Meet the single CEOS looking for love
Where do single high fliers go to find romance? Charlotte Lytton joins the elite dating set on a matchmaker’s cruise
Put 75 successful single, high net worth individuals on a yacht, set sail on the Seine for a week with a free bar, and what do you get? A little romance, tears, and a not insignificant amount of headscratching as to whether this is the future of dating, or a kind of boozy love boat for fashion and finance types who purport to belong to the world’s most exclusive dating club.
For the League, the “elitist dating app” launched in San Francisco three years ago, exclusivity and quality are key. It uses Linkedin data to assess its potential members’ credentials. The top three universities attended by its UK users are Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, while the most common three companies they are employed at are Goldman Sachs, EY and Google.
Currently only available in select cities, when I try to join the app, I am informed that I am number 457,878 on the global waiting list.
The League’s founder, Amanda Bradford, is a walking advert for her exclusive dating service. With glossy blonde hair, an MBA from Stanford University and a musician boyfriend, Jeremy, who she met through her own creation, it is her ambition to pair up would-be power couples the world over, letting its algorithms do “the scouting and the vetting”, while users do “the matching and the petting”. To combat the severe discontent that follows so many swipe-weary daters, the League is bringing experiences offline through the likes of real-life events and trips such as their Paris sojourn, which follows a ski holiday to Colorado five months earlier.
But what I really want to know is: why are these super-successful people still single? Most of the League’s users are in the 30-40 age bracket and have found themselves unattached in midlife for the usual reasons: too many hours spent in the office instead of cultivating relationships, and the same unattainably high standards they pursue of themselves and their careers in what they are seeking from another. Also, many are looking for a second chance at love after a first misguided attempt. “It’s very hard to meet people,” says Cliff Lerner, 40, a native New Yorker and entrepreneur who agrees to speak with me only on the basis that I mention his book, which he repeatedly assures me is an Amazon bestseller. “People are very motivated and ambitious, and work incredibly long hours,” says the author of Explosive Growth, “and there’s just not a lot of time to enjoy yourself and meet people.”
However, a significant number of them seem able to find the time to fly across the Atlantic to spend a week in the romance capital of the world. According to the Little Black Book left at everyone’s bedside on arrival, the company they will be keeping for the next week includes a smattering of CEOS, a raft of lawyers, doctors and finance professionals. Ladies must choose between the likes of banker Mark, who describes himself as “happy, fun, gentlemanlyish. Father of 2 great kids” and Rikhil, a “cityhopping global nomad based in NYC”, while gents on board are shown the profiles of advertising executives like Suzanne, who likes to “paint, draw, dance and sing, but not all at the same time”. Or perhaps management consultant Annabel from London would be more likely to float their love boat?
By the time I meet the match-seeking crew, it is evening on day five and, to put it in the words of more than one hungover singleton strewn across the deck of the luxury yacht, I have entered a “wasteland.” Excursions in the day and partying until 6am an ocean away from most of their homes have taken their toll: relationships have bloomed and bust in a matter of hours and days and one woman has checked into a nearby hotel, sick of the “toxic atmosphere” this intense coupling up has yielded. The experience has been, to put it
mildly, “quite surprising,” says Lara Peake, a 31-year-old account manager from London. “I think the cultural differences between Brits and Americans are quite stark on this trip. There’s been some fairly teenage behaviour going on.”
Peake has had something of a bird’s-eye view of proceedings on account of the fact that, two weeks after booking the trip, she met her current boyfriend. She previously had one seven-month relationship with a man she met through the League – but did those who looked best in the Little Black Book match up to their credentials in person? Lerner says he was impressed by the “attractive, interesting and intelligent” calibre of women in attendance, but adds that “there was no correlation whatsoever” between what he saw on their profiles and how they appeared in real life.
But isn’t that the problem of online dating in a nutshell? For those of us struggling to find decent other halves on terra firma via our phone screens, these digital means can never replace that instant chemistry upon meeting someone; those first few seconds of catching someone’s eye and knowing, instantly, that there is something between you.
Lerner admits that he has come to view dating apps “as a numbers game – the more people you meet, the more likely you’ll find the right person”; Peake sees things differently: “Online dating feels like very high investment, low return.”
On board the League’s lust-liner it seems the old-fashioned way of dating and ditching is going strong. With no screen to hide behind, the usual digital dating hazards of being “ghosted” – having your messages ignored by your date – are replaced by a far more brutal reality.
I speak to a gorgeous, successful 35-year-old woman who, having been snapped up and quickly dumped by several men over the course of the past week is feeling, understandably, bruised. The rejection is made all the worse by the red faces of ex-flames as they duck in and out of their neighbouring cabins with their new squeezes. She is considering taking up one of the last unattached chaps’ offer of a drink because though he is “boring,” she says, glassy-eyed, he is still “an option.” Options here, after all, are paramount: the words “game theory,” in which a strategic standoff can produce only one victor, are mentioned to me on three separate occasions, and multiple men on board say that they will not make a play for a woman they are interested in, rather waiting to do so when they are back on dry land and the other competition will have ebbed away. Public displays of affection here are also verboten, they add, lest their chances of coupling up with someone else during the course of the trip be scuppered.
Many of the women describe their male counterparts as “not particularly attractive or interesting” – and yet pair off with them, irrespective.
This isn’t to say the League’s algorithm doesn’t work for some, distance be damned: Bradford and her musician other half live in San Francisco and Los Angeles respectively, while aerospace engineer Janelle and Geoff, CEO of a digital marketing company, one of the “successful” couples who met on the Colorado trip and have also spent the week travelling around France, call San Diego and Texas home. And there have been some genuine moments of romance. One 41-year-old father-oftwo spent several days quietly wooing a potential mate, surprising her under the Eiffel Tower with a bottle of champagne; another whisked a woman off for dinner at one of the most romantic restaurants in Paris.
Whether the C-suite-on-sea can really be the future of romance remains to be seen. But if it gets people to stall their incessant swiping for a week, perhaps it is no bad thing. Some names have been changed