Kelleher International is a matchmaking service, not a dating service.  This means we aren’t in the same business as “DateAModel.com”, instead, we use our two-and-a-half decades of experience to find our clients “the One” partner for a lifetime of happiness.

So does that mean that looks don’t matter?  Does someone have to be “pretty enough” if they hope to find love?

I’m going to skip over my politically correct disclaimers and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ and get to the straight truth:

• Attractiveness matters – but at least as important as ‘what you’ve got’ is ‘what you do with what you’ve got’.  Somewhere between centuries of evolutionary conditioning and the latest Abercrombie & Fitch ad there has been created visceral reactions to ‘pretty’, none of us benefit from either denying it, or being angry about it.  Whatever your starting point, what else you do-with-what-you-got is going to make the more powerful impact.  Is your hair well coiffed, are your clothes nice, have you been to gym in the past six months — all of these things tell a deeper story of personal pride that are at least at powerful as the physical gifts you received.
• We encourage clients to focus on what is important to them, but we also urge them not to deny what they ‘like’, because that is the short route to unhappiness.  There are guys that like petite brunettes — we tell them to embrace that and we include it in our screening. There are women that won’t date “short” or want a body-fat-below-10% in their partner. If after our interview process we determine that these are really important to our clients, then we gladly proceed with them as screening criteria.
• The matchmaking process gets you past the preliminary “pretty” screen and let’s your other assets shine.  Funny guys get great girls.  Smart girls attract powerful men.  We intentionally do not send photos ahead to our matches before dates, because our clients trust us to deliver the ‘whole package’, and sending a photo sells everyone short.

So what’s the punchline, does pretty matter?  Yes, and so does smarts, funny and adventurousness.  If you feel you are a little behind on the pretty front, make sure you are putting your best foot forward on looks, but also consider other dating methods that are more likely to advance your ‘entire package’ (like matchmaking), not just your physical attributes.