Why I started Shortlist

Manhattan, 2022. I had another date. His name was James.

A few hours before we were supposed to meet, I realised I simply couldn't be bothered. I cancelled, we wished each other luck, and that was that. No hard feelings - we both knew there was a queue of other intriguing profiles waiting. It doesn't matter whether you're looking in New York or Vilnius, the reality of modern dating is the same: too many options, and none of them feel worth the effort. I was ready for a committed relationship. There just wasn't anyone to be ready with. Spending hours on conversations that led nowhere, or being ghosted, had stopped making sense.

That day I went to yoga, where I got talking to a woman. She mentioned she was single too, but wasn't looking herself. Instead, she had hired a private matchmaker. No apps. Just a thoughtful, structured process, one that wasn't open to people looking for something casual. She explained the compatibility methods they used, and it quickly became clear this was an entirely different approach to finding a partner. And it all happened privately.

I knew I wanted to make this kind of process available to others. That was the beginning of my matchmaking journey. I applied what I learned to my own search and found my partner. People say you need to go through many wrong ones before you find the right one. I'm not sure that's true anymore. I think you can skip certain people entirely and go straight to someone you can be yourself with.

Working in this field, I've come to see that the obstacle is rarely a shortage of options. It's the opposite - there are too many. What's missing is clarity: about what you actually need and about the patterns you carry from past relationships. Most of us don't know the difference between what feels familiar and what actually fits.

We don't need a long list of candidates. We need a short one - just the right one. That's what Shortlist is built around.