The allure of romantic matchmaking

On our (my?) cultural obsession with matchmaking reality TV, Yente, how picky is too picky, and against settling

My first introduction to the concept of a professional matchmaker came when I was nine or ten, when my mom took me to a local junior high production of Fiddler on the Roof. While the political and religious tensions in turn-of-the-century Anatevka went mostly over my head, I had seen enough Disney movies to be acquainted with the Marriage Plot and the concept of girls looking for husbands. I left the theater singing the popular earworm sung by Tevye’s daughters (“Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match”), deaf to the dark turn the song takes when the eldest daughter, Tzeitel, spoils her younger sisters’ fantasies of being whisked away by handsome husbands. “Playing with matches a girl can get burned,” she sings, though I don’t ever remember singing this verse as a child. As daughters from a poor family, Tzeitel understands that she and her sisters will be expected to accept whatever man Yente the Matchmaker brings them—regardless of whether he is a poor ugly brute or a rich old butcher, like the man who wants to marry Tzeitel. But, in the first of Fiddler’s three conflicts between romantic love and matchmaker-sanctioned marriages, Tzeitel has her eyes on her childhood friend, Motel. Spoiler alert: love wins. Their father Tevye laments the death of tradition, and in losing his daughter to love marriages, he suffers more losses—the loss of potential economic security when Tzeitel refuses the butcher, the loss of Jewishness when another daughter marries a Gentile, and the loss of another daughter to long distance.

I hadn’t thought about Fiddler on the Roof in at least a decade until I sat down to write this reflection on my obsession with Netflix’s foray into professional matchmaking content. Since it first premiered during the pandemic, I’ve devoured three seasons of Indian Matchmaking, a reality show focused on the efforts of a professional Mumbai-based matchmaker to arrange matches for affluent and educated millennials throughout India and the diaspora. Sima Taparia, or '“Sima Auntie” as she is referred to by her clients, feels familiar even though I am not Indian; this type of well-coiffed, judgmental, conditionally beneficent auntie exists in every culture. In addition to providing her clients with handpicked “biodata” (resumes of potential matches that are tailored for this purpose), Sima Auntie offers tough love and what she views as honest truths. One of Sima’s favorite pieces of wisdom is that you’re not going to get everything you’re looking for in a spouse—you’re lucky if you get 60, 70%. In her view, there is no such thing as a perfect match—at least not in the way that many of her clients fantasize. On Indian Matchmaking, your marriage partner might be predestined, but a perfect match is a good enough match. (I wouldn’t be surprised to hear one of the older couples interviewed about their arranged marriages at the beginning of each episode to break out into a version of another Fiddler earworm, Do You Love Me?, a conversation between Tevye and his wife about whether love has anything to do with marriage at all.)

But Sima’s young clients often disagree. Whether in India, the U.S., or the U.K., these professional thirty-somethings are reluctant to settle for just anyone. Though they have turned to a professional matchmaker after being discouraged and fatigued by dating apps, none are willing to leap into marriage after one or two arranged meetings like many of their parents did. In the beginning, however, they are thrilled to turn over the reins to Sima Auntie, recognizing their own problematic patterns and the deficiencies of the apps. As one client describes, Sima Auntie offers a middle pathway—something “between a love match and an arranged marriage.” But though they are eager for Sima’s help, these millennials want chemistry and attraction. They don’t want to feel like they are on a date with a cousin. Sima Auntie does her best, honoring requests for Hindu-speakers and particular heights and personality traits. At times, however, her assessments of her clients’ desires are overly simplistic. (He lives in the Bay Area and likes camping! She lives in Manhattan and loves Soulcycle! They are both “active.” A perfect match!) Often she is way off. But she offers her clients something they are not finding on Hinge: matches who are for the most part serious about wanting to settle down and get married, and who share a sense of identity and a culture. You get the sense from Sima that she wishes her clients understood that this is enough—that all you need in a spouse is someone from a good family with a good heart who is ready to commit to marriage. Anyone who wants more than that is too picky, in her estimation. (I can only imagine her eyerolls if she had heard me specify that I couldn’t imagine marrying anyone who didn’t subscribe to the New Yorker.) You start to wonder if she gets paid on contingency.

The team behind Indian Matchmaking recently expanded into Jewish Matchmaking, which premiered on Netflix earlier this month. Aleeza Ben Shalom is a different breed of matchmaker than Sima Taparia. She is more big sister than auntie, eager to gab with her female clients, and quick to giddily show a photo of a potential match. But, steeped in Judaism, she brings with her a wealth of Jewish concepts relating to marriage and love and destiny that allow her to gracefully switch into a mode of rabbinical gravitas. She’s no Yente. She is helping her clients find their bashert,¹ and is more tolerant of highly-specific demands than Sima Auntie (she rolls her eyes at a particularly superficial client who insists he is only attracted to blonde-hair, blue-eyed Israelis, but she provides); she is more realistic about the importance of physical attraction to her clients and I could see her honoring my New Yorker subscriber request. At the same time, she deploys a trove of cheesy catchphrases to focus her clients on their goal: marriage. “When in doubt, go out!” is one of her favorites. Don’t rule someone out because you’re not sure about them; keep going out and gathering information. She helps her clients avoid “analysis paralysis” by not giving them too many options. She urges them to face the “mystery in their history.”

Both the Indian and Jewish cultures have long employed professional matchmakers. I don’t intend to make any generalizations about the role of professional matchmakers in either culture. I’m more interested in Sima and Aleeza in the context of reality TV matchmakers, matchmakers who speak to our broader societal discontent with modern dating and our hunger for help finding our bashert. Before Sima and Aleeza, there was Patti Stanger on Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker during the Obama years, who helped high maintenance high-net worth individuals find love, granting them access to her well-curated Rolodex. On Lifetime there is Married at First Sight, where three “experts” match you with a spouse after a purportedly rigorous interview process (though it often seems like a rudimentary AI tool could do a better job identifying compatible spouses than the often-bungling Pastor Cal, Dr. Pepper Schwartz, and Dr. Viviana Coles.) Our cultural appetite for reality dating shows is matched only by our appetite for love. Who wouldn’t want to outsource the depressing drudgery of swiping through profiles featuring misspellings, red flags (“swipe left if u dont get sarcasm”), lower abdominals, and platitudes? Who wouldn’t prefer to go out with someone who has been vetted, someone who is less likely to be a serial killer, and who comes recommended by a person who knows what you are looking for? These same desires for access to a curated pool of options have led to dating apps like The League and Raya.

Unlike other reality dating shows, I find myself rooting for everyone when I’m watching a matchmaking show. I am released from my usual schadenfreude. I want to believe everyone has a perfect match out there somewhere. I want to believe that the professional matchmaker can help find them, and that the matchmaker can see something from her aerial view that the matched individuals might not. I want some of these people to relax some of their more superficial expectations, but I also don’t want to watch anyone to settle. I cheer on the women who decline sweet but mediocre men who don’t light their fire; I rejoice when they find someone perfect after the show airs. (I suppose in this I find myself rooting against Sima Auntie.)

I’ve consumed all of these matchmaking shows through the lens of my own dating journey. Single for many years in my late twenties and early thirties, I was surrounded by coupled friends who wanted to set me up. Though there was something flattering about being considered a good match for someone’s friend, I wasn’t really looking for a partner at the time, and for the most part I rebuffed these efforts. I was picky. Extremely picky. I scoffed when my mother offered me “when in doubt, go out” advice. I was dubious that a marriage would flow from the kinds of ambivalent first dates I was going on. I never wanted to be married badly enough to accept a partner who only offered 60-70% of what I was looking for. I didn’t think I could be happy with anything less.

I suppose I’ll never know if I could have been happy with a non-New Yorker subscribing boring but nice guy, because I ended up with someone who checked every single box (and more). I owe the hugest debt of gratitude to my mother-in-law, who thought we were perfect for each other and kept bringing us together (a much longer story), even though we didn’t realize it. We joke that our marriage was kind of arranged. But I am so relieved I didn’t listen to the Sima Aunties in my life who suggested I was too in my head, or who guilted me for turning down marriageable men. My goal was never just marriage, as it seems to be for Sima. My goal was finding someone to whom I would want to stay married. It might be very millennial and very western of me, but I’ll never regret waiting for someone who could offer me everything I was looking for, in a partner and in a life. I can’t imagine sacrificing humor or brains or heart, or the je ne sais quoi that I would have struggled to put into words to a matchmaker when describing what I was looking for.

While a matchmaker can offer both a wider and more curated array of options and have a good sense of who will be compatible, I don’t believe a matchmaker can ever truly predict where there will be a spark. That is perhaps why many of the people on these television shows walk away from dates feeling friend vibes. Shared interests and backgrounds can be the foundation of friendship, but if a marriage is to be predicated on romance, having things in common is not always enough. That is in part what is so electrifying about attraction—it’s unpredictable, unconscious, and beyond the power of the rational mind to explain. Different cultures may traditionally place differing levels of importance on attraction in a marriage, but there is no doubt that attraction remains integral to the kind of romance that millennials expect to be the foundation of a marriage.

Despite having had conflicted feelings about being set up when I was single, I have now become the kind of partnered person who is obsessed with wanting to set people up. This is not because I can’t let happily single people be single, but because, as cultures with traditional matchmakers have long understood, finding love takes a village. It helps to have someone keeping their eyes out for interesting and eligible people, to have access to a network beyond your own. A year ago I introduced two friends, friends who lived only miles apart from each other but who wouldn’t have otherwise crossed paths. They just recently moved in together, and helping them find love with each other feels like my single greatest accomplishment of the last year (Congrats L&S!). The high of the success is intoxicating, and I won’t deny that I’m chasing that feeling. But I also don’t want anyone to settle. I’m conscious about not trying to set up two people just because they are both single, as can too often be an impulse when you are in your thirties and have few single friends. While timing and geography are often (but not always!) necessary preconditions to love, anyone who has ever been single and dating knows that they are not sufficient. Can the judgment of a matchmaker or a mutual friend be replicated by the algorithm? Enough marriages have sprung from dating apps to establish that they can and do work. But our appetite for human wisdom and human vetting suggest our hunger for a different level of assistance. We watch Indian Matchmaking for the same reason that we agree to go on blind dates—because we believe that someone who knows us is more likely to introduce us to the one person who may be the right fit than an app which gives us access to every single person in greater Los Angeles.

I’m taking clients!

1. The Jewish concept of a soulmate, or destiny.