Matchmaker

There is a third person in this romance and she is not a rival. She has a spreadsheet, a fee, or a family obligation, and she has decided that these two should be together some weeks before either of them has been consulted. Matchmaker is a plot-shape in which a third party engineers the pairing, and it spans a wide range of settings: the professional agency, the interfering grandmother, the village elder, the app, the friend who will not stop. What the shape promises is a courtship with an audience and an agenda. Somebody is watching, adjusting, and reporting. That produces a specific comedy and a specific pressure, because the couple is being assembled rather than assembling, and both of them know it. The make-or-break element is whether the matchmaker has a stake. That is the test. A matchmaker with nothing to lose is a device. One with a stake is a character, and the stake can be almost anything: a reputation built on a success rate, a fee that will not be paid if this fails, a promise made to somebody who has died, a fear of being alone that is being managed by arranging other people. The reader should be able to say what happens to the matchmaker if this goes wrong. The failure mode is the vanishing arranger. She sets the couple up in chapter three and disappears, and the book becomes an ordinary romance with an unusual origin. The shape needs the third party present throughout, interfering, misreading, and occasionally being right for the wrong reasons. There is a second failure worth naming, which is the couple's passivity. Two people who simply comply with an arrangement are not doing anything, and the shape works far better when at least one of them is actively resisting the match while being unable to explain why the resistance is weakening. The strongest versions give the matchmaker a wrongness. She has misjudged something important about one of them, and the couple works despite her model rather than because of it, which lets the book have the shape's pleasure and a corrective at the same time. There is also the matchmaker's own romance, which the genre uses constantly and frequently better than the main plot: somebody who arranges everybody and has arranged nothing for herself. The contemporary version has largely migrated to the app, and the migration changes the shape more than writers usually notice. An algorithm has no stake, no judgement, and nothing riding on the outcome, which strips out everything that made the human arranger interesting. Books using a dating app as the matchmaker generally have to reintroduce a person somewhere, usually as the friend who made the profile, because the shape does not work without somebody who wants this to succeed. There is also the reluctant-client variant, in which one party has hired the matchmaker and the other has no idea any arrangement exists, which converts a comedy into something with a genuine deception at the centre. She takes credit for it afterwards, publicly, at the reception. Neither of them corrects her, and both of them know precisely which part she got wrong. That is the shape. Not the introduction, but a third person with something riding on two people she does not control.