The story behind Love with Me

Why I became a matchmaker, and why I staked the whole business on actually finding people love.

People are often surprised when they hear what I do for a living. Matchmaking sounds like something out of another century, or a television format, rather than a job an actual person chooses deliberately. So I want to explain how I came to it, because the reason explains everything about the way Love with Me runs.

I know the long wait, because I lived it

The plain truth is that I became a matchmaker because I spent a long time single. Long enough to know from the inside exactly what it feels like to want to meet someone and watch the years pass without them turning up. I know what it is to turn over one stone after another after another. The dates that lead nowhere. The hopeful ones that quietly fade out. The friends who couple off while you are still searching, and the kind voices who promise it will happen the moment you stop trying, as though wanting love were the very thing keeping it away. I know the particular weariness of getting ready for yet another first date you already suspect will go nowhere, and the small, creeping worry that perhaps it simply will not happen for you. I am not telling you this for sympathy. I am telling you because it is the whole foundation of how I work. Everything I understand about this, I learned the slow way, by living through it.

What those years taught me

Being single for as long as I was taught me things I could never have picked up from the outside. It taught me that the trouble is rarely the person doing the searching. It is the way we have all been taught to search. It taught me that the apps wear you down in a way that is hard to describe to anyone who has not lived inside them month after month. And it taught me how much it would have meant, back then, to have had someone truly in my corner. Someone who knew me, who was actively thinking about who I ought to meet, who could carry part of the weight of the search so that I was not carrying all of it on my own.

No one offered me that. There were large, impersonal agencies wanting a great deal of money upfront, there were the apps, and there was the steady stream of well-meant advice. But there was nobody whose actual job was to know me and find me the right person, properly, on my side. I used to think about how different those years might have felt if there had been.

So I built the thing I had wished for

Once I had found my own person and come out the far side of it, I could not stop thinking about everyone still in the middle of it. All the warm, lovable people turning over the same stones I had, certain the fault must lie with them. It almost never does. The fault is in a system that treats people as profiles and then abandons them to fend for themselves in a sea of strangers. So I built the thing I had longed for while I was searching. Something boutique in the truest meaning of the word: small enough that I could properly know everyone I worked with. Thorough, personal, discreet. Not a database with a salesperson bolted on, and not a high-volume agency pushing clients through a pipeline, but a real person on your side, doing the looking with you and for you. That is where Love with Me started.

Why the fee works the way it does

Here is the decision I am proudest of, and the one that took the most nerve. Much of this industry runs on large upfront fees. You pay handsomely at the outset and then hope it works out. I understood the reasoning, and I could not bring myself to do it. It sets the matchmaker’s interests against the client’s: once they have been paid, it makes little difference whether you ever meet anyone.

So I built Love with Me the other way around. The model is success-based. We only succeed when you do. My livelihood depends on actually finding you something real, not on selling you the idea of it. It means I will tell you plainly if I am not the right fit for you. And it means that when we sit down together, you can trust that my interests and yours are pointed in precisely the same direction. That alignment is the entire point. Without it, I do not think I can do this work with a clear conscience.

What I actually believe

Beneath all of it sits a stubborn conviction: that nearly everyone is lovable, and that finding the right person is usually a matter of being introduced rather than being fixed. A good deal of the dating industry quietly sells the reverse, the idea that you are the problem, that you need improving, that if you just bought the right course or the right subscription you would finally be enough. I do not believe that for a moment. I think most people are already enough, and what they are missing is not self-improvement. It is a good introduction, made with care, to someone who was right for them all along.

That is why I became a matchmaker. Not because love is broken, but because the way we have been told to look for it is, and because the older, human way of finding it still works beautifully when someone does it with care. I get to be that someone. I cannot imagine better work.