Can £15,000 buy you love?
Leonora Field-Foster speaks to the matchmaking services that bring the high earners of the world together
Catching someone’s eye across a crowded bar, falling in love and skipping off into the sunset seems to be the exclusive preserve of Netflix rom-coms. For most people, looking for love is a time-consuming business of swiping through online catalogues until they find a face interesting enough to warrant spending, and potentially wasting, an evening on. Alternatively, you can rely on friends to set you up. But how do you tell your friend that their friend is awful?
Millionaires have cracked the code: they leave the faff to professionals matchmakers. We spend our money on things far less important, so why not?
Drawing Down the Moon
The London-based Drawing Down the Moon is the UK’s oldest matchmaker, with more than 40 years in the business. Gillian McCallum first came across the company in a magazine ad, with the contact number at the bottom. “I remember thinking, here you have two people in different parts of the country who don’t know one another, who will be picking up the phone and calling the number — and otherwise would never have met.” She was still fascinated over two decades later, when she bought the company.
Having worked as a headhunter for the private family offices of billionaires, she already knew a lot about the rich. “If I was on Mastermind, that would definitely be my specialist subject,” she jokes. To McCallum the transition to matchmaking made complete sense. She had spent years interviewing people. Hiring people was based on chemistry, she maintains, much like matchmaking.
The majority of Drawing Down the Moon clients are based in London or have connections to the city and while they may be entrepreneurs, creatives or even company directors, common denominators are a successful career, a well-rounded social life and a desire to find love, McCallum says. About 75 per cent hear about the company through a friend or relative, but the firm also actively seeks out eligible singles and looks to maintain a slightly higher number of men than women (“men tend to be far more open to the type of women they would like to meet,” McCallum says, “while women are more prescriptive”). Age is but a number. The company’s oldest client so far was in his eighties (and yes, they did find him love).
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The fee starts at £15,000. The process begins with the client completing an online application with all the standard questions like age, occupation, home town, number of children and hobbies. This is followed by a phone call (to ensure the agency is a good fit), an in-person meeting (to further get to know the client) and a meet-the-team session: finding a match is a team effort that includes daily “matching meetings” to discuss potential suitors. Finally, it’s date time — which means as many dates as it takes to find Prince Charming or Cinderella.
The hardest part is encouraging clients to branch out from their checklist. As McCallum says, “All the evidence suggests that we are terrible at knowing who is right for us.” One client had only two requests, she adds: that a potential date must not like sport or work in finance. Lo and behold, the man she ended up being introduced to (after all her checklist matches had been exhausted) was a sport-mad finance guy whom she is now happily married to. McCallum’s top tip? Stick to values.
drawingdownthemoon.co.uk
Ivy Relations
Inga Verbeeck, who’s matchmaking agency Ivy Relations has an 85 percent success rate
“Love is far too important to leave to an algorithm,” says Inga Verbeeck, the CEO of the Belgium-based Ivy Relations. This matchmaking agency works differently. For one thing, it has a mainly male clientele. Its services start with an in-depth meeting to understand a client’s personality, lifestyle and relationship goals. But instead of fishing in Ivy’s own pool of bachelors or bachelorettes, the team of six headhunters cast their nets wider to find the best fish in the sea.
“We do a lot of homework,” Verbeeck says of the agency’s top-secret methods, which have an 85 per cent success rate (based on matches that result in a relationship of at least six months). “For many of our clients, busy schedules and selective environments mean they rarely encounter new people they would consider truly exceptional, and chance meetings are few and far between.” Verbeeck knows what she’s talking about: she became the CEO of a steel business in her late twenties and founded Ivy Relations in 2013 after experiencing the world of matchmaking post divorce.
While it’s hard to put a price on love, Ivy’s rates start at £13,000 and can reach well into the six digits, with standard membership including five introductions. The agency has already played Cupid to 300 couples all over the globe, from the UK to Europe and South America — it takes clients from far and wide, as long as they are successful and single.
“I have the luxury of choosing which people I work with, and try to protect a very positive and respectful environment, so I can vouch for the clients,” Verbeeck says. Nor do they leave clients to their own devices once a match has been made, offering instead a relationship concierge service that covers personal styling, travel coordination, gifting advice and emotional support — so they can go on dates feeling their best self.
As Featured in: The Times