Finding love is a preoccupation for most of us as old as our humanity. And the meeting places evolve with the times. Today, 22% of new couples (formed in the last twelve months) declare met through a dating app or site, which makes these tools the first meeting place. But not everyone is satisfied with it, and among the disappointed or those who fail to find a partner on the Internet to share their life with, some decide to turn to a marriage agency, a sort of ancestor of Tinder, Happn and other AdopteUnMec, appeared in the 19th century. “I was a lot on the applications and I came out extremely disappointed, introduces Aurélien*. As soon as the first appointment is over, there is no longer any attraction. It is a logic of relationship consumption”.
“Shy and reserved”, this 32-year-old salesman, who works a lot, is not too used to going out, then turned to Unicis, a marriage agency. “I did the process on my own. I knew it existed and as I was a bit short of a solution, I started, ”simply explains the one who hopes to build a family. Today he has been in a relationship for two months with the first person that Aurélie, the matchmaker who officiates in the Paris region, introduced him. For his new companion, Aurélien was his second meeting. Both were looking for “a serious project”.
“The brake is the financial aspect”
This desire to build a “serious” relationship comes back to all interlocutors. The aspect of “very time-consuming applications” and the “lack of time to meet people” once you reach your thirties and have a well-launched professional life, are also mentioned among the motivations. This is explained by Antoine*, 37, who perhaps concedes having pushed his rational logic inherited from his training to the extreme: “I pay for services all the time to simplify my life. Ubers to get around, a cleaning lady, travel agencies for vacations. So why not a marriage agency? “Registered for three or four weeks at Unicis, after” a long analysis of the market “, he has already been able to make a meeting which a priori did not match.
In the business for fifteen years, Aurélie has observed within her agency “a population that has become considerably younger. Especially since the Covid. Between telework and confinements, loneliness weighed a lot. Also, dating sites have deteriorated a lot as more and more people use them. »
Antoine declares “to speak very freely about [s]walks with his family and friends. However, this is not the case for everyone. “My family doesn’t know about it,” says Mathilde*, who is expecting a baby from Thomas*. “They say we met through a mutual friend,” she smiles. Her girlfriends are, on the other hand, aware. “I see them struggling with apps and they would take the leap. The brake is the financial aspect” of this “service” that Aurélie, the matchmaker, pays for around 2,000 euros. Mathilde began to learn about agencies during confinement, by watching the program “Married at first sight”.
The use of marriage agencies remains taboo
A return of young people to marriage agencies on which Florent and Kevin are betting, who have just launched Begin, in Aix-en-Provence. And the two entrepreneurs in their forties intend to “uncomplex the process and dust off the model”. Starting with the prices. They offer “packs of 4, 6 or 8 meetings, up to a maximum of 500 euros”, they detail. Even if Kevin met his wife on Meetic, he remains critical of the applications. “The observation is that they lack efficiency. It is not the volume that is lacking, but the relevance of the profiles. And with the volume, we say to ourselves that we can always find better. We also judge on photo, on the physical. We do not present photos to our customers, we ask them to trust us. If, like the other agencies, they carry out an analysis of their clients to see which ones could go together, the two agents themselves propose the place of the first appointment.
“For me it was a drink in a rural setting,” says Matthieu, a 37-year-old from Aix. After “several years on the apps”, he was seduced and reassured by the approach of Florent and Kévin. “I thought it was reserved for the old and those who didn’t know how to use the Internet. I was also afraid of running into a 60-year-old woman who was going to get me a catalog. Matthieu is well aware, like Antoine, that he “pays for a service”. He believes that there is still a taboo around the use of agencies. “It’s a kind of admission of weakness,” he considers. “I talked about it with friends around a table, they laughed about it. But afterwards some came in private to ask me for details. »
The cost of providing agencies limits the number of users. “We are more aimed at dynamic urban executives”, explain our three agents. And beyond the love market, it is that of loneliness that is targeted, and it has a bright future ahead of it. A different target than applications. “Basically, a dating agency is just an improved application that analyzes the two people,” notes Antoine.
*The first names have been changed at the request of the interlocutors.