I t was late in the summer of 2021, and Willie Daly, Ireland’s last traditional matchmaker, was hovering in the door-way of a small cottage on a sprawling donkey farm. “You look like a film star,” he called out, pronouncing “film” like “filum”, and inviting me in for tea. He wore mud-spattered trousers tucked into wellies and a stained blue fleece. Artefacts from 50 successful years of uniting over 3,000 happy couples around the world—Daly’s claim—covered every surface: photos, newspaper articles, wedding invitations, letters of intent from young and old. Daly handed me a pen and a sheet of paper. Sidelining amusement, I listed my “preferences for a partner”: Honest, kind, prefers talking to texting, loves nature and reading, has exceptional taste in music… He tucked it into a bulging ledger made of disintegrating leather, held together with a strap of elastic and bits of string. Paper fluttered from the edges. “Now close your eyes and keep both hands on it for seven seconds,” he said, passing the book to me in a ritual so many came to him to perform. “Picture being in love.”
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For 10 months, I’d been living alone in tiny quarters on a mountain in the middle of a 600-acre forest. Even the postman avoided the narrow lane that went there. At the nearest village, sheep outnumbered people. The rugged wilds of County Kerry. A year prior, I’d left New York City, in a headlong leap through which I shed friends I’d outgrown, my PR career in the arts, and a woefully incompatible relationship with a man I loved. Fifteen years of love-hating on a place I’d never meant to settle down in had left me burnt out, brokenhearted, and lost on the path of my own life. All I had wanted was silence. Specifically, the silence of a forest. I’d let that be my compass and, with no other clarity, bought a one-way ticket to a country where I knew no one. After three seasons in isolation, it was my neighbour, Maitiu, who suggested I visit Emerald Isle’s most renowned matchmaker that summer, hours away on the outskirts of rural County Clare. “He’s the custodian of a 160-year-old magic book,” Maitiu had explained to me, “It’s been passed down through a matchmaking bloodline. If you touch it, you’ll be married in a year.”
Practice swipes on a friend’s Bumble years back had offered up a sweat-covered guy wearing nothing but underwear and a Santa hat and a man who liked to bury himself in piles of stuffed animals and women’s shoes. Supernatural alternatives seemed preferable. So I sent a wry email that very evening. The matchmaker responded a few hours later: “I’ll be delighted to assist you in finding love.” What that looked like was an influx of calls from suitors between 7 and 9pm over the coming weeks. “They’ll be a bit shy,” he’d warned of his Irish male clientele. “They aren’t used to girls who aren’t their mothers, but they’ll have a bit of land.” There was a sheep farmer, a blacksmith, a race car aficionado, and a bus driver who liked “social dancing” and claimed to be 39 but was definitely in his 70s. The matchmaker’s own son, a recently divorced pig farmer, asked me to drive hours to meet him. “Would you want your daughter travelling alone to meet a strange man in a foreign country?” I’d asked. My sense of humour evaporated in provincial mores so disparate from my own.
In the months following, other suitors seemed to materialise. I’d told almost no one about my appointment with the matchmaker, but potential partners came to me from all directions. A police officer invited me to the pub; I met a doctor in line at a bookshop in a nearby town and a photographer in a national park. Friends from home suddenly believed we were destined to be lovers. Exes, including the incompatible one, re-emerged, claiming to have changed enough to merit another chance. Maybe something had alchemised with my pilgrimage to the matchmaker’s farm, I started to consider. Or perhaps it was the result of another shift. During that time in Ireland, I watched a sunrise in the forest and swam in the icy stream behind my house. I celebrated Midsummer around a bonfire with traditional music and new friends near standing stones, beneath a towering Lebanese cedar tree.
I was learning things that seemed inherent to the rural Irish: how to stay open to the mystical, connected to nature, and be at peace with potent in-betweens. Their ancestors, animist Celts, believed that time spent in nature brought insight and grace, and viewed forests as necessary to wellness. I didn’t know that then, but somehow, the land was teaching me something. I met my partner in early winter—four months after meeting the matchmaker—a set-up arranged by friends. I couldn’t believe we had identical tattoos in the same spot on our dominant hands. As we got to know each other, more synchronicities unfolded in ways that could only seem conjured. Among them, he’d left Los Angeles to be closer to nature near his hometown in the Highlands of Scotland, and had spent two years alone in the mountains there. We’d been walking from opposite ends of the same path, until we started on a new one together. Within the year since I held the matchmaker’s book, we decided to get married.