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The Short Version: Coming off a broken engagement in her 20s, Sophy Singer went on 150 online dates and decided there had to be a better way. But only after exploring her inner turmoil did she understand the connection between emotional health and the capacity for intimacy. That led her to Sophy Love, where Sophy and her tight-knit team take a bespoke approach to matchmaking. Active in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Francisco, Sophy Love helps clients build lasting relationships using therapeutic understanding, skill, connections, and intuition.
You might be the smartest person in the world, but you can’t get anywhere with relationships if you don’t understand yourself and how to communicate that to others. That’s the takeaway at Sophy Love, a matchmaking service for people in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Francisco.
Even if you don’t live in the areas where chief matchmaker and founder Sophy Singer operates, what she says about her personal journey and how it transformed her approach to dating, relationships, and even her business might tell you more than you knew about the person who looks back at you from the mirror every morning.
On one level, Sophy Love is a bespoke dating agency specializing in matchmaking, dating concierge services, coaching, and connecting with Sophy’s extensive network of vetted singles. A dedicated, professional team works alongside Sophy to treat every client as an individual with unique wants and needs.
The thing about wants and needs is they come with challenges, and that’s where Sophy Love shines. Sophy’s personal therapeutic journey has positioned Sophy Love at the crossroads of matchmaking and mental and emotional health.
If that sounds heavy, don’t worry — we all experience some form of trauma in life, Sophy said. What we learn from the traumas we undergo and how we put that learning into practice is what counts in relationships. Sophy’s perspective comes from deep learning that she and her team apply to curate thousands of engaging dates and hundreds of successful couples.
“The poet Rumi wrote that our task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within ourselves we’ve built against it,” she said. “We offer permission and liberation to singles to come home to themselves and one another.”
How many of us have had a formative experience in a relationship breakup? Too many to count. What’s distinct about Sophy’s story is that her breakup led her on a journey of revelation.
The breakup occurred in her 20s, as many of them do, more than 20 years ago. Sophy expected to be married with a child by 30 but instead found herself online searching for love.
“I was like, God, this feels unnatural, but I did it, and I did it for years,” she said. “I felt like a husband and family were the only things that would make me happy.”
She developed an informal methodology to protect herself emotionally as she went on more than 150 dates before meeting the man who would become her husband. They had twins. Friends considered Sophy a dating guru and asked for advice.
The twins’ arrival led her to switch from a job that required travel to a matchmaker position at a big-box dating agency. While in that position, she developed an early iteration of Sophy Love in 2018-19.
But all was not well — her son was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and she entered therapy to deal with the stress. That’s when the dam burst.
“I found my way into doing some profound inner work and started becoming conscious of decades of trauma stored in my body,” she said. “I was like, wow, this is why dating was so hard and why it literally hurt to go through breakups.”
Sophy had run full force into Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, which views the psyche as a system of painful wounds and emotions. Integrating those wounded parts into the authentic core self is the task.
Authentic Relating is an adjacent practice to reveal one’s internal struggle and authentic self in intimate and social conversation. Internal Family Systems and Authentic Relating became the behavioral and relational basis of Sophy Love.
“Relationships are a vehicle for healing and growth,” Sophy said. “Self-understanding gives you a much better chance of having a successful, sustainable, meaningful, nourishing relationship.”
The result is an approach that sets clients on a journey of self-discovery.
“We’re here to match people and facilitate the next chapter of growth,” Sophy said.
Executive matchmaking at Sophy Love is for busy professionals seeking high-end dating experiences. They count on the team to build a deep relationship with them using scientific techniques informed by Internal Family Systems and Authentic Relating.
A one-on-one intake meeting with Sophy identifies preferences, lifestyle, values, and partnership desires that comprise a personalized search profile. That’s the beginning of what often leads to a beautiful relationship.
“I want to work with people who say they’ve been on dating apps for 10 years but just haven’t met the right person,” she said. “I tell them they’ve probably met the right person 50 times. Something different needs to happen.”
Clients work with certified Internal Family Systems coach Justin Wilford and Authentic Relating coach Ryel Kestano, co-founder of the world’s largest Authentic Relating training company and author of “Authentic Relating: A Guide to Rich, Meaningful, Nourishing Relationships.”
Sophy and Ryel co-facilitate workshops, one-on-one coaching sessions, and live events.
Live online dating workshops instill conversational awareness through Authentic Relating to draw the dating partner into a genuine connection. A better understanding of relationship dynamics helps clients navigate conversational pitfalls to make encounters more constructive.
One-on-one coaching sessions lay the philosophical groundwork for deeper connections by helping clients develop confidence, communication skills, and dating strategies to approach dating with an optimistic mindset. Coaching includes goal-oriented advice.
Events channel participants through three conversational levels: informational, personal, and relational. The key is to unlock the relational level, which refers to conversations that take place in the moment.
“Those conversations are always new because these moments have happened before,” Sophy said. “It’s literally the antidote to dating boredom — so much connection happens there.”
Sophy said many clients come to Sophy Love to learn how to date and end up learning how to be more human. Internal Family Systems and Authentic Relating techniques help clients confront childhood emotional suppression learned to maintain parental attachment and replace it with authentic experience.
“You’re telling your date you’re feeling really awkward and don’t even know what to do with your hands,” she said. “Believe me, the other person will appreciate you just being real versus trying to cover up the awkwardness.”
Sophy said that’s because people subconsciously sense the disparity between what people say and how they say it. That reduces trust and can lead to another counterproductive evening instead of promising eye contact.
Those techniques require interactions to reach their full therapeutic potential. That’s why self-knowledge instigates a journey that often leads to a connection. Sophy said she doesn’t prefer to work with clients who seek transactional relationships and hand her a checklist of personal traits they need for a relationship to work.
“The integrative part is what makes this successful,” she said. “We’re using evidence-based psychotherapeutic modalities to help people transcend and transmute their experiences and stories and turn them into deep and meaningful connections.”
Sophy’s podcast, “The Conscious Matchmaker,” available on popular podcast platforms, seeks to redefine the essence of modern dating and connection in these terms. Co-hosted with Elizabeth Foster, Lead Executive Matchmaker and Conscious Dating Coach at Sophy Love, “Conscious Matchmaker” presents heart-to-heart conversations, expert insights, and compassionate wisdom in a convenient audio format.
There’s more to come as Sophy Love helps more Californians settle into lasting love relationships.
“I just want to change the trajectory of people’s lives in whatever way I can and bring this work and this healing and this liberation to as many people as possible,” Sophy said.
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