Lory Kelsey’s eyes grow wide like a child with a secret. She can feel it. She’s on the verge of a love match.
“Let’s say I introduced you to this lady and it was like a fireball, all-consuming like a rocket,” she tells Thomé Nicocelli, 44, who’s on the other side of her desk. “Are you ready to move into the house and have a family?”
Nicocelli equivocates. Kelsey pushes back. Finally Nicocelli says, “Yes, I’m ready.”
The divorced dad of a 10-year-old daughter is Italian-born, handsome, well-educated, oozing charm and sophistication. He has it all. Earlier in the day, Kelsey met a 38-year-old woman, smart, sophisticated and, like magic, the two popped into her head as a pair. Next steps — coffee, a Valentine’s Day dinner? — are up to them.
Kelsey calls her mental couplings a gift, one backed up by the hard work of getting to know her charges. Matchmaking these days might conjure computer algorithms and faceless online chats, but Kelsey’s business is hands-on and homespun.
Her territory is as unforgiving as they come: Greenwich, Connecticut, where she lives; the towns of Lower Fairfield County such as Darien and New Canaan that make up the so-called Gold Coast, and sometimes Manhattan. This is where hedge-fund and private-equity managers, Wall Street success stories of various stripes, live, work and sometimes shell out a pittance of their net worth to find romantic companionship. They demand results.
“It is cutthroat,” says Kelsey, 59, who started her matchmaking business three years ago.
She has amassed a registry of more than 1,000 women she has started to charge $250 to be included. She had to reduce the maximum age to 48 after getting too many applicants older than that. The minimum is 21. Men must be 25. There is no maximum for them. Male clients pay a standard $30,000 for up to 15 introductions a year, or can now choose a special introductory deal of five for $6,100. That’s as much as $2,000 for a date.
She also gets a $15,000 bonus if the man gets engaged, $25,000 if he marries.
For many men, the priority is age, often sending off Kelsey to find dates 20 or more years younger. For many women, it’s the bank account and the security it brings. Height can be a deal-breaker for both sexes; religion, not so much.
If the business model sounds sexist, Kelsey says, it’s only because both sexes want it this way.
Some men can be picky, bizarrely so. One client Kelsey described as a “jetsetter” wanted only women between 5-foot-7 and 5-foot-9. Candidates who were an inch shorter or taller he rejected sight unseen. Another told Kelsey to get him Gwyneth Paltrow. Kelsey doesn’t know Gwyneth Paltrow.
While Kelsey finds women are more flexible, they can be specific in their preferences too. She tries to accommodate both. “I work very hard,” she said. “I got into this to make people happy.”
Divorced with two grown daughters, Kelsey is 5-foot-7 with blond-brown hair, freckled skin and a chin that juts just enough to be aristocratic. A licensed pilot for small-engine planes, she began her business in January 2012. She made $60,000 last year and she’s confident she’ll surpass that number and expand her one-woman operation.
Her ambitions are well-founded. The U.S. dating business, including matchmakers, is a $2.1 billion industry and exploding, according to Lisa Clampitt of New York City’s Matchmaking Institute. The school instructs would-be matchmakers in profiling clients, building a database and marketing their brand. Six were certified in its inaugural 2004 class. Ten years later, there were 80.
Kelsey didn’t attend Clampitt’s school nor was it her lifelong dream to make matches. She’s the oldest of three children, born in London of British parents. Her father, 91, is a semi-retired concert organist who brought his family to North America years ago for a job at an Episcopal church in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They moved around the U.S. before settling just south of Greenwich in Port Chester, New York.
Kelsey graduated from high school, went to Hunter College and then to Fordham University for a master’s degree in social work. She landed her first job in Moline, Illinois, as a state social worker helping children and families. In 1981 she returned east and worked at a dating service, where she met her ex-husband when she helped him fill out a membership application. They were married in 1983 and divorced in 1992.
Single again, she dipped into the world of personal ads and online dating with disastrous results. A company chief executive she met online beat her with a coat hanger. In 2008 a Wall Street trader who answered her ad, “Damsel in Distress Seeks Knight in Shining Armor,” moved into her four-bedroom Cape-style home in Greenwich, promising to pay rent and teach her how to make money by trading stocks.
She fell in love but the bubble burst. When he failed to keep up with the rent, she gave him the boot and looked for a matchmaker. Finding none, she began her enterprise not just for herself.
“I had so many girlfriends who were single forever,” Kelsey said.
She works seven days a week out of her home office, attending events to find potential clients, promoting herself on social media and poring over client information in spiral binders or her laptop. She’s now in a committed relationship with a man she met online.
The Saturday that ended with the home-office interview of Nicocelli began in the morning at Greenwich’s Equinox health club for a Valentine’s Day party. Kelsey mingled among servings of egg-white frittatas and red balloons, chatting and handing out her business card.
Then it was on to a coffee shop on her town’s luxurious Greenwich Avenue for an appointment with Marea Armenti, 50, of New Canaan.
The athletic brunette, who uses her maiden name, has been separated from her Wall Street husband for three years, the divorce still in the works. She’s tired of the single life, tired of friends saying they’ll fix her up but don’t.
Kelsey asked what kind of man lights her fire.
“Someone fun and happy,” said the fast-talking mother of four, who has been married for 22 years. “I don’t want short. I don’t want angry.
“I like a guy who doesn’t say no,” Armenti said, offering an example. “Turns out I’m free this weekend. Want to fly to Miami? Go! That’s what I want. I just want him to say yes.”
Kelsey is worried.
“I’m just trying to think what kind goes with you,” she said. “I’m struggling with it. You’re very high energy.”
As they stood to depart, Armenti apologized. “I’m sorry if I acted too energetic,” she said.
“No, it’s fine,” said the Greenwich matchmaker who, as a self-described hopeless romantic, often tells herself that love will find a way.
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