The Matchmaker

Rooms: Same questions, asked in different rooms. No. 1.

I had forgotten what it costs to want something you cannot make happen.

That is a strange thing to forget. I spent years in it. But I got out, and once you are out, the water looks warm from the shore.

I went to interview Sophie Kaemmerlé because her work and mine rhyme. She is the founder of Toi & Moi Matchmaking. She works primarily with BIPOC clients, most often high-achieving women of color and expats who built their lives by setting a goal and finding the fastest line to it. I put a cup of Taiwanese tea in front of someone and watch how fast they decide they like it, before they know why. She does it by asking. I do it by watching. Different rooms. The same question underneath. How fast we decide, and what we miss when we do.

I went in certain the conversation would be about curiosity. Sophie talks about it like a muscle. She can watch two people meet and tell you within seconds which one is curious and which one is only collecting.

“When people “interview” their date, they often don’t follow up in a conversation. They just move on to the next topic.”

I knew that one. I live in that one. It is the whole reason I do what I do. People come to a session thinking they came for tea. They did not. They came to watch how quickly they file a thing as good or bad and call it taste.

So I had my essay. I had it before I sat down.

Then Sophie said the word I had no slot for.

“They’re coming from a place of scarcity, and they’re coming from a place of grief. Grief for a life that they didn’t have, or they thought they would have by now. For love that they thought they would experience by now.”

Grief.

I had never thought about dating as grief. Not because the idea is wrong. Because I had filed my own away too fast to recognize it in someone else’s mouth.

Here is what I had forgotten.

I dated in this city until the word fun stopped applying. The apps. The drinks that went nowhere. The slow math of deciding whether it was worth getting dressed for. At some point I stopped waiting for it.

I got Parker. A chocolate brown Havanese, the best thing I have ever done in my life. People expect a dog you get after giving up to be a consolation. He was not. He was the door. Without him, Markus and I would never have worked.

That is the thing about getting what you wanted. It edits the memory of wanting it. I had not grown wise about grief. I had just walked far enough from it that it went quiet. Sophie’s clients were standing exactly where I once stood. And I needed a stranger to describe the place before I saw my own footprints in it.

She does not pretend she can fix it.

“I can’t guarantee that you’re going to meet your partner tomorrow. I can’t guarantee the next match is your person. What I can guarantee is that I’m going to work tirelessly on your behalf to find somebody who’s compatible for you.”

That is not a sales line. That is someone who decided to stand next to grief instead of promising it away.

Near the end I told her I would rather send someone to one of my sessions than to a boring coffee date.

She stopped me.

“It’s funny that you said a boring coffee date. Because for some people it’s not boring. And that’s perception.”

She caught me. In a conversation about not doing it, I had dropped a whole experience into a box without looking inside. Twice in one afternoon, then. Once with grief. Once with a cup of coffee I had decided was dull on someone else’s behalf.

I came home to the dog and Markus and the life I almost stopped waiting for. I had sat down to write about curiosity.

This is what came out instead.