I'm A 30-Something Single And Not On Dating Apps—Here's How A Professional Matchmaker Is Helping Me

I can’t decide if the fact that nearly 47% of the U.S. population is currently single comforts or worries me. As a single 30-something with a huge desire in my heart for marriage and family life, you’d think I’d be all over dating apps. But I’m not. I can’t quite bring myself to create a profile or swipe just yet, even though 45% of couples have reported meeting online, with the other 33% being connected by a friend and 32% meeting at events such as concerts or festivals. 

(Sidenote: Can we do a public service announcement to ban airpods and bring back spontaneous conversations and meet-cutes, please? Thank you.)

As the matchmaking efforts of my friends and family have been slim-to-none, I decided to seek out external professional help. 

Thankfully, what dating apps did do was create normality in using a third party to find a relationship. Enter Maclynn, an international matchmaking service that was conceived in 2011, before the advent of most dating apps. Their tagline? “Imagine your ultimate relationship. Now let’s create it.”

My Non-Negotiables

I’ve (half) jokingly asked both my religious and secular friends (as well as pleading to God, of course) if what I’m asking for is too much: a nice, normal, unvaxxed Catholic man? Most laugh at me, stating that I’ve narrowed my pool far too much and maybe I need to consider scratching off some of my criteria.

After all, maybe he’s not the same denomination as me (maybe he’s not even Christian at all), but perhaps his values are conservative and he’s traditionally minded. Is that enough? Or perhaps he did, at first, follow the Covid narrative because of incredibly justifiable and admirable reasons, but he now draws different conclusions. 

“Context” is a word that kept coming up during my meeting with Maclynn. Just as no dating profile is a one-dimensional photo with a list of statistics, no real-life person is either. 

So, I told myself to walk into the matchmaking profiling session with as open a mind, and heart, as I was able. 

The Profiling Session

Taking place over a 90-minute session, I met with the Director of Client Services and an Assistant Matchmaker to go through a conversational-style set of questions that got right down to the core of who I am, what I have to offer, and what I want from life. 

It was exactly what I expected, and yet it still felt incredibly existential for me to answer questions about my values, relationships, and vision for the future. 

Questions included: Let’s talk about your career. What values do you think you’ve inherited from your family? How do you see those values influencing your search for a partner? How do you feel about dating someone from a different cultural or religious background? Where are you right now, professionally? How’s your work-life balance? How do you envision your career in the future? Do you have any physical preferences in particular?

“It’s important to keep in mind that our matching process is rooted in values and the vision you have for your future,” the Maclynn team tells me. “We do take preferences into account, of course, because attraction is important, but we try to focus more on those deeper values.”

Measuring Values

Knowing how easy it can be to get prescriptive and hung up on the small things  – What does he look like? How tall is he? What job does he do? – this whole experience challenged me to see the key traits and topics that will add up to aligned values. 

We discussed everything from faith and spirituality, finances, health and well-being practices, family values, previous relationships, domestic life, vacation rhythms, and hobbies.  

Any season of singleness, especially if it feels painfully prolonged, can leave you idealizing “him” and idolizing marriage, so actually taking the time to understand what I want and how I’ll measure that in a potential spouse was just the step back I needed to come back down to reality.  

The idea, Maclynn told me, isn’t just to expand my own understanding of myself but to expand my choices – and to see what makes me compatible with another person. (My friends will be pleased to hear this.)

The Values Questionnaire 

After my profiling session, I was sent an online form. The purpose of this questionnaire? To help achieve my core objective of finding my compatible life partner. 

The idea is that shared values guide our behavior “by forming the conscious and unconscious foundation for our decision-making,” encompassing what is truly important to us. 

According to Maclynn, shared values are one of the strongest determinants of interpersonal attraction: “Sharing values with a partner has also been shown to enhance relationship satisfaction and be fundamental for the quality and stability of a relationship.”

Doing the questionnaire helped me bring my core values into conscious thought with the value list consisting of a total of 117 different values, including everything from “achievement” and “education” to “morality” and “spirituality.” The maximizer inside me wanted to select at least 21, but I was limited to a maximum of 10. 

The values I chose were: family happiness, health, freedom, religion, community, personal development, economic stability, helping society, play, and creativity. I tried to pick the ones that spoke to me immediately, not allowing myself to question or second-guess my options. I didn’t let myself curate them more than a once-over because I wanted to go with my gut instinct, rather than what I felt I “should” choose or say. 

I then had to rank my chosen values into “very important” and “somewhat important,” explaining why these values matter to me and how I’d recognize them in a partner. I also had to describe how these specific values could be demonstrated and displayed by someone, so I visualized my ideal relationship by asking myself What does it look like? How do we spend our time together? Where are we living? 

As a writer, I had no problem bumping up my word count, but I did have the issue of overthinking my answers as soon as I hit the submit button. Was it a bad idea to do them at 10:30 p.m. after a long day at work? Possibly. The paranoia of not optimizing my answers weighed on me before I reassured myself that my imperfect partner is not looking for impossibly perfect answers, and neither should I. 

Closing Thoughts 

While admitting that their clientele skewed 60% female and 40% male, Maclynn’s success rate speaks volumes with 85% of clients in a committed relationship within six months. Rooted in psychology, the agency doesn’t just pair you with people you match with but also has a coaching element based on the feedback you give and receive. 

While I’ve yet to go on a date myself (this piece would take much longer to write if I’d waited), I’m intrigued – and slightly terrified – of the idea of getting feedback from a date. But, this ultimately will help me understand how I come across and am publicly perceived. Plus, I did put down “personal development” as a key value, so there’s really no going back now, lest I be called a hypocrite. 

Overall, the exercise of digging deeper into the desires and intentions of my values has helped me see what I do actually appreciate and has encouraged me to put my Type-A personality down in my dating search.

Chances are, I won’t be able to relate to every choice this man has made, but hopefully, I’ll be able to see the values they were rooted in and maybe, just maybe, those will align with mine. 

Maclynn is an international matchmaking organization. Delphine Chui talks about dating and living a fulfilled life, no matter your relationship status, on YouTube and Instagram.