By 6:47 the room had gotten loud enough that I could not make myself heard across a table, which I know because I tried, standing near the bar with one of my matchmakers and repeating the same sentence three times before she gave up and leaned in to hear it. That noise was the entire point of the evening.
On July 24 we filled a room at 220 King Street West in Toronto with single people and called it The Right Room. In it were CEOs and physicians, lawyers and founders, people who hold public office and people who run hospitals and departments and companies, all of them accomplished and hard working and funny and beautifully dressed, and every one of them without a single place in their ordinary week where meeting somebody was a realistic thing that might happen.
For twelve years the same sentence has been coming at me from people who have never hired a matchmaker in their lives, arriving from strangers in my inbox, from women beside me at dinner parties, from men messaging me on LinkedIn at midnight, always some version of the observation that there is nowhere left to meet anyone. We heard it often enough that we eventually stopped nodding sympathetically and went and built one.
The man who had not been on a date since 2015
He called in for a consultation a few months ago, long before he ever became a client of ours, and he counted it out on his fingers while I sat there and watched him do it. Eleven years.
He runs a company with roughly a hundred people reporting to him, he is in his forties, he is in good shape and he is genuinely kind, and none of that had made the slightest difference, because his office went remote years ago and never fully came back, his closest friends are married with small children whose weekends belong to hockey practice and birthday parties, and the last two weddings he attended were for his cousins’ kids. Somewhere in there he had simply run out of places where meeting somebody was a plausible outcome of leaving the house.
Around the same time a woman messaged me on Instagram, somebody I had never met and who has never worked with us, to tell me she had been on Hinge for three years and could not remember the last occasion on which a stranger had started a conversation with her in person. Not a good conversation. Any conversation at all.
Adults used to meet each other through infrastructure, and almost all of that infrastructure has quietly gone in the space of twenty years. The office you physically travelled to five days a week and where you knew everybody’s business. The neighbourhood. Church. A friend’s wedding that seated you at a table of strangers and left you there for four hours. The bar where the same forty people turned up every week until one of them eventually became your husband. Nothing arrived to replace any of it except an app you scroll through alone in bed at eleven at night, which is why telling an accomplished forty two year old to go out and meet somebody in real life has become advice with nowhere at all to land. So we built somewhere for it to land.
The rules of the room
Every design decision we made was deliberate, and nearly all of them existed to remove one specific excuse a nervous adult might reach for.
Everyone in the room is single, which does more work than every other decision combined. In an ordinary bar you spend the first ten minutes of any conversation quietly establishing whether the person in front of you is available, and most people abandon the attempt long before they get an answer, so at the door of The Right Room we answered it for them in advance. You could see the difference in how people stood.
No speed dating, which means no rotations, no bell, and no microphone moment where a grown adult is made to share a fun fact about themselves. Successful people spend their entire working lives being assessed and they can smell a corporate icebreaker from the coat check, and in my experience adults are perfectly capable of finding each other at a party without being formally assigned to one another first.
A balanced room, which took some discipline on our part. Women’s tickets sold out first, and rather than selling more men into an evening that would have wasted their time and their money, we held the ratio and opened a waitlist instead.
Matchmakers working the floor all night, making introductions and moving people around, because twelve years of this work has taught me that the barrier is rarely willingness. It is the eight seconds of standing alone with a drink in your hand doing the mental arithmetic on whether to walk over, and those eight seconds have ended more potential relationships than rejection ever has. We took them away.
Three short moments on the microphone spread across the night, spaced so the whole room resets every so often, which gives anybody trapped in a conversation that has run out of road a graceful exit they did not have to invent for themselves.
A full zero proof menu, because I have been sober for fourteen years and I am not willing to build a room where the only available route to feeling comfortable comes in a glass, or one where the people who do not drink get handed a soda water and quietly made to feel like a logistical inconvenience.
The most impressive people in the room were often the most nervous
This is the part of the evening I have not stopped thinking about since Friday.
A man who signs off on decisions most people could not sleep through told me he had no earthly idea how to cross a room and say hello to a woman, and a physician who spends fourteen hour days making calls that determine how somebody’s life goes told me she would rather do all of it twice over than approach a stranger holding a cocktail. Competence at work does not transfer to a room like this, and it never has. Most of the people standing in front of me had not practised any of it since university, largely because they spent their twenties and thirties building something instead, and the building worked.
So I spent a good portion of the night handing out the same small set of instructions, and by nine o’clock I was watching people use them on each other.
What I told the nervous ones
Set a number, and make the number five. Decide before you walk in that you are going to meet five people, because five is high enough to force you past the first awkward attempt and low enough that you will actually do it rather than quietly renegotiating with yourself by the bar. Everybody I gave that number to had hit it by eight o’clock and then carried on well past it, since by that point the difficult part was already behind them, while the guests who arrived without a number in their head tended to speak to two people and go home.
Separate at the door. If you have come with a friend, agree in the car that you are splitting up on arrival and finding each other at the end of the night, because a friend is a warm and safe place to stand and you will stand there for three hours if you give yourself the option.
Your opening line only has to be said out loud. Something as plain as “Hi, I’m Sarah, I don’t know a single person here” has started more relationships than every clever line ever written, and the enormous amount of energy people pour into engineering the perfect first sentence would be far better spent on the ten minutes that come afterward, which is the only part anybody remembers.
Read the shape of the group before you approach it. Look for three people standing in a loose horseshoe with a gap in it, because that gap is a genuine invitation and it is the easiest entry point in any room, whereas two people turned squarely toward one another are having a conversation that you would be interrupting.
Ask a question, listen to the answer, then ask a question about the answer, and do that four times in a single conversation. It is the highest return thing I have ever taught anybody in twelve years of doing this, it takes an evening to learn, and it works identically well on a first date, at a party, and in a boardroom.
Leave a conversation while it is still going well. “I’m going to go and say hello to a few more people, it was really lovely to meet you” is a complete sentence, and if you say it warmly and mean it, every adult in the room will respect you for it. Several people told me afterward they wished they had started using it an hour earlier than they did.
Ask for a phone number while you are still standing in front of the person. Instagram handles convert to almost nothing, and a follow tends to turn into a follow, whereas a number typed into a phone at quarter past eight on a Friday night turns into dinner the following week.
Give the night ninety minutes before you form an opinion of it. The first fifteen minutes of a room like this are always the worst fifteen minutes, and the people who leave early are almost always leaving right before it turns.
What people said afterward
My inbox the following morning held the best feedback I have received on anything I have built in twelve years of business, and I have built a few things. There were messages from people who had not been to anything of the kind in a decade, from guests who arrived alone and stayed until we turned the lights up, from women who had already got a date in the calendar by Saturday lunchtime, and a striking number of notes that all landed on some version of the same sentence, which was that they had forgotten this was possible.
One woman stopped me on her way out to tell me she had forgotten what it felt like to have somebody look at her properly while she was talking. She had been on the apps for four years and she had been in that room for two hours.
The thing I keep turning over is how completely ordinary the whole scene looked from the doorway, which was simply a room full of people talking to each other. That used to be free and it used to be everywhere, and it now requires a venue booking, a guest list, a carefully held ratio and a team of professional matchmakers to recreate for three hours on a Friday, and people will pay for it and then write to thank you afterward, which tells you fairly precisely how much has been lost and how quickly it went.
I have twelve years of evidence that people find each other perfectly well when you put them in the same place at the same time, and building the room has always been the hard part.
The next one is already being planned for New York City, Montreal and back in Toronto. If you would like to be in it, add yourself to our database at lyonselite.com/join-our-network and we will send you the date before it goes public.
Emily Lyons is the founder of Lyons Elite, a luxury matchmaking agency operating in nine cities across North America. The Right Room is her live event series for accomplished singles.
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