Incredible piece.

It's basically a double-ad: for the matchmaking service Agape Match and for the featured guy himself, Joseph Pascaretta (hotshot AI executive, blah-blah; very short, lots of work travels and social occasions).

Clearly very high-end matchmaking but still including quite interesting reflections on the modern dating landscape

Pascaretta has dabbled in the apps casually, thanks to a few colleagues who set him up with profiles on Hinge, Bumble and The League, but he thinks they’re superficial. Strictly a numbers game. Matchmaking may sound like “voodoo” or “witchcraft” to some of his friends and family, he said, but he feels there is nothing like having a team of people who understand you out there searching for Mrs. Right for you, hyping you up.
He was four months into his six-month, $25,000 contract with Agape Match, so he still had free dates coming. He still felt optimistic that something would work out. If you counted his previous two arrangements with the company, going back nine years (with a pause during the pandemic), he had paid the matchmakers roughly $65,000 and gone on approximately 40 first dates, and 20 second dates — only one of which led to a relationship.

If you have the means, and you're looking at it as search costs for the most important decision/investment you make in your life, paying a matchmaking firm 25 grand seems sort of reasonable:

This summer, Agape Match had 15 current matchmaking clients — a fairly typical load — all men, except for one woman, which is unusual for the company. Avgitidis has found her niche with straight men — partly because she finds they are the most receptive to her often blunt feedback, and partly because of her database of singles. She has found it easier to amass a large group of attractive, successful and datable women than an equivalent large group of men.

"However grim the dating environment, it remains unusual for someone to turn to a matchmaker when looking for a partner."

Avgitidis has worked as a matchmaker since her early 20s, but she feels as if something has shifted among daters in the last year. The apps have worn people down while simultaneously giving them the sense that they have unlimited options. At the same time, social media is awash with talk of green flags and red flags and dating absolutes. Throw in the astronomic rise of A.I. chatbots designed to endlessly flatter and reassure and there are a whole lot of daters now who have begun to mistake compromise for settling, Avgitidis lamented.

she thinks well-intentioned meddling is exactly what is missing from modern dating. People used to get set up by friends and family, Avgitidis says. They’d meet at a cookout or a house of worship or flirt for hours at a bar. Now, their primary means of connection is mindless swiping, she said: on the couch while half-watching a TV show, standing in line at Starbucks, even sitting on the toilet.

"Dating right now has become an incredibly lonely activity,” she said. “It used to be a community endeavor.”"

The story goes on, reflecting quite painfully on Pascaretta's troubles finding a suitable mate -- even at one point pursuing, nay, obsessing over, someone who wasn't interested back:

It hung there between them: the unavoidable reality that you can spend thousands of dollars to insulate yourself from many of the pains of modern dating, but that no amount of money can help if the person you really like simply does not like you back.

Ouch.

How did you find your spouse, Schtackers?

https://archive.md/GWFUH