Lara Malvesí
Barcelona (EFE) on the Internet and those who, after having opened a digital profile, have not found the experience or the result they were looking for.
This has been told to EFE by María del Carme Banús, owner of the Samsara agency, and José María, one of the clients who has knocked on the door looking for love, “fed up” with flirting applications in which “false profiles” are rampant ” and everything depends “on looking good or bad in a photo”.
The director of this agency in the center of Barcelona explains that she has “three types of clients”: “Those who want a professional to take care of it because they don’t want to waste time, those who come out “frustrated” from the applications, which are becoming more and more , and then there is a public, mainly female, who highly values their confidentiality”.
By age, most of them are between 30 and 65 years old, although they have clients up to almost 90 years of age. And, by sex, Banús explains that there is parity up to 50, although from that age there are more clients.
José María is getting to know some of them. This 61-year-old divorced bank worker has already had five dates in four months. So far, he hasn’t had any luck. He though he has full confidence in the agency’s method. “They’ve been here for more than twenty years, that’s how they work,” he explains.
Not everything is what it seems
“In the applications there are too many people, thousands of people. In the end, it depends on whether you look good at a certain moment or not in the photo and you manage to pass the verdict of your finger to the left or right (to give “like” to someone on Tinder), points out this client who, he emphasizes, “there are also lots of fake profiles.
“Here, at least through the agency, you know that who you know is who they say they are and how they say they are, and that they are looking for the same thing as you: a stable relationship,” he adds.
In his unsuccessful passage through the applications, however, he points out, “there are those who are looking for something sporadic, those who are looking for something more or less serious, and even those who are not looking for anything at all.”
The professional method
“The difference between us and the networks is that we filter before the appointments. We know them personally, we interview them, we know who they are, we give them a test, a coaching session, and then we put them in touch so they can have appointments”, explains Banús.
The “matchmaker” says that after the meetings they receive the impressions of both parties and with that information they continue looking for if there has been no luck “or chemistry”, an element that Banús says he cannot predict because, he says between laughs, “he is not a seer ”.
Two years after celebrating the 30th anniversary of the business, he assures that they have brought together “around 7,000 couples.” “It’s just that we’ve been here for many years and a lot of people pass through here,” she says.
Agencies not so “matrimonial”
“Marriage agency is the usual name, but it is already something from another era, the reality is that for many years no one has come to tell me that their great dream is to get married. What they are looking for is a stable, serious relationship, a life partner or partner,” explains Banús, who opened his business on February 14, 1995.
The director of Samsara says that these weeks they are working to change their advertising and nomenclature and to call themselves a “matchmaking agency”. “I don’t like Anglicisms, but I can’t find the word in Spanish,” she says. Maybe matchmaking?
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