article: The good-man shortage has gotten exponentially worse

[MatureDJ]

MSN

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.

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.

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” ...

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.”

“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.”

“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.