Maybe you know the feeling. You show up to another date open and hopeful, and somewhere between the small talk and the bill, you feel that familiar drop: not this one either. Or maybe it's quieter than that.
Maybe it's 11 pm on a Tuesday, staring at your phone, wondering if you're the problem, or if love itself just isn't built for people like you anymore.
I know that feeling.
Because I've lived inside it. Four and a half years of dating, in one of the most disorienting eras in the history of love seeking, and there were nights I asked myself the exact question you might be asking right now:
Is love still out there for me?
Dating wasn't supposed to be my subject. For most of my career, I worked in private equity, in fine art, in cross-border strategy. I built a premium beauty brand from scratch in one of the most competitive consumer markets in the world.
My job was reading value that other people missed, in deals, in art, in markets that didn't yet know what they were worth. Nobody trained me to read love. I ended up doing it anyway, because eventually every question becomes the same question.
I come from a family where love was steady, respectful, and deeply present. My parents have loved and supported each other for more than four decades, and growing up inside that kind of partnership taught me something I never unlearned: love was never transactional; it was the foundation. That belief is what sent me looking, and it's what kept me looking even after years of not finding it.
Here's what all those years, in boardrooms and on dates both, finally taught me: the decisions that matter most don't get made with a spreadsheet. They get made with a feeling. I sat in rooms where the numbers checked out and everyone still decided on instinct. I went on dates where a spark decided everything before either of us asked a single real question. Same instinct, wearing a different outfit.
And that's exactly the problem. Feeling is a terrible judge of fit. Chemistry tells you how someone makes you feel in a moment. It says nothing about whether you're compatible for the next twenty years. I've watched brilliant, self-aware people, myself included, mistake a spark for a match, over and over, and pay for it later. The dating industry knows this, and it optimizes for the spark anyway, because the spark is what keeps you swiping.
Nobody is building for what actually lasts.
