Culture · Dating well

‘Materialists’ is right about dating — and wrong about matchmaking

By Riley Chen, culture writer · Jun 14, 2026 · 6 min read

A year after it landed in theaters, Celine Song’s Materialists is having a second life on streaming — and the conversation it started is, if anything, louder now. The premise is simple: Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, the top matchmaker at an elite New York firm, a woman who has turned love into a science and a sales funnel. Then her own life refuses to follow the spreadsheet. (Don’t worry — no spoilers ahead; we’re here for the idea, not the ending.)

The film struck a nerve because it’s not really a rom-com. It’s a quiet takedown of the transactional, stat-obsessed way we’ve all started pursuing connection — and watching it, a lot of people recognized their own dating life on screen. We think the movie gets the diagnosis exactly right. We just think it points at the wrong cure.

What the movie nails: dating became a market

Lucy’s job is to convert human beings into data points — age, height, income, the whole résumé — and trade them like assets until two portfolios “clear.” Clients talk about partners the way investors talk about positions: upside, dealbreakers, market value. It’s uncomfortable to watch because it’s familiar.

And it should be familiar — because the dating apps trained us to do exactly this, just without the matchmaker. A swipe feed is a marketplace: a stack of people reduced to a few photos and a height number, evaluated in half a second, ranked and discarded. The film makes the brokering explicit and a little grotesque, but the logic is the same one most single people now carry around in their pockets. We wrote about why the apps are built to keep you single — the short version is that a marketplace optimized for engagement has no reason to want you to stop shopping.

So yes: Materialists is right. Modern dating really has become a transaction where people get priced by their stats. That feeling isn’t in your head.

Where it goes wrong: blaming matchmaking

Here’s the turn. The movie’s villain isn’t really a person — it’s the method. Lucy’s matchmaking is cold because it optimizes for the wrong thing: surface value, status, the optics of a “good match” on paper. The film’s implied answer is romantic and a little defeatist — stop calculating, throw out the formula, just follow your heart.

But an elite firm pairing wealthy clients by their résumés isn’t the opposite of the swipe apps. It’s the same trap in a nicer suit — the marketplace with a concierge. The problem was never that someone tried to match people thoughtfully. The problem is what they optimized for and who they were really working for.

“Follow your heart” is a lovely ending for a movie and a genuinely bad strategy for a Tuesday. The heart, left entirely to its own devices, is the thing that keeps texting the person who never shows up. The goal isn’t to delete judgment from dating. It’s to point judgment at the things that actually predict whether two people last.

The version that actually works

There’s a kind of matchmaking the film doesn’t imagine — one that keeps the human and fixes the incentives. A few things have to be true:

• Optimize for fit, not flash. Height and income predict almost nothing about a lasting relationship. Values, life goals, how you handle conflict, what you actually want five years out — those do. Good matching weighs the things that survive the honeymoon, not the things that photograph well.
• Keep a real person in the loop. Lucy’s instincts aren’t the problem; her brief is. A human reviewer catches the nuance an algorithm misses and refuses the “great on paper, wrong in real life” pairings — when they’re accountable to your happiness instead of a sales quota.
• Fix who the matchmaker works for. The deepest flaw in the movie’s world is that the firm earns whether or not anyone finds love. Change that one thing — earn only when two people genuinely choose to meet — and the cold calculus melts, because now the matchmaker only wins when you do.
• Drop the velvet rope. Real matchmaking shouldn’t cost $50,000 and require a banker’s salary to access. AI is what finally makes thoughtful, human-reviewed matching affordable for normal people — the opposite of Lucy’s exclusive clientele. (More on what matchmaking actually costs.)

That’s not “throw out the formula.” It’s a better formula — one aimed at a relationship instead of a transaction.

The honest closing argument

Materialists is worth watching precisely because it’s honest about the disease: we turned love into a market, and the market made us miserable. Where we part ways with the film is the prescription. The answer to bad matchmaking isn’t no matchmaking — it’s matchmaking that measures the right things, keeps a human who’s on your side, and only profits when you actually connect. The calculator was never the problem. We were just letting it add up the wrong numbers. (New here? Start with matchmaking vs. dating apps.)

Lucy spends the whole film selling other people a version of love she can’t quite buy herself. You don’t have to. You can find out who genuinely fits you in about two minutes — and have a real person, not a quota, take it from there.