"When I choose a partner, I screw up, so I decided to try a marriage agency"

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MS is 54 years old and in 2021 she had a very bad time due to the bitter experience of her

Everything happened in the month of August but she, a staunch defender of love and the couple, decided that she did not want to spend another year alone, and on December 31 she knocked on SamSara's door.

SamSara

is a Barcelona company that was born in the mid-90s of the last century as a marriage agency and whose founder,

now prefers to call it a matchmaking agency, as the times dictate and, above all, the competition that lurks on the Internet.

Lack of trust

It was the first time that MS resorted to this method, and it was her lack of self-confidence that led her to the doors of this agency, which in its history is proud to have formed

and runs a database of about 450 people.

"When I choose a partner, I screw up, so I decided to try another way," she says.

There she paid the fee - "within the reach of any economy as long as you have a job," according to Banús -, answered an extensive questionnaire and then was interviewed by the owner, the method they always follow.

Soon the files of men who had also gone to the agency in search of a stable partner began to arrive

she says MS-.

She received seven and, as if this were her lucky number, with the seventh the match was produced.

the beginnings of love

At that time, a quiet relationship began that broke off shortly after they met because he was not entirely clear about it.

MS then met two more candidates, but the one who had been

and they resumed their relationship.

Since then they have been together for more than half a year.

How did you detect that he could be the man of your life?

had known each other for a long time, when she heard him speak she told me to myself: 'he is different from the others' ».

For MS, the differences with dating applications like Tinder are very clear: «I think that if there is a previous filter it is much better.

In the agency there are also psychologists, you have to pay money and people don't go there just looking for sex.

Maybe I am an old one, but I prefer that they do a follow-up ».

handpicked candidates

Yes, perhaps going to a marriage agency in search of eternal love sounds old, especially for the

worldwide who have applications such as Tinder, the most downloaded in Spain, which allows you to select or reject a candidate with the swipe of a finger, and that it's free.

Thus, giving the finger,

found his partner and father of his first child.

She landed in Madrid from her native Malaga in 2015 and downloaded Tinder to meet people.

"She used it at times," she recalls, not like the 32% of users of this app in Spain who enter several times a day looking for a match, or the 25% who do it once a day.

His goal was to have fun and, why not, flirt, something he couldn't do in bars, and at no time did he consider looking for a serious relationship.

But the match arose after two years and he found who at the moment is the man of his life:

People go in a lot looking for sex and I was already bored, I wanted to laugh and have a good time.

But he appeared, very nice, nice, nice, funny...».

That I am looking for?

So, in addition to the money you pay at the marriage agency, the tests they submit you to, and the follow-up they carry out, one of the big differences between looking for a partner on an app or in a marriage agency is that if you trust the former, you should reject many people who have

different from yours, which will not happen if you resort to the second.

So much so that Tinder has just launched a new functionality aimed precisely at avoiding this.

Thanks to What do I look for in a relationship, in their profile users can choose between a stable relationship;

relationship, but we'll see;

rolls, but we'll see;

make friends, and I'm still not sure.

other differences

Carme Banús goes one step further and assures that whoever crosses the doors of SamSara is looking for "someone to introduce their family to,

and women who value their privacy and men who want professional advice do it."

The age of the users is also different.

In SamSara, the typical client is

while in dating applications the users are younger, the majority from 20 to 34.

The SamSara method

According to Carme Banús, her business has experienced what she calls

"One, which benefits us, is that there are more and more singles and relationships are very liquid.

The second, the irruption in the United States in 1995 of match.com, the first of the dating applications, which gave a different aspect to the business and normalized it.

But now these apps produce a lot of frustration and posturing...».

A frustration that she at SamSara wants to avoid with her method, infallible in 90% of cases: «After preparing the profile of each candidate, doing a personality test and interviewing him, I study his file, I look for the points he may have in common with others and I also consider that both can like each other physically.

I have trained a lot, but the truth is that I have been doing the same thing for 27 years and I use my intuition.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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