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About the Author: Steve Ward
Steve Ward is the Owner and CEO of Master Matchmakers and a second-generation matchmaker who built the firm alongside his mother and co-founder JoAnn Ward. He hosted and executive-produced VH1's Tough Love for six seasons, co-authored Crash Course in Love (Simon & Schuster), and has been featured as a dating expert by CNN, the Today Show, Oprah, Glamour, People, and Cosmopolitan. He has spent more than 25 years personally coaching and matching relationship-minded singles nationwide.
Quick answer: Master Matchmakers changes four specific things about how you meet people: who does the looking, what is known about a person before you meet, how quickly a mismatch gets corrected, and how long you have. Fees start at $3,500. Nobody changes the outcome, and any firm claiming otherwise is selling something it cannot deliver.
This question usually gets answered with a success rate, and success rates in this industry are close to meaningless. Nobody agrees on what counts as success, nobody audits the numbers, and the firm quoting them chose the definition. I have been doing this for more than 25 years and I would not ask you to believe a percentage I published about myself.
A better question is mechanical. Not does it work, but what does it actually change about the way you are currently meeting people. That has a concrete answer, and once you have it you can decide for yourself whether the change is worth paying for.
Change One: Somebody Else Does the Looking
On your own, the pool of people you can meet is whoever your life puts in front of you: colleagues, friends of friends, and whoever is on the platform you happen to use. Those are real sources and they produce real relationships. They also have a hard ceiling, and most people who call me have hit it.
A sourced search moves the work off you. Someone else goes looking, deliberately, in places your own life does not reach, and does it whether or not you had the energy that week. That is the least glamorous part of this and probably the most consequential, because effort applied unevenly over eighteen months is the actual reason most searches stall.
Change Two: You Know Who They Are Before You Meet
Before anyone becomes eligible to be introduced to you, they clear identity, age and photo verification, a criminal and public-record background check, and a personal interview. When a genuine fit surfaces, you get the verified profile, the photographs and a phone number. You speak with the person yourself and you approve the introduction before it happens. There are no blind dates.
What that changes is narrower than people assume, and worth being precise about. It does not tell you whether you will like someone. It removes the category of evening spent discovering that a person was not who they presented themselves as. If you have dated for any length of time you know how much of the total cost that category represents.
The distinction that matters: verification is not compatibility. It cannot predict chemistry and does not try. It guarantees that the facts you were given are accurate, which is a smaller promise and the only one anybody can honestly make.
Change Three: A Mismatch Gets Corrected Instead of Repeated
Dating on your own has almost no feedback loop. An evening goes averagely, nobody says anything true about why, and you carry the same unexamined assumption into the next one. People repeat the same mismatch for years without ever being told what it is.
After each introduction, both sides give feedback and it travels in both directions, filtered through a coach and matchmaker who have no reason to flatter you. Sometimes what comes back is that the criteria are wrong. Sometimes it is that something in how you show up is landing differently than you intend. Neither is comfortable, and both are information you cannot get any other way, because the person who could tell you is the person least likely to.
This is the part that changes what the tenth introduction looks like compared with the first, and it is the reason the sequence matters more than any individual match.
Change Four: The Clock Does Not Run Out
Our contracts do not expire. That sounds like a commercial term and it is really a structural one, because a search with a deadline behaves differently from a search without one. When there are six weeks left on an agreement, the pressure is to produce introductions rather than to produce the right introduction, and everyone involved can feel it.
Removing the timer changes what a slow month means. A demanding quarter at work, a family situation, or a stretch where nothing suitable surfaces stops being a loss of value and becomes what it should have been all along, which is a pause.
| What you are doing now | What the process changes | What it does not change |
| You do the searching, in the time you have | Someone searches on your behalf, consistently | Whether the right person exists in range |
| You find out who someone is during the date | Identity, age, photos and public record checked first | Whether you enjoy each other's company |
| Nobody tells you why it did not work | Honest feedback both ways, plus coaching | Whether you act on what you hear |
| A quiet month feels like failure | No expiry, so a quiet month is just quiet | How long it takes |
Where the Process Has No Power
Everything above is machinery around a meeting between two people, and machinery has limits that are worth naming precisely rather than in general terms.
It cannot manufacture attraction. Two people can be well suited on every dimension anyone can assess and feel nothing across a table, and no amount of process reaches that. It cannot make somebody available who is not: if you can give this two evenings a quarter, the sequence that produces results will take much longer, and a firm that pretends otherwise is managing your expectations rather than your search. It cannot make a market larger than it is, which is why the right radius gets discussed before anyone signs. And it cannot make you act on feedback. I have told clients things that would have changed their year and watched the same pattern repeat, because being told is not the same as being persuaded.
So the honest shape of the answer is this. The process reliably changes the inputs, and the inputs are what you actually control. It does not control the result, and anybody who tells you they do is describing a business that does not exist.
What We Stand Behind Accurate Information, Not a Guaranteed Result
In business since: 2001 | Private network: 65,000+ singles | Fees from: $3,500
We do not guarantee a relationship, because no firm legitimately can. What we are answerable for is narrower and checkable: the person you sit down with is exactly who the profile said they were, verified before the introduction was ever offered to you. The full sequence is on our How It Works page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a matchmaker do that I cannot do on my own?
Search consistently in places your life does not reach, verify identity, age, photos and public record before you meet anyone, and give you honest feedback after each introduction. You can do parts of that alone. Almost nobody does all of it steadily for a year.
Why will you not quote a success rate?
Because nobody in this industry agrees on what success means, nobody audits the figures, and the firm publishing one picked the definition. A number produced that way tells you about the firm's marketing rather than your odds, so we describe the process instead and let you judge it.
Who does matchmaking not work well for?
Anyone who cannot make time for introductions once they arrive, and anyone unwilling to hear feedback and adjust. The process reliably improves your inputs, but it cannot create availability you do not have or persuade you to change something you would rather not.
Can a matchmaker guarantee I will meet the right person?
No, and no firm legitimately can. Attraction cannot be manufactured and no process reaches it. What can be guaranteed is the accuracy of the information you are given about every person introduced to you, which is a smaller promise and an honest one.
Why do Master Matchmakers contracts not expire?
Because a deadline changes behaviour. With weeks left on an agreement the pressure is to produce introductions rather than the right introduction. Without a timer, a demanding quarter or a stretch where nothing suitable surfaces is a pause rather than a loss.
Judge the Machinery, Not the Percentage
If you are weighing this up, ask any firm to describe the four things above in its own words: who searches, what is verified and when, what happens after an introduction that did not land, and what happens when the agreement runs out. The answers are specific, they are comparable between firms, and they tell you far more than a statistic ever will. If you would rather start from what it costs and what that buys, that is a separate question and we have written about whether matchmakers are worth it in its own right.