Finding a love match based initially on personality isn’t a new concept, despite what Netflix’s Love is Blind might have you think. But choosing to have humans rather than algorithms find your Mr or Ms Right is a growing trend. Amanda Cassidy goes down the rabbit hole of matchmaking.
Feargal Harrington can pinpoint exactly what the busiest times of the week, and the year, are for the business he founded with his wife, Rena Maycock. They are the moments when people’s aloneness seems to especially strike, he explains. “We organise about 100 dates a week, all over the country. But at certain times, you see a surge,” says the director of INTRO Matchmaking Agency. “Tuesdays and Thursdays and Sundays are the biggest days. Sunday specifically, because single people hate Sundays. Then the lead up to the weekend, when there aren’t an awful lot of plans.”