05-05-2025
A boom in matching apps for married women
By Michael Hoffman
Whoever you are, whatever you do, whatever you're looking for, there's an ap for you. What's the one thing everyone wants besides money and power? Love.
A capricious flower, love. It blossoms or doesn't, withers or doesn't, hovers out of reach until, just when you least expect it, it lands in your lap – or doesn't.
There's marriage. All cultures have it. Its forms vary but not its purpose. It channels the sex drive, presides over child-rearing, and governs inheritance. Some marriages begin with love, others end in love, others still have little or nothing to do with love. All cultures attach some degree of sanctity to it, fading in our own desanctified time but still felt.
There are marriage apps, pre-marriage apps, post-marriage apps and extra-marital apps. Together they form a community of apps known in Japanized English as 'matching' apps – whose latest version, profiled by Shukan Gendai (April 28), has sparked a veritable 'boom' (yet another one), catering to married women in search of love, marriage having let them down without quite breaking down.
The author of the report is its main character – a man of 52 with frankly confessed (under cover of anonymity; for convenience we'll call him Tetsuo) marital problems of his own. His 22-year marriage has run its course. It's dead in all but name. Must he die with it? But he's so very much alive! Where to go, what to do? Life and love, if not inseparable, are so closely intertwined as to make the loveless life a thin, dim, shadowy prospect, a joyless trudge into the questionable refuge of old age in which such things cease to matter. Meanwhile… what? Anything? Nothing? An extra-marital relationship? Why not? Divorce is foreseeable – after the couple's teenage daughter is grown; not before. Should he wait? Why? Life is here, now. To suppress it till there, then is surely to diminish it. He can force himself to wait, maybe, but it – life – won't wait with him, or for him.
Confiding in a friend over drinks, he heard for the first time of matching apps. Tell me more, he said. He listened eagerly. Check it out, said the friend. Maybe I will, he thought.
A little online research gave him the general picture. The first organized 'matching' events for the unhappily married, circa 2018, were non-app, non-virtual, face-to-face get-togethers: dinners, parties, outings – modern jauntier equivalents of the traditional omiai arranged marriage events. The COVID-19 epidemic put a stop to them, and apps arose to fill the vacuum. The three leaders in the field – 'Kikonsha Club' (kikonsha means 'already married'), 'Cuddle' and 'Healmate' – boast a combined client base of some 1.2 million, men as a rule paying a monthly fee of about 10,000 yen, women not charged.
'I started this service,' Healmate founder Taeko Isono tells Shukan Gendai, 'for those who want to experience the full richness of life. There are those who feel it's immoral for married people to engage in extra-marital relationships, and I understand their feelings. But those who feel differently have a right to choose accordingly.'
A dead marriage is an awful thing. Some couples try in all earnestness to bring it back to life. Sometimes they succeed; more often not. Years take their toll. Love feeds on freshness, surprise; it withers in familiarity and routine. Some of her clients, says Isono, are reanimated, reinvigorated by the encounters her service fosters. Others, she says, find themselves going back to their spouses with fresh appreciation of their charms and virtues. Life is full of surprises – sometimes.
Tetsuo urged himself on: 'Let's see what happens.' He had doubts. Yes, he owed it to himself – but didn't he owe something too to his wife and child? He felt them looking on, disdainful and reproachful, as he filled in his profile. Would it bother them to know? 'But they won't know.' Perhaps they'd laugh at him? Perhaps they'd have reason to. Mustering his courage, he stated in his profile a preference for a 'second partner' in her 20s or thirties. No one replied. It stung. It was a blow to his masculine pride. He put the best face he could on it. 'Well,' he thought, 'to a woman that young a man my age may well seem past it. I'm not, but…' – seeming trumps reality. He yielded. 'Alright, the 40s and 50s then.'
There came a message signed Kayo. Real name? Not? Does it matter? No. Age? 54. They chatted, clicked, met for dinner, clicked again, had a few drinks, grew lively, checked into a nearby love hotel, and clicked there too.
Tetsuo awakened to a smartphone sounding. Kayo slept on. It was her phone. He shook her awake. He caught his breath. Her husband?
'What?' Kayo asked sleepily.
'Your phone. Your husband?'
'What if it is?'
'But…'
'I don't care if he finds out.'
You'd think Tetsuo would have been pleased – but no, quite the contrary, these were deep waters, maybe deeper than were good for him, it's one thing to look forward to doing something like this, another to face one hardly knows what but the human imagination is a vigorous thing, conjuring all kinds of possibilities, all kinds of complications, and his was already going into overdrive.
He blocked Kayo's messages and never saw her again.
A sad, perhaps unnecessarily sad ending – with one consolation: a reporter's consolation rather than a lover's. He got his story.
© Japan Today
