degrees of relationality with everyone.
And then when it moved into more of a feudal system, it was like, this person owns this plot of land. And therefore they also owned this person on this plot of land. And that’s how we started getting into the very one-to-one monogamous relationship structure that’s evolved, but mostly been consistent for quite a long time.
But now we’re kind of in this gig economy situation where you do several things at the same time. And that’s also happening with love. You have two, maybe three, connections that are important in that way for you. For a lot of people, it’s not for everybody. Obviously.
I don’t know if we can really escape that because the economics of things are so tied to our way of being in the world, whether we like it or not. I can’t exist without a job. And so if that’s deeply ingrained into my understanding of how things work, then I’m going to apply that same mode of thinking to other areas of my life – which is probably where you get a lot of that business language coming from, particularly in super capitalistic America.
I think it’s good to be mindful of those parallels. And also to just remember that real love is something much more open and organic and beautiful and creative – with no ROI attached to it.
-Megan Weisenberger