In trying to understand the “crisis” I started with the library and did some reading on the history of marriages and matchmaking. From what I gathered it has changed a lot in the last couple hundred years. In villages and small towns the matchmaker functioned more as a go-between as recently as 150 or so years ago. That is, everyone knew who was going to get married. The strict segregation between the sexes practiced by some of the frum was not and could not possibly have worked in a world of hard-scrabble farmers. There’s just too much that men and women had to do to survive that had them interacting with each other.
In larger cities or in cases where no suitable spouse could be found nearby the matchmaker could call on a network of friends, relations and professional contacts in other places. These tended to be full-time professionals, the man with the umbrella and bowler hat of past generations.
Remember, people in those days lived a different life than we did. Almost everyone was involved in farming in one way or another, and nearly everybody lived in villages or small towns. Even in bigger cities identifiable groups lived close to each other. Ethnic and religious groups like Romany or Jews or groups which shared a profession such as dock workers and brewers lived and worked close to each other.
In a situation like that everyone knows everyone. Kids grew up playing with each other. You were friends with the great-grandchildren of your great-grandparents’ friends. The invisible but powerful League of Older Women was always on the lookout for grandchildren. Marriages were often arranged as economic relations between families, ways of increasing land or business.
The point is, you often knew a lot about the man or woman you were going to marry. Say, a girl has a talk with her mother about the boy a farm over, the one with two wells and some river-bottom land. The mother has a talk with her husband who has a talk with the boy’s father who has a talk with his wife who already had a talk with the girl’s mother. Somewhere along the line the shadchan gets called and the young couple are officially “introduced” to each other.
Now we live in big cities with cars. Shelves of books have been written about how this has changed everything in life. The role of matchmakers and the economics of marriage have changed dramatically. And they will continue to change to meet the needs of observant Jews who want to fulfill the mitzvas of marrying and having children.