He should be tall, slim and very athletic, under no circumstances older than 50, and he should reside in the Bavarian state capital. This is how a woman from Munich introduced herself to her “Mr. Right”. She put 7,400 euros on the table at a dating agency. But when her dream man was not on offer, the customer sued the love agency. An undertaking that the 29th Civil Chamber at the Munich I District Court soberly rejected.
True love or commodity love, finding the perfect person to live in and love has apparently not gotten any easier, even in the digital age. The plaintiff probably drew hope when she discovered an advertisement for a partner agency with a claim to exclusivity in a trade journal. In January 2020, an employee of the agency was soon sitting on her couch and in a conversation lasting several hours, she found out what the single woman wanted. Appearance, as it turned out, was important to the woman from Munich, as were her place of residence and her age.
With her own appearance, her education and the environment in which she lives, she is “easily conveyed in a timely manner,” the employee of the dating agency is said to have explained. Finally, the Munich resident signed the contract. 400 euros were incurred for the first consultation, 7000 euros for the mediation.
Within a week, 20 partner suggestions fluttered into her house, and six months later eleven more were added. But Cupid’s arrow went wrong. The woman complained that none of the suggested partners matched her requirements. Her private and professional situation was not taken into account at all when selecting the partner. The announced “coordinated and hand-picked partner search” was not recognizable. On the contrary. The gentlemen’s profiles seemed like “completely inadequate, inappropriate and arbitrary mediation proposals”. In July 2022, the Munich resident announced that she was withdrawing from the contract and wanted the money she had invested back. Alternatively, she also wanted to contest the contract because of “fraudulent misrepresentation”.
The court does not recognize any fraudulent misrepresentation
The chamber heard the plaintiff, also an employee of the agency, and then there was a lot of shaking of the head: it was neither possible to reverse the contract, nor was there a violation of good morals or fraudulent deception. You can’t see a gross mismatch between the partner suggestions and the payment. The agency does not owe the woman a successful placement, with the emphasis on successful.
Under the heading “This is how I imagine my partner”, the plaintiff provided information that was reflected in the partner proposals submitted, the chamber continued. And the criterion that the man of dreams should only live in Munich and the surrounding area appeared neither in a memo nor in the customer form. On the contrary, the love agent explained in court that she had told the woman that she should be more flexible in this regard, otherwise the customer could not be included in the agency’s database because this was “locally too specific”.
The court came to the conclusion that the agency’s mediation proposals should not be regarded as non-performance. “The partner proposals were at least not completely useless,” the court said. According to Anne-Kristin Fricke, spokeswoman at the Munich I Regional Court, the judgment is not final.