Introducing The Lonely Hearts Club’s matchmaker-in-residence by Justin Myers

Dante and Virgil observing the fate of the Lustful, 1444–1450 from Divine Comedy /The Public Domain Image Archive / British Library

The Lonely Hearts Club’s matchmaker-in-residence on why he’s the perfect (and only) man for the job.

Playing matchmaker is a responsibility not to be taken lightly.

So great is the pressure, I recommend that no matter how hard your friends beg, or how sad it is to witness single pals pinball between dating disasters, you stay quiet on suitable matches. Most romances begin with a spark, after all — but which fuel are you igniting? A pairing of soulmates to rival Burton & Taylor, Taylor & Travis, or bread & Nutella, whose public displays of infatuation will leave you heaving into your bottomless brunch? Or a decade-long study in the power of a public argument to siphon the joy out of every party, until your friendships have withered to call-screening status?

Instead, leave your single friends’ fate to the stars, or Tinder, or romance’s long-standing successful accelerant: a cocktail of booming pop music, a nightclub that’s lit like a vandalised phone booth, alcohol, and inhibitions lowered to the Earth’s mantle. Let nature take its course. Or perhaps you can send them here, to our tender embrace? Messages in virtual bottles sent floating in the sea of love, or companionship, or “it’s complicated.” You may question my matchmaking credentials. I may be old enough to remember the pre-surgery faces of most red-carpet celebrities and the Motorola Razr, but age alone does not guarantee wisdom — you need only cast your eye along the front benches of the House of Commons to know that. I’ve put in some serious shifts at the dating coalface. First of all, I’ve been on hundreds of dates myself, and blogged them, anonymously, publicly. Remember blogging? No? How about when being anonymous on the internet was cute and not borderline creepy and a skeleton key into behaving with extreme unpleasantness, unpunished? We do indeed live in different times.

Anyway, once I tired of stultifying small talk in London’s worst boozers with men no amount of PR spin could’ve made my mother like, I switched to reviewing the Guardian’s “Blind Date” on a Saturday, annotating starry-eyed couple’s answers to the column’s standard questionnaire with what you might call witty asides, if yowere a fan. I wrote about dating for Gay Times for five years and was sex and relationships columnist for GQ for six, but my authority on love is just as flimsy as the next person’s.

Put simply, then, it comes from an obsession, a decades-long fascination that defies description or logic. The things people say intrigue me: What might it mean; Where might it lead; Who are they trying to be? But even more alluring… what they don’t say. I love to shine torches into the darker corners, raise an ear trumpet to the awkward silences, and fill the dead air.

Best of all, I have no skin in this game.

I can strike the sandpaper on the box, see the spark, then walk away and watch the fire roar from a safe distance. And, now you can too. Come, then, let’s light a match and see where it lands.

This article was written by Justin Myers, better known as The Guyliner — writer, cultural commentator, and long-time observer of the strange rituals of modern dating. He writes Impeccable Table Manners, his cult-favourite column dissecting the triumphs and disasters of Guardian blind dates, and publishes the Substack newsletter The Truth About Everything. His novel The Glorious Dead is available from all good bookshops (and preferably your nearest independent).

He is also The Lonely Heart Club’s Matchmaker-in-Residence. In every issue he writes “The Myers Match”, where he pairs two hopeful souls from the paper’s personal ads and gently nudges fate in their direction.

This article originally appeared in Issue 01, the debut issue of The Lonely Hearts Club, published in January 2026. It was published online on March 12, 2026.