“He’s an artist, he wears corduroys, and he’s really funny.”

These words changed the course of my life.

I was 26, had been single for a few years, and was quite sure I’d never find anyone right for me. I thought I was too eccentric and maybe a little bit broken. Plus, the dating landscape was bleak. It was 1996, and I had just moved to New York City. Hookup culture was becoming the norm. The most promising guy I’d recently met had admitted after a couple of casual dates that he’d forgotten to mention he was still living with his girlfriend.

That’s when a friend informed me that she thought I might like a friend of hers from college. “I’ve already got two marriages under my belt,” she told me with an enticing smile.

I met the guy—this artist, who was indeed funny—a week later, at a small party my friend held in her Manhattan apartment. My first sight of him was in the kitchen: a skinny ball of energy in suede sneakers, engaged in animated conversation. When I piped in with a wry comment about a word he used, his entire locus of energy whomped straight over to me.

My friend called first thing the next morning: “What did you think?”

I admitted I was quite interested.

“Let’s see if he’s free tonight,” she said. “I’ll invite a bunch of people over.”

“Don’t tell him you’re setting us up!” I said, nervously anticipating that awkward meeting. She reassured me that a core element in her matchmaking strategy was to always keep one person in the dark.

Pairing off young people used to be a society-wide project, whereas now it seems that young people are left to their own devices.

The party started at my friend’s place, then moved to a nearby bar, then back to her apartment. At a certain point, after an evening of private side conversations with the artist and eye contact across the table, I realized I needed to go home before I got drunk and messed this up.

He and I exchanged numbers, and I said my goodbyes.

Then, as I headed down the block toward the train, I heard my name called. He was running down the street after me. When he caught up, he said, “I’ll walk you to the train.” Instead we stood under the streetlights on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 14th Street, in the middle of the night, for well over an hour, just talking.

A few days later, my friend and I hiked up the path along the Hudson River plotting how I should proceed. I didn’t really need her help by then. I just wanted to talk about him! And I wanted reassurance. “Why isn’t he taken?” I asked. He seemed so perfect, like I’d almost written him into existence. “Well, he’s got some baggage,” she admitted. This was almost too good to be true. So did I.

Thirty years later, this man—although he no longer works as an artist, and I’ve never seen him wear corduroys—is still my favorite person in the world. Along with the two children we raised, of course.

He and I became the third marriage plot my friend helped write.

Thank goodness for busybody, matchmaking friends! We need more of them.

Finding the love of your life has never been harder. The horrors of dating apps have been well-documented. But the real problem might be this: Pairing off young people used to be a society-wide project, whereas now it seems that young people are left to their own devices.

For much of the 20th century, society employed a series of rituals and knacks to assist in the process. For example—and I cringe a bit to admit it—my sixth-grade class in the early ’80s had a family square dance, complete with straw bales and a guy in overalls who called out the dances in a country twang. I remember it as a sweet event, with parents asking us awkward adolescents to dance, helping us break the ice and get in line for the do-si-dos. Would we have done so without their help? I don’t think so.

This wasn’t the only tradition intended to teach teenagers how to clear those first hurdles—asking for a dance, eventually a date. There were barn parties, cotillion, community dances, finishing schools, prom, and homecoming. Also church suppers and dance halls and debutante events. In my grandmother’s era, they put it in the newspaper when a girl was old enough to look for a husband—which I find a little gruesome, but the point is this: It was once understood that young people needed help to fall in love—and it was provided.

But those days are over.

Busybody matchmaking is now seen as borderline offensive. Last month, for instance, Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, 35, said that pressuring young people to get married is a form of “cruelty.” I felt this way when I was younger too: Women have better things to do than finding a husband and building a family. We have degrees to obtain, success to experience, authentic selves to explore. Everybody should back off, because this obsession with coupledom is exhausting and insulting, and women don’t need a husband to be happy.

Except: Many of us do.

Last year, the Pew Research Center found that 69 percent of American adults between the ages of 18 and 34 who’ve never been married do want to be, one day. And yet less than half of U.S. adults are married. It sounds obvious but bears saying: If people say they want to be married but aren’t, it’s probably because they can’t find a partner—which can be an unbelievably painful experience, not to mention a shameful one. To deal with this, some people might say they’re not interested in finding a partner, when actually, they are.

For much of the 20th century, society employed a series of rituals and knacks to assist in the process of falling in love.

Even Taylor Swift, who proudly posed as a “Childless Cat Lady” a year ago, released a song last week with the lyric: “When I said I don’t believe in marriage, that was a lie.” Perhaps she feels free to admit this because, a couple months ago, at age 35, she got engaged to football player Travis Kelce, who set up a rose garden in his backyard to propose to her.

And how did they meet? Seemingly, thanks to a matchmaker! Swift’s father and Kelce’s coach, Andy Reid, are friends, and the latter has said he thought the two would make a good match and made the intros. Even romantics can benefit from a little interference.

Matchmaking is a powerful, and undervalued, force in society. And young people, tired of Tinder, are starting to recognize this. The New York Times recently reported that couples are “turning their weddings into matchmaking hubs” by “reinventing the ‘singles table.’ ” The Washington Post followed up with a piece headlined “Your Single Friends Are Dying for You to Set Them Up,” which explored how people are systematically sharing details about single friends with other single friends, to help them get together.

Why would anyone bother going to these efforts for their single friends? Because helping two people you care about fall in love is one of the best feelings in the world.

Maybe it’s my age—mid-50s, with grown children—but I now find the prospect of young people falling in love and maybe having babies nearly as compelling as I once found nurturing my own kids. All those old crones and matchmakers who chuckle, nudge each other, and watch from afar as young love blossoms? I’m now one of them.

Traditionally, this figure is maligned. Is there a more comically pathetic character in literature than Mrs. Bennet, the ridiculous matchmaking mother in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, who will not stop with her scheming and gossiping as she pursues her obsession with marrying off her five daughters? These days, no one wants to suggest their daughters should prioritize marriage, and they don’t want them to feel shame if they can’t find a mate. So they back off.

I’m not sure that’s the best thing.

Certainly, the older generations can be too aggressive. My mother, born in 1940, still remembers being harangued by her mother to get married and have children. “It seemed like the only thing that mattered to her,” my mom, now 85, remembers.

Matchmaking is a powerful, and undervalued, force in society. And young people, tired of Tinder, are starting to recognize this.

My parents met in high school in the early 1950s and dated through college. My father, a studious nerd who went to Princeton, seemed like a good catch. All through my mom’s college years, my grandmother was after them to hurry up. Then, when they finally got married, my grandmother couldn’t understand why they were waiting to have children. My mom finally gave in and had her first child in 1964, my brother, at age 24.

When it was her turn to be the mother of a daughter, my mom went hard in the other direction. “I wanted you to feel like you could do more interesting things with your life than immediately becoming a mother,” she remembers. “I thought that could all come later.”

This felt so forward-thinking and humane at the time, especially when it often seemed the culture at large still thought I’d be worth anything only with a ring on my finger, pumping out babies—and that I’d better hurry up. I was 17 when the 1986 Newsweek article “The Marriage Crunch” explosively informed us that an unmarried 40-year-old woman was more likely to be killed by a terrorist attack than to find a husband.

Of course, this was also the era of women’s rights, and this article was met with outrage and derision. I joined in the chorus of fury. We young women finally had the freedom to make interesting choices with our lives, and here were these medieval enforcers urging us to become obsessed with husband-hunting. We were equally offended by unwelcome advice from speakers like Phyllis Schlafly, who would pop up on television or argue in print that women should stay home.

The extreme versions of the matchmaking project still make me squirm, but I think the old dowagers’ keeping quiet is a mistake. The landscape has been emptied of signposts, and the kids don’t even have a map.

But despite my protestations, my grandmother (on my father’s side) had no problem urging me into the dating pool. “My friend’s grandson is in town,” she said to me once when I was in college. “He’s going to give you a call.” Or she’d set up a cocktail hour, where my girlfriends and I would meet her friends’ grandsons—as if we were debutantes looking for husbands instead of scruffy art students suspiciously eyeing preppy business majors.

I didn’t feel like I could say no to my grandmother, but I complained about it. “You have no idea what kind of guy I like,” I’d tell her. Or: “We don’t date like your generation did.”

“It’s good practice,” she’d answer, ignoring my protests. Then she’d randomly offer dating advice. “Never order spaghetti on a first date,” she once said. “Always make sure you have some money so you can get home on your own if you need to.” She advised that I should never have more than one drink on a date—okay, maybe two, but I should ask the waiter to water it down with seltzer.

I used to roll my eyes and silently groan, but looking back, it’s not the worst advice. In fact, now that I’m older myself, I’ve come to appreciate my grandmother’s wisdom. I didn’t meet my husband at one of her cocktail hours, but I think she was right: They were good practice.

My grandmother died almost 30 years ago, and her approach seemed antiquated even then, but looking back I wonder: If you’re single, would you rather scroll through Hinge alone in your room or grab a friend to join you as an elderly woman—who just wants everyone to be happy—ushers you both toward a guy who doesn’t look like your type, but could still turn out to have plenty to say for himself?

The extreme versions of the matchmaking project still make me squirm, but I think the old dowagers’ keeping quiet is a mistake. The landscape has been emptied of signposts, and the kids don’t even have a map.

It takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to get that child’s parents together in the first place. The old ladies, the coaches, the busybody friends: We are the oil that keeps the machinery turning.

It’s been almost 30 years since the artist and I went on our first dates without the help of our matchmaking friend. One day, early on, we headed uptown, half the length of Manhattan, trying to get back to a bar where I’d left a sweater the night before. It was a sunny late spring day and we decided to walk.

As we passed through one neighborhood after another, it seemed we would never run out of things to talk about, or favorite movies we wanted the other one to see, or ideas we wanted to run through the mill of our developing shared beliefs. In so many ways, we are still on this walk.

I’ll always be grateful to my friend for automatically scanning through her collection of friends when she heard I was moving to the city. We should all be doing this. There are nice young men everywhere. And young women too. Let’s help them meet.