Dating agencies: the costly quest for love
They say that money can’t buy happiness – but Tereza Burki, a 47-year-old financier, was willing to give it a go, said the Daily Mail. In 2013, she paid £12,600 to an elite dating agency, Seventy Thirty, to find her the “man of her dreams”. Alas, the agency failed to do so, and last week the High Court ordered that it repay her her fee, plus £500 to compensate for her “sadness”. In a twist, Burki was ordered to pay it £5,000 for calling it a “scam” in a review: the judge stressed that the agency was not a fraudulent operation. It had, however, misled her. It boasts of having 7,000 members, but the judge estimated that only 100 of them were men actively looking for love. Burki’s requirements were not, he said, “modest” – she was looking for an affluent jetsetter with “multiple residences” ideally, who’d be willing to have a child (to add to the three she has already) – but it remained the case that she’d never have paid up if she’d known how few fish were in this particular pond.
You may think she was a fool to even think of paying so much for the impossible promise of happy ever after, said Rosa Silverman in The Daily Telegraph, but there are plenty like her. Thousands pay vast sums to agencies for access to what they hope will be an exclusive pool of singles. In some cases, it pays off. But they are often disappointed: in the US, a woman who’d paid more than £100,000 for “CEO level” membership of a dating agency claimed in her lawsuit that among the “highly screened” potential partners she was offered were serial lotharios, married men and convicted felons. In other cases, women find that they’re offered only far older men who have paid the agency a fraction of the price they have – if they have paid anything at all.
The fact is, single women looking for love are bombarded with the message that there is something wrong with them, and that to fix it they need to spend money – whether on diet foods, cosmetic treatments or matchmakers, said Jean Hannah Edelstein in The Observer. But there is no magic formula. If we were a bit more honest about how difficult it is to find a life partner, businesses might find it harder to “wring money from women’s pain”.