A Facebook post stopped me mid-scroll and sent me into laughter I couldn’t shake off. It read: “If you think you have tried many matchmaking relationships and it hasn’t worked, you have not truly met a real matcher. Just call the number below, whether you’re a man or a girl, let me add you with the right people.”
I’m still smiling. It’s fascinating how social media has turned matchmaking into a full-blown profession, with self-styled “fixing experts” and “relationship coaches” operating in what Marshall McLuhan called the global village. What was once whispered by aunties and elders has now been monetized and advertised with phone numbers and emojis.😃
But what exactly is matchmaking? At its core, it’s the art of pairing two people who may never have met, based on a third party’s prediction that they might fit. It isn’t a laboratory science, but it borrows from everyday empiricism by reading common traits in age, ethnicity, profession, hobbies, class, character, and even physical appearance to make an educated guess. The matcher becomes a human algorithm, processing variables that would otherwise remain hidden in chance encounters.
The problem is that life rarely follows a neat formula. Love defies arithmetic. Matchmaking assumes that a rich man will naturally fall for wealth, that beauty comes first, that family background outweighs everything else. If that were true, no man in his sixties would ever find a bride, and no woman would fall for someone twenty years older. Yet Emmanuel Macron shattered that assumption, and countless stories around us do the same every day. Human desire is stubbornly illogical.
Still, matchmaking has its strength. Social psychologists call it the outsider advantage. A third party, unclouded by infatuation or ego, can sometimes see compatibility more clearly than the people involved. Where lovers are blinded by fantasy and projection, the matcher operates with relative neutrality. Studies on arranged marriages in South Asia show that marriages brokered by families often have lower divorce rates, not necessarily because of love at first sight, but because expectations are managed, and the partnership is treated as a project built over time. The matcher also expands horizons, introducing people to potential partners within reach but outside their immediate circle, people they would never have noticed without that nudge.
The downside is equally real. Matchmaking can rob people of the romance discovery, the illusion that they alone are the luckiest person alive because they chose their partner through personal judgment, instinct, and conviction. I’ve described love before as an art, and art is about the world we create around the person we love, not just what nature hands us. A matcher can hand you a candidate, but they cannot hand you the internal spark that turns acquaintance into meaning. That spark is often born from struggle, uncertainty, and the story you build together, not from a curated profile.
Yet even here, matchmaking can serve as a catalyst. It challenges people to step outside their comfort zone, to test their prejudices, and to consider alternatives they would have dismissed on sight. In doing so, it nudges us toward what Socrates called intellectual humility, the recognition that “I know that I know nothing.” It is that humility that allows someone to meet a partner through a stranger’s suggestion and, months or years later, rewrite their story with gratitude of thanking the matcher.”
Love, after all, has a habit of showing up in unexpected places. There is no universal formula that guarantees success. At best, matchmaking opens the door. Whether you walk through it, and what you build once inside, remains your art to create.
*Bagudu Mohammed*
bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com
