Do you have single friends? Help them get off the dating apps and set them up with other singles in your life. Photo / Getty Images
Tired of dating apps, some singles long for their friends to get into amateur matchmaking.
Tahirah Nailah Dean had a single friend: a sweet, nerdy, Pakistani Muslim woman in her mid-30s, living in Dallas and looking for a partner. Dean also knew a man from her mosque in Boston who was similar to her friend in age and background, sweetness and nerdiness. She contacted each of them individually and asked if, despite their geographic distance, they would like to be introduced. Both parties agreed.
They are now married, with a 6-month-old baby. For their wedding gift, Dean presented them with a framed print of the messages she had sent, asking each if they would like to be connected.
Sixteen years ago, the dating app Grindr launched. Three years later, Tinder and Hinge followed. These apps are responsible for countless marriages and children – and untold uncategorisable love stories between people who never would have met otherwise. There is another population to consider, though: people who started looking for their partner at the dawn of the dating app era and are still swiping.
Since the pandemic, there has been a resurgence in analogue romance incubators like speed dating and mixers. Movies like the recent Materialists from director Celine Song and a spate of reality TV shows (Indian Matchmaking and its Jewish and Muslim varietals) have brought professional matchmaking to the fore. While these services cost money, amateur matchmaking – playing Barbie with full-size, neurotic, adult humans – is a free service anyone can do for a willing, interested single person.
Setups aren’t new, but they feel borrowed from a sepia time when people spent Saturday night falling in love at an ice cream social, instead of experiencing the sinking feeling of re-downloading Hinge for the 16th time.
“The most traditional ways of meeting for heterosexual couples, i.e. meeting through family, meeting through church, meeting in the neighbourhood, and meeting in primary or secondary school, have all been declining sharply since 1940,” wrote a group of Stanford researchers in a 2019 paper. According to sociology professor Michael Rosenfeld, the latest data from “How Couples Meet and Stay Together,” a study cited in the paper, shows that only 15% of respondents said they “met through friends”. Only 3% selected “met through family”.
For some groups, set-ups never went away. In the Muslim community, Dean noted, community social media groups are flooded with biodata, or marriage resumés, allowing laypeople to matchmake.
Some singles who don’t have access to those community practices long for the return of lovingly meddling friends and family in place of an algorithm handled by a private company. Danielle Egan, a 26-year-old dating in San Francisco, said, “I think more recently there’s been a lot of fatigue around [dating apps] and people just wanting a more genuine ‘meet cute’ of a story. I think people are really seeking that.”
“More and more it just seems to me that being set up is the last frontier,” said Jon Branfman, a 36-year-old dating in the Bay Area.
When Kim Curtis’ mother was 84 and widowed, her college friends conspired to set her up with a man in their small town. “They fell in love!” said Curtis, a 69-year-old living in Flagstaff, Arizona. “They loved dancing, and they loved politics.”
Two years ago, inspired by that memory, Curtis sent an email to several dozen of her closest friends, asking them to consider setting her up on a blind date. “It was really fun to do, to ask my social intimates to help me with this, and I thought it would be fun for them maybe,” she said.
For daters who have tried everything, set-ups appeal because they feel intentional, direct and personal. Branfman has tried meeting a partner by using dating apps, going to social events and spending time in bars. Generic dating wisdom, he said, is maddeningly vague: “Just put yourself out there!” and “You’ll meet people doing things you love!”
“The advice seems to be, like: float around, outdoors, and eventually through vibrations of the universe beyond your control, the moment will come and you will be cast in that role,” he said. Asking to be set up, on the other hand, is explicit. It’s not just “putting yourself out there,” it’s putting your heart in the hands of your friends, neighbours and entire social network.
Because a set-up starts with having a relationship in common, Ben Orenstein, a 42-year-old dating in Somerville, Massachusetts, said, “I think the likelihood of a match is a bit higher.” Another benefit, he said: “Both people are kind of incentivised to kind of be on their best behaviour in a way that dating apps don’t encourage.” There’s less ghosting and more of a mutual desire to “both be sure we’re behaving like decent human beings”.
To nudge his social circle to think of him for potential set-ups, Orenstein created a personal website full of information about himself and his dating preferences and shared it widely on social media. There’s a sense, he said, that “dating apps are something you do privately, on your phone, semi-secretly, and maybe there’s a touch of shame there”. In contrast, he said, publicly asking to be set up is saying, “I am single, I don’t want to be, I am trying everything to resolve this”.
If you’re thinking about setting a friend up, “the first thing you should do is always ask first if your friend wants to be matched,” said Anthony Canapi, a matchmaker who works with gay, bi, trans and queer men. The most rookie mistake for a would-be matchmaker is assuming that a single person wants to be a part of a couple.
Once you’ve confirmed a friend is open to dating, Canapi suggests a simple script: “Hey, I know you’re single, I know it sounds crazy, but I have this other friend, I’ve known him for this many years, he works in this job, he’s this age, he loves to do this, this, this and that, I think it would be awesome if I could connect you. What do you think about that?” If they’re interested, you can offer to show them some photos.
“It is the greatest amusement in the world!” exclaimed Emma Woodhouse, Jane Austen’s heroine, of matchmaking. (She later gives up matchmaking, having nearly ruined several people’s lives.)
Egan worked to strategically make setups more fun. “Dating can suck and be a really gruelling process,” she said. The question, she said, is: “How can we make it more fun in the short term?” She interviewed her friends and wrote paragraph-long “personal ads” for each of them. Then, with their permission, she put the ads on a website. She put up posters in neighbourhoods around the city, directing people to the website.
The whimsy was part of the strategy. “My philosophy when I was creating this was: This has to go viral to be successful,” she said. “It has to appeal broadly to everybody so they send it to their friends, and they send it to their friends, and it eventually reaches the right people.” Images of her posters circulated widely on X and Reddit, resulting in thousands of hits to the website. Several dates resulted, but no long-term relationships – yet.
For a setup to have a prayer of success in the era of dating app abundance, it’s crucial to get enough information about each prospective dater to avoid wasting everybody’s time. Canapi asks all singles who come to him for matchmaking about the same five areas: marriage, children, sexual compatibility and the type of love they are looking for. He also asks, as he put it, “Do you have your s--- together?”
Egan spent more than an hour sitting down with each of her single friends so she would be able to convey their character and their preferences in a short paragraph on the website she created. “It was a lot of work,” she said. (The only compensation Egan asks is that if she connects a friend to their future spouse, she gets to perform their wedding.)
For single people, a frustrating but necessary element can be gently reminding people in your life that you’re still open to being set up. “I’ve found that it requires one more, ‘Hey, have you thought of anybody?’ to get somebody over the hump of, ‘Okay, he’s really serious, let me spend some actual mental energy here,’’ Orenstein said.
Dean, who set up the couple who got married, briefly offered her services to her social media followers. But soon enough, she said, she quit doing any kind of organised matchmaking.
“I was just so disgusted, and it was going to make me not have faith in people, humanity, love, all that stuff,” she said. The pattern that emerged, she explained, was that when she showed single men descriptions of single women, they were interested. But when she shared photos, the men changed their minds. She made a habit of asking men about the set-ups first, since they were more likely to reject their potential suitors. But eventually, she quit. “It was so demoralising,” she said.
Canapi called this the hardest part of working as a matchmaker. “We do all the vetting, all the curating,” he said. “The hard thing we can’t do is predict the chemistry.”
Facilitating a set-up means plotting, delicately manoeuvring, fearing for the worst and hoping for some good karma. “It’s just like another way to do good in your community is to make matches and watch people be happy,” Dean said. “I do think if you find the right partner, if you’re able to establish that connection, that’s going to make the happiness level in your life increase so much. So why not try to help people with that?”
To Curtis, whose mother found love and a dance partner at 84, setting people up “is really doing a service for the people that we care about and even those we don’t care that much about”. Done right, it’s not just a tricky obligation. It can be a joy.