Sophy Love Uses Relationship Science and Self-Knowledge to Match Clients

The Short Version: Sophy Singer’s engagement fell apart in her 20s, and afterward she racked up 150 online dates before deciding there must be a better way to do this. It wasn’t until she explored her own inner turmoil, though, that she grasped how emotional health ties into the capacity for intimacy. That insight eventually gave rise to Sophy Love. There, she and her close-knit team take a custom approach to matchmaking. Serving San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Francisco, Sophy Love draws on intuition, connections, skill, and therapeutic understanding to help clients build relationships that last.

You could be the smartest person on earth, yet relationships will go nowhere unless you understand yourself and know how to convey that to others. That’s the lesson Sophy Love teaches. The matchmaking service’s clients live in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Francisco.

Even if you live outside the areas where founder and chief matchmaker Sophy Singer works, her personal journey — and the way it reshaped how she thinks about relationships and dating, and even how she runs her business — might teach you something new about the person who stares back from your mirror each morning.

On the surface, Sophy Love works as a custom dating agency focused on coaching, matchmaking, dating concierge services, and introductions to Sophy’s large network of vetted singles. Working with Sophy is a dedicated, professional team that treats each client as an individual with their own wants and needs.

Wants and needs bring challenges with them, and that’s where Sophy Love excels. Thanks to Sophy’s own therapeutic journey, the agency sits where matchmaking meets mental and emotional health.

If that sounds heavy, relax. Sophy said everyone goes through some kind of trauma in life. In relationships, what counts is what we learn from our traumas and how we put those lessons to work. Sophy’s perspective grows out of deep learning, and her team uses it to set up dates, which has produced hundreds of successful couples and thousands of engaging evenings.

“The poet Rumi wrote that our task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within ourselves we’ve built against it,” she said. “We offer permission and liberation to singles to come home to themselves and one another.”

Relationships as a Path to Healing and Growth

How many of us went through a formative relationship breakup? More than we could count. What sets Sophy’s story apart is that her breakup set off a journey of revelation for her.

Like so many breakups, hers happened in her 20s, more than 20 years ago. She had assumed she’d have a husband and a child by 30; instead, she found herself looking for love online.

“I was like, God, this feels unnatural, but I did it, and I did it for years,” she said. “I felt like a husband and family were the only things that would make me happy.”

She devised an informal method to protect herself emotionally over the course of 150-plus dates, which came before she met her future husband. The couple had twins. Her friends saw Sophy as a dating guru and asked her for advice.

When the twins arrived, she traded a job that involved travel for a matchmaking role with a big-box dating agency. There, in 2018-19, she developed an early version of Sophy Love.

Sophy Singer founded Sophy Love and works as a matchmaker.

Not everything was fine, though. Her son received a brain tumor diagnosis, and she began therapy to cope with the stress. It was then that the dam broke.

“I found my way into doing some profound inner work and started becoming conscious of decades of trauma stored in my body,” she said. “I was like, wow, this is why dating was so hard and why it literally hurt to go through breakups.”

Sophy dove headfirst into Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, which treats the psyche as a collection of painful wounds and emotions. The goal is to bring those hurt parts back into the authentic core self.

A related practice, Authentic Relating, brings a person’s internal struggle and authentic self to light in intimate and social conversation. Together, the two practices — Internal Family Systems and Authentic Relating — formed the behavioral and relational foundation of Sophy Love.

“Relationships are a vehicle for healing and growth,” Sophy said. “Self-understanding gives you a much better chance of having a successful, sustainable, meaningful, nourishing relationship.”

A Fully Integrated Approach to Matchmaking

What emerged is an approach that sends clients off to discover themselves.

“We’re here to match people and facilitate the next chapter of growth,” Sophy said.

Sophy Love’s executive matchmaking is designed for busy professionals looking for high-end dating experiences. They rely on the team to get to know them deeply, drawing on scientific techniques shaped by Internal Family Systems and Authentic Relating.

During a private intake session, Sophy pins down the values, lifestyle, preferences, and partnership goals that make up a personalized search profile. It’s the first step toward what often becomes a beautiful relationship.

“I want to work with people who say they’ve been on dating apps for 10 years but just haven’t met the right person,” she said. “I tell them they’ve probably met the right person 50 times. Something different needs to happen.”

Clients work with Justin Wilford, a certified Internal Family Systems coach, and with Authentic Relating coach Ryel Kestano, who co-founded the biggest Authentic Relating training company in the world and wrote “Authentic Relating: A Guide to Rich, Meaningful, Nourishing Relationships.”

Sophy covers everything from matchmaking to coaching.

Together, Sophy and Ryel lead live events, workshops, and one-on-one coaching sessions.

Live online dating workshops use Authentic Relating to build conversational awareness that draws a dating partner into genuine connection. Understanding relationship dynamics better helps clients steer around conversational pitfalls so their encounters are more constructive.

One-on-one coaching sessions build the philosophical foundation for deeper connections, helping clients build dating strategies, communication skills, and confidence so they can approach dating optimistically. The coaching includes advice focused on goals.

Events guide participants through three levels of conversation: informational, personal, and relational. The goal is to reach the relational level, meaning conversations that happen in the moment.

“Those conversations are always new because these moments have happened before,” Sophy said. “It’s literally the antidote to dating boredom — so much connection happens there.”

Get Past the Barriers You Put Up Against Love

According to Sophy, many clients arrive at Sophy Love hoping to get better at dating and leave having learned how to be more human. Techniques from Internal Family Systems and Authentic Relating help clients face the emotional suppression they learned in childhood to stay attached to their parents, and trade it for authentic experience.

“You’re telling your date you’re feeling really awkward and don’t even know what to do with your hands,” she said. “Believe me, the other person will appreciate you just being real versus trying to cover up the awkwardness.”

Sophy said the reason is that people sense, without realizing it, the gap between what someone says and the way they say it. The result is less trust, and what might have been promising eye contact can turn into yet another unproductive evening.

Singles get everything in one place at Sophy Love.

Those techniques need interaction to work to their full therapeutic potential, which is why self-knowledge sparks a journey that often ends in a connection. Sophy said she’d rather not work with clients who want transactional relationships and hand over a list of must-have personal traits for a partner.

“The integrative part is what makes this successful,” she said. “We’re using evidence-based psychotherapeutic modalities to help people transcend and transmute their experiences and stories and turn them into deep and meaningful connections.”

Sophy’s podcast, “The Conscious Matchmaker,” which you can find on popular podcast platforms, aims to redefine the heart of modern dating and connection along these lines. Co-hosted by Elizabeth Foster, Lead Executive Matchmaker and Conscious Dating Coach at Sophy Love, “Conscious Matchmaker” offers compassionate wisdom, expert insights, and heart-to-heart conversations in a handy audio format.

More is on the way as Sophy Love helps even more Californians settle into lasting, loving relationships.

“I just want to change the trajectory of people’s lives in whatever way I can and bring this work and this healing and this liberation to as many people as possible,” Sophy said.