Emma Brockes Body Language At Club Sirius, the dating agency for “single, well-educated and articulate people”, success isn’t measured by the number of members who marry, but by the number who recommend the service to a friend. By recommending it, members are seen by the club’s management to have faced out a powerful taboo.
That taboo was challenged when a recent survey revealed that one in five single Britons use dating services. The report says the figure will double over the next five years. Agencies predict that the days of clients having to lie about where they met are ending. Such optimism may be premature. James is a 37-year-old who, as a smart, sophisticated and avowedly not desperate sales manager, epitomises the new breed who have joined dating agencies but is reluctant to be identified. He recently paid the 699 fee to join Club Sirius. “I’ve always been in steady relationships, so when my last one ended I went out to wine bars and pubs and clubs. I never met anyone.” “These are successful people who aren’t lonely but are isolated,” says Kate Corbett, director of Club Sirius. “The old-fashioned ways of meeting people no longer exist. Young people say that nightclubs aren’t the right place to meet people. The workplace was a way of meeting people, but relationships at work are increasingly discouraged. People come home after a 12-hour day and they don’t want to go looking for a tapas bar to hang out in.” Since 1992 the number of dating agencies in Britain has increased from 150 to almost 700, and the Internet has seen a boom in introduction services. But while meeting someone over the Internet isn’t remarkable, dating agencies still get a hammering. James joined up for reasons Corbett mentioned: he is frequently on the road, making socialising with colleagues difficult. Yet James found it hard to confide about his membership. “My friend was moaning about how he never meets women and I said, ‘Why don’t you join a agency?’ I didn’t go on to say that I had joined.” As long as marriage is regarded as an accomplishment rather than a lifestyle choice, it will be subject to the laws of competition, and there will be winners and losers. Since it is a principle of masculinity to chase and win the woman unassisted, men who join a dating agency risk being consigned to the loser category. “I’ve never met a man who told any of his friends he was joining,” says Michelle Bartleet, a 29-year-old recruitment manager who joined Club Sirius last year. When Bartleet received a selection of men’s profiles, her female friends grouped round to help her select from them and it became a social activity in itself. Now three of them are members. If women members are less reticent about agency dating than the men, it is only up to a certain age, beyond which agencies face their most hostile pockets of resistance. “I’m 51,” says Julie Raynor, chair of the Association of British Introduction Agencies and owner of the Julie Raynor Agency. “Women of my age and older are reluctant to admit they went through a dating agency, because they belong to the generation for whom it was an admission of failure. At the start of the 1980s it was all you could do to get an advert in the paper. You were looked upon as one up from prostitution.” “People still don’t know the difference between a dating agency and an escort service,” says Alun Jenkins, owner of the Executive Club of St James, where prices start at 3 000 and finish at 7 500. “The older generation sees it as a marriage bureau for failures. But younger people who are used to going to consultants for everything see it as completely normal.” “Completely” normal is perhaps an overstatement. Dating agencies still rub against the wisdom that you can’t force the hand of Cupid by filling in forms and attending singles nights. “There is a slightly different atmosphere on an agency date to other ones,” says James. “You both know what to expect.” Yet there persists the sense that there is something unrealistic, if not distasteful, about trying to distil one’s personality into a dating agency form. How many people, if they wrote down their partner’s vital statistics on a piece of paper, would pick them out as the person they were meant for? “We don’t take gentlemen under 5ft 6in, because the rejection rate is high,” says Jenkins. “You have to have your own residence, because if you’re 30 and still living at home you’re not our kind of member. “For ladies, there’s a maximum dress size of 16 because over that you’re throwing your money away. Size 14 is acceptable, 16 is marginal and 18 is over the top. How you speak is important. It’s not about money.” He is being realistic, he says, rather than chauvinistic. His agency merely articulates the prejudices exercised by everyone in the search for a partner.
It is one of the paradoxes of dating through an agency that the more elite the service you join, the more desperate you risk looking. Dateline, still cranking out matches after 34 years, has almost acquired kitsch status. Even the much-mocked lonely-hearts column is enjoying a renaissance among young people who use it as a diversion. Miranda (27) is a publishing executive who put an advertisement in a newspaper reading: “Petite redhead seeks ancient millionaire with terminal disease for adult fun.” “I thought I’d get someone either rich or ironic, but I didn’t get either. They focused on the adult fun part. It’s pot luck as to who you meet in a bar, so it’s no different going through a paper.” Despite her insistence that it was just a bit of fun, Miranda won’t allow the use of her surname in this article. It is this pecking order between the introduction services themselves that highlights the intractable human need for sexual superiority. If people at Club Sirius look down on people at Dateline, who look down on people in the lonely hearts columns, who are looked down on by everyone and who in turn assume a kind of ironic superiority, then it seems unlikely that anything much will be changing.