> The Good-Man Shortage Has Gotten Exponentially Worse. HOLY SHYT, THESE DELUSIONAL WARHAGS!

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The Good-Man Shortage Has Gotten Exponentially Worse The crisis is both a boon and a challenge for high-end matchmakers helping women find love.

Charlotte had been dating with “full-time job effort” for two years, going on two or three dates a week, by the time she realized she had to do something different. Based in the Bay Area, she encountered
men who were too clingy, men who seemed intimidated by her professional success, one guy who was like “a needy 3-year-old child,” and “a lot of alcoholics.” She found that “the quantity was overwhelming” and the “quality was underwhelming.” She learned that women dating in male-dominated Silicon Valley had a saying that captured the point: “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

A few years ago, Charlotte, which is not her real name, was referred to the Select Date Society, which then offered services starting at $35,000 (due to high demand, the fee rose to $75,000 shortly after, with a top tier that started at $150,000). Charlotte, 38 at the time, worked for a successful business that had just gone public, so the money wasn’t a huge issue for her. “No one I know would ever do this, I know that,” she says of her thinking at the time. “But you know what? I could use some help, so I’m raising my hand here — I could use some help. And I’ll be honest, I’m lonely.” An M.B.A. with a blistering career trajectory that had taken her to companies like Goldman Sachs and Google, she was mainly occupied renovating a townhouse she’d recently purchased. She was in a position where, she says, “I can use a friend. I can use someone who’s like my best friend.”

She told her matchmaker, Kate O’Connor, that she liked clean-cut men with dark features. She was asked how much she wanted a potential partner to make: Between $100,000 and $250,000, $250,000 and $500,000, or over half a million? She chose the middle bucket: “A good amount of money, so we could do fun things together, but it wasn’t outrageous that work is kind of what he does all the time,” she figured. One of Select Date Society’s recruiters, Nicole Boccia, found a handsome fellow, Kyle (also not his real name), who matched that description. The company ran a background check on him, did two rounds of interviews, conducted a social-media audit, and had him sign an NDA. It sounded promising to Kate: Both of them liked the same ’90s rock bands, cats, traveling, and Japan.

“I think it’s more like headhunting than it is matchmaking,” Charlotte says. “It’s really what it’s turned into for successful women.”

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Historically, matchmaking was a man’s game. The stereotype was this: Rich men would turn to matchmakers to connect them with beautiful, often younger women who could hold a conversation, and matchmakers would source and vet these women.  But in the half-decade since heteropessimism entered the lexicon and women started openly decrying the shabby state of men — less educated, less likely to own a home, more conservative — the field of matchmaking has changed. “Almost all of our inbound calls are women at the moment,” says Amy Van Doran, founder of Modern Love Club, a high-end matchmaking service whose services begin at $100,000. Over the course of reporting this story, I spoke to women who paid anywhere from $60,000 to $150,000 to find a partner and matchmakers who set their fees in the seven figures. Amber Lee, the co-founder of Select Date Society, says 82 percent of her clients in the past three years have been female.

The problem of the underwhelming male is especially acute for accomplished and high-earning women like Charlotte, who are often looking for similarly situated men. Unlike men, who “don’t care if the woman is a barista at Starbucks or if she’s a preschool teacher,” according to Sweetpea Felix, a nearly 23-year veteran of the matchmaking trade, women are more wary of being taken advantage of and tend to desire a partner of similar wealth and stature. “These women, a lot of times, have reached a level in their career that basically knocks out 95 percent of the male population,” says Alessandra Conti of the Beverly Hills–based Matchmakers in the City.

In addition to a scarcity of good men, the women at the luxury end of the matchmaking market can be uniquely particular and demanding — they’re paying a fortune, after all. The result is that matchmakers are squeezed from both ends, caught between rising expectations among women and a dearth of good men. The matchmakers sometimes end up going to extremes to find appropriate matches for their rarefied clientele. As Van Doran puts it, “The good-men crisis seems to have gotten exponentially worse.”

There’s still some truth to the classic image of the matchmaker as a silken-haired woman in stilettos pairing wealthy men with bodacious younger babes. At the Global Love Conference, the industry’s regular spring gathering in New York, some 175 attendees, many in high heels, click-clacked through the midtown event space, flipping long waves over their shoulders. Some matchmakers still work exclusively with men, perhaps because it’s easier. “Everybody knows incredible women,” says April Beyer, a longtime matchmaker who created  a centralized platform of profiles so matchmakers can pool their resources and access each other’s networks. “I find it to just be a simpler search.” Rachel London, a matchmaking partner at Cinqe, works with women and men. She had recently posted a description of a male client on Instagram (“new EXCEPTIONAL billionaire”) and within an hour received more than 700 DMs from interested women. “It’s easier for us to go find a beautiful woman than it is to go find an incredible, wealthy man,” she says. “It’s just harder to find.”

London, who came to matchmaking after guest-coaching men working with the pickup artist and author Neil Strauss, says her large network of men made her a natural fit to take on female clients when she joined Cinqe, a global matchmaking firm, five years ago. Generally speaking, she says, men don’t require the same amount of hand-holding and “emotional nurturing” women do over the course of a contract. With women, “it’s a roller coaster, and it’s very emotional,” she says. “We’re riding the highs of the excitement about a date or a budding relationship  and then we’re riding devastating lows with them when they get rejected or the guy breaks up with them.”

Lisa Clampitt, a New York–based matchmaker with more than 25 years of experience, only started working with women, in her own company, about ten years ago. Today, about two-thirds of her clients are female. “Women are starting to say, ‘I am more successful, and therefore I’m not going to settle, and I need someone as wealthy as me,’” Clampitt says. “She has this money, and she somehow thinks that that’ll make her have the pick of the litter.” Clampitt, like many other matchmakers, observed that men are less interested in a woman’s net worth and tend to be more concerned with looks, while for wealthy women, a partner’s net worth is often still important.

Her female clients often need help managing their expectations; a key part of her job is urging women used to wielding control to let go and trust her. She had a client who insisted that because she typically flies first class, any prospective partner should be able to fly first class too. “I was like, ‘Okay, let’s be real. How often are you on the plane first class versus being cozy with this awesome relationship?’”

Bonnie Winston, a New York-based matchmaker who has made a specialty of working with older women who faced the “three D’s” — death, divorce, and disappointment — recently had a client in her early 30s open their first meeting with a slideshow of the “look” she wanted to date. “She’s showing me pictures, I’m not kidding you, like celebrities, models,” Winston recalls. She also wanted any potential match to make at least a million dollars a year. Winston asked her to rate the men, purely on aesthetics, on a scale of one to ten. “She goes, ‘12.’ I said, ‘Yeah, they’re unbelievable,’” Winston says. She asked her to rate a man her age making seven figures a year on a scale of one to ten; the client guessed a nine. Winston then asked her to rate herself on looks and income. She gave herself a three and a five, respectively.

“I said to her, ‘You attract what you are,’” Winston adds. “I can’t do it. If you had said to me, ‘I feel that I am a nine or ten aesthetically, and I feel that I make, for my age, an eight,’ I might have been able to do it because you’re so confident that you probably could have pulled it off. But you’re depending on me to make you feel better by providing this for you, and I can’t do that.” There’s an expression in the industry for this kind of wishful thinking, Winston says: “I’m a matchmaker. I’m not a magician.” Men, of course, don’t face the same dynamic. Clampitt notes, “As women get older, there are fewer choices. As men get older, they’re like, you know, wow, they’re the best thing ever, especially if they date within their age.”

Some matchmakers say the same qualities that enabled their clients to found companies or become CEOs can be impediments to finding love at a time when gender roles and expectations are still evolving. “These women are high achievers, so they’re super-successful, and sometimes that translates to having a lot of what society would say is masculine energy,” says Lee. “They want a man to be the man in the relationship, and so sometimes that’s a challenge.”

She described one of her clients as a billionaire “used to running the show,” she says. “This is a woman who literally has so much at her disposal. She has, like, celebrities performing at her birthday party.” Lee and her colleagues matched her with a small-business owner whose quiet confidence, they thought, might balance out her big personality. The client trusted their judgment, and now the two have been married for three years. “We went to her estate and spent a day with them, and she told us, ‘He makes me so calm and lets me get out of my head and stop thinking about all the crazy ideas I have and just brings me in the moment,’” Lee recalls. “It’s really beautiful.”

London described the contrasting approaches of two recent female billionaire clients. One, divorced from a spouse who had cheated on her, was focused on finding a kindhearted man whose net worth wasn’t important as long as he didn’t want her solely for her wealth. “This woman already lives in a multimillion-dollar mansion, she’s already flying private,” says London. “She just wants someone who’s going to be a good life partner, who she could trust, who can hold her after a long day.” Another billionaire, a founder in her 30s, made it clear she was looking for someone with significant assets of his own. She wanted someone who could “keep up with her lifestyle,” London says, “where she’s not necessarily having to pay for him.” London located her “described dream man,” but after dating seriously for a spell, her client ultimately “decided to keep looking.”

The biggest lift for matchmakers is what they, like corporate headhunters and NCAA basketball coaches, call “recruitment.” Recruiting costs often determine the price of a matchmaker’s services: The more specific the search, the higher the fee. Matchmakers maintain databases of what they call “resources,” people who might be matches for their clients. But those databases are often populated with women, who are more proactive about signing up for a free membership on the off chance they’ll get summoned for a date with a wealthy, commitment-minded bachelor.

And so to find more men, matchmakers have to network, both in real life and on LinkedIn. Matchmakers invest tens of thousands of dollars in memberships to private clubs and tickets to benefits and galas where the wealthy and successful congregate. Lee and co-founder Sandra Myers have two full-time recruiters on staff. Conti has one dedicated recruiter on staff reaching out to people on LinkedIn, and someone from her team is out in Los Angeles most nights of the week. They will target specific events depending on the client; the Jewish charity circuit, she mentions, had been a fruitful pipeline. “The best matches are found organically and through natural conversation,” Conti says. “I absolutely would never just ‘cold approach’ someone personally.” She’ll often find herself chatting with a small group, and when someone asks what she does, the answer always elicits a “wild variety” of reactions, “everything from them telling us that we have answered their prayers, to telling us exactly what their perfect match would be then and there, to asking a whole lot of follow-up questions!”

For a celebrity-dentist client, Conti and her sister went to high-minded cultural outings, professional gatherings, fundraisers for Doctors Without Borders and the Los Angeles Lawyers Philharmonic, and Soho House events. They also targeted occupation-specific soirées such as bar-association receptions and business societies. “We love a doctor, we love an attorney. We love the job, the men with objectively great jobs,” she says. “We’re always on the hunt, but a lot of the matchmakers, if they’re doing a talk or if they’re going to an event, a lot of times we’re the only matchmaker in the room, and they’re social butterflies, so they’re meeting everybody.”

Felix, the industry veteran and one of the field’s few prominent men, started Match Resource almost two years ago to address the shortfall of good men. “Every matchmaker does the same thing,” he explains. “You want to look through your database before you take a client to make sure you have a solid starting point of options.” But if the first four or five dates aren’t a success, the database might be exhausted and the matchmaker gets nervous. That’s when they network with other matchmakers, paying them for potential matches from their databases. But if those don’t work, “then matchmakers start to panic because there’s really no place you can go to, to source high-quality matches for your clients,” Felix says.

The task of sourcing these men falls to Nate Romero, 23, one of Match Resource’s co-founders (the other, Michael Felix, is Sweetpea’s son and was Romero’s middle-school water-polo teammate). They got their start when Sweetpea hired them to search for men for a difficult client, an Ivy League–educated CEO with a net worth north of $50 million. “In one week, they found me two of the highest-quality men I’ve ever seen,” Felix says, well-educated, handsome, fit men in their early 50s who were leaders in the health-care field. In the two years since they began, they’ve worked with over 150 matchmakers around the globe, and 95 percent of their searches are on behalf of female clients. “We’ve become the go-to for high-quality men across the country,” Romero says.

“Quality” seems to be dictated by the kind of information available on LinkedIn, where the two of them spend most of their days trawling for prime candidates. Their initial parameters come from the client on whose behalf they’re conducting the search. For someone who went to Harvard, they might start with alumni groups; for a doctor, they’ll look at medical associations. If a man is spoken for, they might ask if he has any eligible friends or colleagues (“Maybe you have someone as great as you in your network who is single?”) and hope for a referral. Romero estimates 10 to 15 percent of men he contacts claim to be single, which he then tries to cross-reference through Facebook or other publicly visible information.

The manhunt is so intense that in places like New York City, with its famously skewed dating market, there’s a good chance that Romero is not the first recruiter or matchmaker the man has heard from. That some men are repeatedly tapped on LinkedIn by matchmakers has become a running joke in Beyer’s marriage. “I always ask my husband, ‘Have you been contacted by any?’” she says. But Beyer also wonders if matchmakers’ and recruiters’ aggressive pursuit of desirable men has itself reduced demand for their services from potential male clients, further skewing the client base. “Men may not be as prone to hire a matchmaker because maybe they’re hearing from dozens of matchmakers that month, reaching out to them, inquiring about their single status,” she says.

When they’re not on LinkedIn, Romero and Felix conduct short Zoom interviews to determine whether the resources are worth turning over to the matchmaker, who will conduct a more thorough vetting. (Matchmakers often liken their intake process to “going on the first date” for their client; one prospective male says it was akin to “a root canal.”) Romero guesses he looks through up to 26,000 profiles each year, from which he’ll pluck 500 to 600 solid candidates.

Many of the more than a dozen matchmakers I spoke to were proud of being able to meet a client’s hyperspecific request. Romero once conducted a search for a woman in Chicago, who, he says, “I’ll never forget.” She was 65 and would only date men between 65 and 70. “They had to be Jewish, they had to be conservative politically, they had to be at least five-foot-ten, and they had to be high net worth,” he says. “A search like that, you know, when you just look at it from a numbers perspective, there are less men to choose from. It’s going to take more time, it’s going to take more effort to screen that, so a search like that, especially when we do shared contracts with matchmakers, it’s going to cost more, right?”

After two months, they found their target, a big hedge-fund manager, via a board he was on. They sent him a “really curated” message on LinkedIn hoping to get his attention. The two dated a few times, but the relationship ultimately didn’t pan out “for location purposes,” Romero says.

London recalls a woman she worked with who asked for a man who practiced a particular religion, had a minimum net worth of eight figures, flew private, and had some idiosyncratic lifestyle specifications. He needed to be okay with her having children and to want more children. Oh, and of course he had to be a certain height and live within a designated geographic radius. “I looked it up on ChatGPT: ‘How many of these people in the world exist?’ I think it said in the world it was like 180, and we presented her with 30 over the span of several months,” she says as if she were an FBI agent who has just rounded up a slew of most-wanted criminals.

Still, she wishes people could drop their transactional attitude when it comes to searching for love. “It’s not about ordering human beings like we order things on Amazon,” she says. Other matchmakers offered similar metaphors for their clients who walked in with long wish lists: customizing a BMW model to your specifications; ordering a pizza; building a bespoke robot. Sometimes, London says, it felt like “love has been removed from the equation.”

With or without love, the high-touch, curated dating process that matchmakers facilitate has come to resemble so many other aspects of the economy, such as Disneyland or air travel, in which the rich are having a vastly different experience from the rest of us. One woman, a senior executive in her mid-40s, described it as essentially a high-priced exit ramp from dating apps and the heteropessimism they inspire: The $60,000 she paid for six months of matchmaking help was worth it to her, she says, “to be able to be optimistic that there’s great guys out there, and not have to do the slog that I see other friends going through to find them.” But if it takes ponying up what amounts to a year’s median income to locate a few suitable men, what does that mean for those of us who need that money for, say, student loans or rent? Matchmakers are aware that they’re providing a luxury service to people who have already hired professional help for other aspects of their lives: nannies, dog walkers, housekeepers, executive coaches. As important as love is, “I don’t think anybody should go into debt to hire a matchmaker,” says Lee. Nor does it work for everyone. I heard of one female client who had invested $130,000 with three different matchmaking companies but had yet to have a relationship and another who had been turned down by several matchmakers because they just didn’t think they could help her, a woman in her 50s, find a man her age.

Charlotte was thrilled at how handsome Kyle turned out to be — he looked exactly like his picture. “I’m used to dating really intelligent men,” she says. “I’m drawn to intelligence. I think that might be something that a lot of successful women do too. And I was like, Wait, I can get a hot guy? That’s way better! Like, way better.” They got to know each other over casual meals of pizza and Taco Bell, and only when they were four months in and chatting about their investments did the scope of her wealth become clear to him. Kyle is successful in his job at a pharmaceutical company, which Charlotte attributes to his being both smart and “off-the-charts emotionally intelligent,” she says. “He’s in sales, so he has to be brilliant with people.”

They’re engaged, and O’Connor, their matchmaker, has been invited to the wedding. The $35,000 she spent was “worth its weight in gold,” and she would recommend it to anyone else who is looking for a lifelong partner, like a cardiologist friend of hers who has struggled to meet men who are supportive of her career. “That said, could I convince someone to pay $150,000?” she mused. “That’s a really high bar.”