Dating gets personal
I FEEL like I’ve stepped into a scene from Sex and the City, where Carrie is investigating a new dating technique. Indeed, right now I am the Carrie figure, here to observe how exactly a new matchmaking service does its business. The women I am meeting – all glossy and stylish in sharp designerwear – are assembled in the chic Paramount members’ club at Centrepoint to discuss (over drinks and stunning views) the characters of a batch of romantic hopefuls.
If this sounds like something you already do with your friends over drinks, think again – these ladies are deadly serious and very professional. They are the emissaries of Just Courting, a new company that uses the matchmaking skills of its employees to help members find the One. All participants answer a revealing questionnaire about themselves (“do you see the world as very simple or very complicated?”) before being interviewed by the ladies. After the interviews, the panel of super-sleek women – with backgrounds in recruitment, casting, marketing and advertising – sit together, profiles and interview notes in hand, and set about making matches.
PERSONALITY TEST
This is what I have walked in on, even if it does look more like friends having a natter. I’m curious to know just how personality matching can be outsourced to a group of urbane strangers. “We’re here to gauge what members truly value and go from there,” one of the women says.
Just Courting, which launched in June, was founded by eight unlucky-in-love Londoners, who between them had tried 30 dating techniques – the women gathered in Paramount are among them. They form part of an “introductions team” that proudly bypasses internet profiles, photos and data sharing in favour of personality tests (on paper, referred to as the “initial filter”) and face-to-face meetings. The service caters to people between 20 and 50 and at the moment, stands at 6:4, women to men. To join, you must be London-based, professional and interested in finding a partner – and, one gets the impression, the right sort of person.
The panel of matchmakers look so sharp and modern – they are people in the business of monetising love after all – that it is strange to hear them sing the virtues of “good old fashioned” matchmaking and “traditional courtship and romance”.
AWKWARD
Yet that is what Just Courting is about (the clue is in the name) – only a bit better. “People often feel obliged to get on with someone that a family member or friend has set them up with,” says one of the team. “It can be awkward, especially if the person’s awful. When it’s arranged like this, people are totally free to act as they feel and the matches are made more objectively, rather than by people who mean well but might misread things.” The panel strongly feel that online dating is a seriously flawed system, pointing out to me that profiles aren’t necessarily even true, and that the kind of information you submit makes it more random – and less likely to work – when you finally do meet.
It would appear members are in good hands. The interviews, which happen over “a glass of wine or a latte” are probing: including questions about dream jobs, the way people feel about their parents’ relationships and the reasons their last relationship ended (“did that special someone get away?”). The panel recalls interviewing a girl who admired her parents’ marriage; against temptation, they refrained from pairing her with a man who seemed right for her, but came from a broken family and felt cynical about marriage. They find out who smokes, who drinks, who loves travelling, what people say about their work-play balance.
MATCHMAKING
Once the team has identified a match, it sets them on their way by arranging a venue for the date. These include cookery classes or meals at swish venues including Quo Vadis and Moro.
After that, you’re on your own. But Just Courting expects a few misses; after all, when you sign up (or are “invited” to sign up, after an interview), you pay a three- monthly membership fee. That’s time for a lot of matchmaking – as to whether it leads to a match made in heaven, read City PM reporter Rob Davies’ account of his Just Courting date below.
Online registration (in which you fill in a 24 question form about yourself) is free. There’s then a £55 fee to arrange an initial meeting with a matchmaker, and an additional £195 for three months’ membership. www.justcourting.com