From London Matchmaker to Sexologist: Why Finding the Right Person Is Only the Beginning
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For over a decade in London, I worked as a matchmaker.
And I loved it.
Matchmaking gives you a rather unusual window into human attraction.
I met women who would refuse to meet a potentially wonderful man because he wasn’t six feet tall.
I worked with a man who had paid £9,000 to find love — only for him to tell me, his matchmaker, that I was actually the kind of woman he was looking for.
I saw people with extraordinary lives, successful careers and seemingly endless possibilities struggle with exactly the same questions about love as everyone else. At one point, even a well-known actress came through our service looking for love.
It was fascinating.
But the longer I worked in matchmaking, the more I realised that finding people a date was often the easy part.
The really interesting part was what happened next.
We say we want love. But what are we actually available for?
People would come to us because they genuinely wanted a relationship.
They were investing considerable amounts of money, time and hope into finding one.
And yet sometimes, when we put someone potentially compatible in front of them, something else appeared.
The checklist.
The height.
The job.
The age.
The photograph.
The immediate spark.
Or simply: They're lovely, but they're not my type.
Of course attraction matters. I would never suggest that people should force themselves to date someone they don't desire.
But after years of matchmaking, I became increasingly curious about the distance between what people said they wanted and what they were actually drawn towards.
This became especially interesting when someone already recognised their pattern.
A woman might tell me:
I always choose emotionally unavailable men. I don't want to do this anymore.
And yet when I introduced her to someone who behaved differently — someone consistent, interested and emotionally available — she wasn't interested.
The men who activated the familiar feeling still felt more exciting.
That contradiction fascinated me.
It still does.
What if “my type” isn't quite as innocent as we think?
We talk about having a type as though it simply arrives fully formed.
That's just what I'm attracted to.
Sometimes it probably is.
But attraction doesn't develop in a vacuum.
Our experiences, culture, attachment history, ideas about masculinity and femininity, previous relationships, sexual experiences and even what we have learned to associate with love can all become woven into desire.
Which makes attraction considerably more interesting than a checklist of preferences.
Sometimes the person who produces butterflies is genuinely exciting.
Sometimes those butterflies may also contain uncertainty, anticipation or anxiety.
And sometimes a person who feels different from our previous partners doesn't immediately produce the emotional intensity we've learned to call chemistry.
That doesn't mean we should override our desire and date people we don't want.
But perhaps we can become more curious about it.
Why do I want what I want?
That question eventually became much more interesting to me than:
Where can I meet someone?
You can outsource the search. You can't outsource the inner work.
This was perhaps the biggest lesson matchmaking taught me.
You can pay someone to search an enormous database.
You can have introductions personally selected for you.
You can improve your dating profile, change apps, attend singles events, hire a matchmaker and dramatically increase the number of people you meet.
All of those things can be useful.
But nobody can do the internal part for you.
A matchmaker cannot make you emotionally available.
An algorithm cannot tell you whether you're experiencing compatibility or simply being activated by something familiar.
And neither can guarantee that you'll recognise a healthy relationship when it arrives.
Sometimes people wanted us to find love for them while remaining remarkably uninterested in exploring what might be happening within themselves.
I don't say that critically. I understand the temptation.
It is much easier to believe that the problem is the dating pool.
Or the apps.
Or London.
Or men.
Or women.
Or that nobody meets our standards anymore.
Sometimes those external realities genuinely are part of the problem.
But sometimes the uncomfortable question is:
What am I bringing into the room?
Finding someone was only the beginning
These questions eventually pulled me beyond matchmaking.
First into dating and relationship coaching, and then deeper into sexology, sexuality counselling, attachment, intimacy and desire.
Because finding a partner doesn't magically resolve our relational patterns.
You can finally meet an emotionally available person and discover that closeness frightens you.
You can choose a loving partner and years later wonder where your sexual desire went.
You can communicate beautifully about everyday life while being unable to tell your partner what you actually want sexually.
You can have chemistry without compatibility.
Compatibility without eroticism.
Love without intimacy.
Or enormous attraction to someone who is incapable of building a relationship with you.
Human connection is wonderfully inconvenient like that.
And this is where my work sits today.
I'm still fascinated by dating and attraction. Probably always will be.
But I'm less interested in simply helping someone answer:
“How do I find the right person?”
I'm interested in what happens before, during and after that encounter.
What are you attracted to?
What happens when somebody gets close?
Can you distinguish intensity from intimacy?
Can you remain connected to yourself while becoming attached to someone else?
Can you communicate desire rather than hoping your partner somehow knows?
And can you become curious about your patterns without turning every romantic feeling into something that needs to be analysed or fixed?
Because I don't think the answer is to become so self-aware that we intellectualise love.
Quite the opposite.
Perhaps the deeper work allows us to experience relationships more fully — with a little less unconscious repetition running the show.
After all these years, I still believe meeting someone can change your life.
I just no longer believe that meeting them is the hardest part.
In many ways, I haven't left matchmaking behind at all.
I've just followed the question much further.
