Last year, I started hosting monthly house parties. When I saw two friends get on really well, I set them up on a date. “You two should go out sometime,” I casually said. “I think you’d have a lot in common.”
Turns out, they did.
So far, there have been three dates among people who met at my house parties. Little did I know, my unintentional matchmaking efforts may have a higher success rate than dating apps.
In my view, one sad side effect of the rise of dating apps has been a noticeable decline in matchmaking. Whatever happened to setting friends up on a blind date? Or even just recommending that two people you love give it a shot of finding love themselves?
And in our modern moment of isolation, polarization, and loneliness, it is clear to me that now is a crucial time for us to bring back matchmaking for our friends. When one of my friends called me after her date to get more insight about my other friend, I was able to answer all her concerns. That couldn’t have happened if she had met a stranger on a dating app.
Dating apps have made meeting someone feel increasingly detached from the people and communities we already belong to. We swipe through strangers based on a handful of photographs and prompts, often with very little context about who they are beyond what they have chosen to present.
A friend, on the other hand, can tell you things an algorithm never could: what someone is actually like, how they treat people, whether they are kind, funny, or reliable, and whether they are compatible with you.
“Friends, especially long-term friends, know literally every nuance of who we are that an algorithm or app cannot capture. Digital mechanisms capture factual data,” says Blythe Landry, a trauma and relationship therapist. “Friends carry history, trauma narratives, inside jokes, the way our nose wrinkles when we laugh, and our favorite order at Starbucks.”
Our nearest and dearest know our likes from the inside out and, perhaps most importantly, they know we can sometimes be totally blind to our patterns in choosing romantic partners. Many of us have the experience a year after a breakup when a best friend says, “I knew that was never going to work! I just didn’t say anything because it was important for you to see that for yourself.”
Friends also know our limitations and what we can and cannot bring to a partner. They are more likely to be brutally honest with us than an app that matches us with someone in our area. Once, I had to tell a friend of mine that the person she met at my house party and went on a date with might not be compatible with her financially. Ultimately, she agreed.
Too often, we underestimate the value of this kind of social knowledge. I remember being annoyed at my friend when she casually told me that she has three brothers. I am not saying I wanted to get with any of the brothers, but surely those brothers have big friend groups and she could have set me up with someone? My friend herself has been in a relationship over the last few years and had no idea that I would prefer her help over the multiple dating app options I have at my disposal. “Why would you want to meet any of my stupid brothers’ friends when you have the whole world at your fingertips?” She asked me innocently.
When we erase community and friendships from the dating experience, dating becomes strategic in the most unpleasant of ways, says Landry. “Because we are now in a time where every single thing we do is online, there are simply way too many ways to ‘not engage’ with someone online, even if offline they could be our perfect match.”
Landry’s best friend died in 2021 of cancer, but years before her death, she had the great pleasure of introducing her to the absolute love of her life. “It was my one and only setup, and it was literally like I momentarily became a professional matchmaker.” Both of her friends had been single for a decade. “One day, I was at coffee with my friend, and he ordered his tea the exact same way my other friend ordered hers.” At that moment, time stood still and out of her mouth came, “You should really meet my friend.” They both protested. Both told Landry that they had nothing in common and had no interest in the other. Just weeks later, they were living together.
“While I will always miss my friend, I will forever be so happy she got to find true love with someone,” she says. “And, point being, no app could have ever caught that ‘match’ moment like a best friend could.”
There is something reassuring about being set up by someone who knows both people involved. It also changes the stakes of dating: you aren’t meeting a complete stranger who exists entirely outside your social world, but someone who already has a connection to it.
Perhaps this is why we also need to bring back house parties, hosting a casual dinner, and planned drinks with friends. But no matter the form, this is why we need to bring back matchmaking. When dating is mediated by apps, we have fewer opportunities to organically meet the friends of our friends. House parties create the kind of low-pressure social environment where those connections can happen without anyone having to announce that they are “looking for love.”
My three successful matches are obviously not scientific evidence that dinner parties can replace dating apps. But they have made me wonder whether we have outsourced too much of our romantic lives to technology and whether our friends, who already know us better than any algorithm, should have a bigger role in helping us find someone.
The return of matchmaking among friends could offer an antidote to the impersonal nature of app dating. I believe that the energy you put out there is the energy you get back, so I am hoping that while I play cupid for my friends, they too, at some point in the future, will decide to set me up with someone suitable.