In my last post, I discussed a film about matchmaking that I was asked to comment on during a group presentation.
The film dealt with a culture where parents would find marriage prospects for their children, young adults who were brought up to accept and embrace this practice.
The advantages of this practice are that:
- Parents understand their children best. After a lifetime of raising them, they have the best appreciation for their likes and dislikes, their temperaments and attitudes.
- Parents have their children’s best interests at heart. They are truly invested in finding the “right match” for their kids in order to promote long-term family harmony and the probability of grandchildren.
Of course, this intimate knowledge on parents’ parts can often backfire, causing the potential for heartache when marriages turn out badly.
Often the very intimate knowledge that parents bring to the table is the very thing that distorts their ability to see their children objectively.
Consider the plot in “Fiddler on the Roof”, where Yenta the matchmaker proposes Lazar Wolf, the butcher, as a match for Tevye’s eldest daughter. Had she gone along with that arrangement, she would have been miserable, although well fed!
Instead, she followed her own heart and persuaded her father to agree to her marriage to a poor tailor, whom she truly loved.
Of course, the single life in the Washington, DC area is a far cry from the Polish village or ‘shtetl’ where “Fiddler” took place.
Today’s singles are independent and ambitious, while still holding out hope that their romantic ideals will be realized.
My matchmaking practice consists of studying my clients’ culture, background and relationship with their parents, along with the clients’ relationship histories, to arrive at a deep understanding of what makes each person tick.
They then communicate their vision of the person they’d like to meet.
It’s my job to translate that into the right match, while accepting the reality that physical chemistry isn’t something any matchmaker, even parents, can provide. That’s up to nature itself.
What makes my approach more current and effective is the variety of possibilities open to my clients.
While common ground is an important predictor of success in a relationship, access to a large pool of people can yield referrals to people who members would otherwise never meet.
Unlike online dating, I meet and carefully vet all prospects and assess whether peoples’ value systems are compatible. This compatibility can surprisingly exist even despite peoples’ cultural and religious differences.
In over 26 years in this business, I’ve facilitated over seventy marriages and hundreds of relationships for varying lengths of time.
This experience puts me in the best position to gauge the probabilities of success. Everyone deserves a shot at happiness. Working with an experienced professional as myself, rather than online dating, or your mother’s well meaning, but misguided efforts, is my recommended course of action.