Wow, have we evolved! Way back in the late 80-s with my college friends I was known as dating matchmaker, or as I preferred to be called at the time, a dating coach. The word matchmaker immediately conjured images of 80 years old yentas and my friends, and later clients, many had not even seen/heard of classics like Fiddler on the Roof! WSJ.com
Thus, when a client asked me how long I’ve been doing this, I told her that I pre-date online dating! She’s in her 30’s and couldn’t even imagine when I told her that people in the 1980’s went to a video matchmaking service and sat on sofas viewing other people---while majority checking each other out!
And it cost, wait for it, $2,000-3,000. I saw her jaw drop on our Zoom dating coaching call!
So, it made me think of the universe of dating and the big bang theory of the dating explosion.
While I started It’s Just Lunch in 1991, there really was nothing out there and what a stigma attached to a dating service. “Oh, those poor single people” I heard frequently. After expanding from Chicago to NYC, my landlord didn’t want to rent to me as he thought I was Heidi Fleiss.
And, then, thank you in the later 90’s came the advent of online dating where I believe we eradicated 90% of the stigma of using a dating service! It began in 1994 with Kiss.com and Match.com jumped into the action in 1995. (match.com was actually one of the potential buyers who put in a proposal to buy www.itsjustlunch.com from me around 2008).
From the first 1870 newspaper for singles, The Matrimonial News (men paid a quarter to place an ad) in San Francisco all the way back to 1685 when the first known personal ads popped up in a British agricultural magazine, we’ve used the resources available with the technology we had at the moment.
Fun Facts about where we are at today in 2021 with online dating apps/online dating coaches, online dating clients:
*275M users in 2020 compared to 170M in 2015
*Global dating revenue in 2020 was at 3.2B (yes, billion)
* By 2025, Statista projects growth of nearly 100% to 6.0B
*Over 50% of online dating users engage at least 1x a day
I was known for saying to my friends the biggest pool of potential matches you’ll ever find is in college, next grad school, perhaps the workplace.
With over 100 million singles in the US, there’s no doubt there is someone for everyone and a very high likelihood she/he is online! To increase the odds, I always recommend going to a pro to help with your online dating profile!
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