Love in the Real World
For those tired of looking to faceless swipe-and-scroll tech for love, You & Me Matchmaking Service offers real connections for real people.
by Leigh Stuart

People are going organic for everything from dog food to hair products, but for some reason when it comes to love, tech has become the go-to for matters of the heart. 
 
If this sounds off to you, you’re not alone; Julia and Alex Gold agree that taking the human element out of the equation when it comes to love just doesn’t make sense.
Putting the human experience back into the work of finding love was a central reason they took up the noble cause of matchmaking with their firm, You & Me Matchmaking Service.
 
For Alex and Julia, matchmaking is a personal passion. Their marriage was the second for both of them. Julia cites her own experience “on the apps” as a reference point when it comes to sympathizing with the exhaustion many daters feel in the modern world. 
 
“Going back to my dating experience, I was divorced for some time,” she shares. “And I’ve been on dating apps and various dates that did not go well. It’s so, so difficult to find your person. The fact that we met and we’ve been successful, we just kind of want to pay it forward.” 
 
With backgrounds in management and human resources, respectively, Alex and Julia bring a wealth of knowledge to the table. They excel in synthesizing myriad pieces of information to find compatible solutions—skills that apply not only in managing people, but also in matching potential partners. 
 
“Julia has extensive human resource experience, and I’ve been in management—corporate and financial—for my whole professional career,” Alex shares. “We have been educated and trained to work with people, having been sent to executive courses at the likes of [the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania]. I’m not trying to pat myself on the back, it’s just something that comes with the territory. Certainly over time, you become quite a bit of a psychologist.”
 
Having worked with situations across the globe and people from all walks of life, the husband-and-wife duo possess the empathy, keen sensibility, and tact necessary to walk clients through the highly personal process of finding love. 
 
“The way we looked at it, we wanted to do something in the community that wasn’t readily available,” Alex says. “When we talked about what aspects were interesting for us, we had a lot of conversations about the dating world and how, psychologically, this trend has gone against the natural kind of progression of a human being—needing social media, the dating apps, and how unequipped the younger generation is in terms of being able to socialize with each other.” 
 
“And not even just the ‘younger’ generation,” Julia adds. “We’re talking about people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who have been having a difficult time.”
 
From this, Alex and Julia set themselves on a course to help people find love the “old-fashioned” way—that is, in real life. That’s the same reason they like to collaborate on occasion with singles event planning agencies, which hold singles events throughout the Philadelphia and New Jersey areas.
 
“We also help people get from point A to point B, from sending the first text message to then starting a conversation, then proceeding to a phone call, and then asking someone out,” Julia shares. “Going back 20, 30 years, this wasn’t an issue, but now this seems to be a challenge for many people.”
 
Among top issues, Alex and Julia agree, is the sheer volume of humans as data points on dating apps. 
 
“I would say number one: too many choices,” Julia says. “We have too many choices and people are looking for perfection. As you know, perfection does not exist. We take the person for who they are, and we give them a chance. We don’t just say, ‘OK, next, next, next’; social media makes it impossible to concentrate on one person because you always feel there’s someone around the corner that’s better. Relationships are not about that.
 
“We’re so conditioned today as opposed to 20, 30 years ago, that everything is at the tip of your fingers,” she continues. “You click, you swipe, and people start nitpicking; they don’t want to even go so far as to meet the person because they immediately turn them down based on silly qualifications.”
 
As a remedy to this, Alex and Julia consider the whole of a client, from their passions and character to their greatest hopes in finding love. On the flip side, all potential matches are vetted thoroughly and personally by Julia and Alex themselves. They also perform background checks for the safety of everyone involved.
 
“What the dating apps are doing, there’s always an algorithm behind it, and I’m an IT professional who has worked my whole professional career in technology,” Alex says. “I very well understand how these systems and programs work. AI works on a very similar principle—it’s an algorithm, and it just looks and tries to figure out programmatically what works.  
 
“What’s missing there is the human factor,” he continues. “This is exactly one element that no program, no app, no AI can replace. It’s the feeling right after you speak to the person. You, as an individual, get a very good sense of whether this person is arrogant or whether they’re kind or whether they’re honest about their preference; it’s all in the way they speak.” 
 
At the end of the day, You & Me Matchmaking Service offers the support, guidance, and, yes, love required to make successful matches.
 
“We give advice, we give support, we laugh, we joke,” Julia says. “We get on a phone call, we encourage, and we’re happy to do it. It gives us a feeling of warmth. That is one aspect I did not expect, honestly, is how much fun it is, how rewarding it is. We’ve met so many different personalities and individuals. Some we’re friends with already. It’s wonderful to be able to just make people happy.”
 
You & Me Matchmaking Service
(215) 595-6697
youandmematchmaker.com
 
Photo by Alison Dunlap
 
Published (and copyrighted) in Suburban Life, June 2026.
 

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