Why a Real-Life Matchmaker Thought Materialists Was Satire
In Materialists, Dakota Johnson’s Lucy, a young matchmaker, argues that romance is a numbers game. She’s more of an actuary than a romantic — at least at first. What makes a good match is the central question of the film, and the nuances of the answer are more complicated and messy than Lucy might have once expected. Part of what makes Materialists so intriguing is its relation to matchmaking itself: In a dating ecosystem flooded with apps, could one of the oldest professions in the world hold the key to finding the love of your life?
To answer our questions about matchmaking — and the extent to which setting people up can be a real-deal job in the modern age — we called in a real-life matchmaker. Gabi is based in upstate New York and arranges matches virtually near and far. After giving birth early in the pandemic, she began her training with a longtime matchmaker named Rachel Russo, who invites matchmakers-to-be to Zooms to discuss and learn the practice. Gabi now works as a self-employed matchmaker, which is representative of a shift in the industry away from corporate agencies, like the one Lucy works for in the film, toward a more holistic and individual direction. We spoke about navigating first dates, client training, and how matchmaking has shifted away from the model in Materialists.
What was your initial impression of Materialists, both as a moviegoer and as an actual matchmaker?
The movie was tonally bizarre. In the beginning, when they were hammering home the transactional nature and the market of it all — first of all, how many times are we gonna say the word “market”? Like, I get it, we’re in New York — I thought it would be more satirical than the rest of the movie sets out to be. Once the love triangle and the sexual-assault story line started to take over, it fell apart for me. Overall, the movie felt cynical about matchmaking, sure, but especially about single people. It’s true that there are really entitled single people, but in my experience, the people that I’ve worked with are very reasonable. You do definitely encounter guys who want a woman in her 20s, and you meet the women who are like, “I won’t consider a guy who’s not over six feet,” but that’s not the majority of people. When Lucy describes her job like working for the morgue or being an insurance underwriter, I just died inside. That’s the kind of thing we really try to move away from.
That said, I think the movie also gestures toward something very real about how single people feel right now. The dating apps have gamified the entire process. People feel like commodities! You’re running into bots; you’re running into people who are misrepresenting themselves. It’s not really that safe. To meet the movie on its own terms, the value proposition of matchmakers is that we are a lot safer because we vet people personally.
What does that vetting process look like?
Every matchmaker is different. It’s an unregulated industry, so there’s no set of standardized rules for screening, but a lot of matchmakers care about this issue a lot. There are traditional background checks and social-media checks, but most importantly, it’s the qualitative stuff, which it never seemed like the agency in the movie did. Part of the reason why I got into this work is because I see how people have suffered in abusive relationships or bad marriages, and nobody teaches you really what to look for in a relationship unless your parents had a perfect, beautiful, ideal marriage as representative. And how many people can say they’ve had that?
I integrate coaching into my matchmaking as a rule. I go on mock dates with male clients so that I can assess for red flags and things like that. I’ll ask pretty probing questions, in part because a lot of my clients want to have families. In a more conventional interview setting, you can miss red flags because people might just say stuff to please, but in the context of continued coaching or a mock date, people tend to open up a bit more. If people are awkward, that’s one thing. I have one client — a super-sweet guy; he’s off social media, his dad was a farmer, he himself just really wants a family — but he is pretty awkward. We can work on that; it’s a process. But one time I had to let a client go because his communication was so bad. He snapped at me at one point, and, you know, maybe someone else will want to work with him, but I decided to pass.
In the movie, Lucy does these check-ins with her clients the day after their date. Do you do those as well?
The actual matchmaking contract is pretty transactional: You have a catalogue of potential singles and then you’re looking to match certain criteria in order for the match to actually be viable. How it might work is that I will reach out to a potential match and say, like, “Hey, I have this client. Would you just be interested in going on a date with them?” Sometimes it’s another matchmaker’s client that I find in a shared database so the request then goes through them too. Everyone says “yes” to the match. I’d arrange the date. Matchmakers try to streamline everything for the daters, especially when it comes to giving out phone numbers. People will screw that up constantly. I heard a story about a guy who texted the woman, and she didn’t answer for, like, four hours, and he called the matchmaker and he was like, “Cancel the date.” Anyway, clients fuck that part up all the time. Some matchmakers will not even give out phone numbers at all, but I do 24 hours beforehand, just because I think that’s reasonable. Then the next day, I call them and I try to get just like two sentences of feedback. In New York, it’s often about $1,000 per match — and that’s just first dates. When Zoë Winters’s character said she had gone on ten dates, that meant she probably spent about $10,000, which is, you know, a lot. I don’t think any matchmaker worth their salt would send somebody on ten first dates that went bad without staging an intervention. At that point, you’d want to stop the bleeding a little bit because we don’t want to traumatize people.
Lucy is successful in part, she argues, because she sees that it’s all a numbers game. To what extent when working with clients are you “ticking boxes” versus looking for something more holistic?
Another reason why I thought the movie was satirical was because of that early scene when she is comforting the bride who’s getting cold feet and then she gets the bride to admit that she’s doing this to make her sister jealous. I laughed because, like, it’s true, there are people who really do get married for horrible, shallow reasons like that all the time. But Dakota Johnson’s character seemed so pleased. You can set some people up on dates, and you can have nine engagements, but if the relationship is not based on shared values — things that sustain a relationship — those aren’t actually successful matches.
I try to work with people closely to understand why they might have these nonnegotiables. Sometimes, when you interrogate that, people start to realize that it’s about something else. Do you really want a guy who’s tall? What is that really about? It could be that, like, the woman was previously in a relationship with a guy who was short who was mean to her. Maybe she feels like a tall guy would protect her. When you navigate the nonnegotiables head on, people will usually open up. I don’t really like to work with inflexible people because the goal is to put people in healthy, long-term relationships, and inflexible people are definitely not going to do well in long-term relationships. Sometimes those nonnegotiables are more lifestyle-related — maybe someone doesn’t want a partner who might have kids from a previous relationship or who doesn’t want to date a smoker — but that’s really understandable.
How do you navigate when what someone is looking for bumps up against your own values? I’m thinking about the guys in the movie — and in real life — who are in their 40s and looking for a girlfriend in their 20s. There’s nothing legally or even morally wrong with that, but the movie (and sometimes society) frames that as a bad thing.
At these agencies, I don’t think that they have a choice who they work with. So for me being self-employed — and also what any seasoned matchmaker will tell you — is that your experience is totally determined on whether or not you like your clients. Part of the benefit of moving to more of a boutique model is being able to screen people out and take people that your values align with for the most part. And that’s not to say that every single one of my clients shares my politics. I don’t think any of my clients are quite as far left as me. It’s a matter of making sure that even if they have fundamentally different life philosophies, I believe that they’re emotionally mature, first and foremost, and that their philosophy is rational, whether or not I personally agree with it. I mostly don’t want to work with people who are bigots — and I’ll screen for that as best I can. But otherwise, I think it’s a good learning opportunity for me to learn about people who are different from me and how those relationships work.
As you mention at the start, there’s an incident with sexual assault where the movie kind of grinds to an emotional halt. I was wondering if that subplot felt accurate to you — emotionally, practically, or otherwise.
I thought that the sexual-assault part of this movie was a really interesting point to bring up because it does call into question the extent to which a person at an agency would be, in some way, responsible (if at all). I asked a few veteran matchmakers who worked for agencies, and one of them said that it’s happened once in her 20 years and another one said once in her 12 years. But yeah, the company got subpoenaed and the matchmaker couldn’t talk to the client — that all felt accurate to her experience. I would think as matchmaking becomes less corporate, the risk goes down. I never worked for an agency, but my friends who do say the vibe is much less sleazy than as depicted in the movie. That’s not to say those don’t exist — a friend told me about one where they ask women for their bra size — but for the most part, matchmakers really, really try to do their due diligence.
The Zoë Winters character is kind of the median client in the movie — in terms of looks, success, age. Are most of your clients around her age — 30s, 40s?
I have some clients in their 20s, but yeah, generally I’m working with 30-to-45-year-olds. Although I did get my first senior-citizen client, a 78-year-old widow. She’s very funny. She was an advertising baddie in the city back in the day and doesn’t have kids or anything. She’s willing to relocate, too, which is another huge thing with the global matchmaking network. If Zoë Winters’s character was my client, I might stop setting her up with New York guys — like, let’s try an international thing! I met my husband in another country, and I never thought in a million years that would have worked out. It’s not about getting people to settle or lower their standards; it’s getting them to broaden their fantasies.
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