The two who will arrive.

Everything a card can carry is above it: a name, a face, an age, a nationality. What a card cannot carry is the thing the two of you are actually choosing, which is how a woman is in a room with a couple who already know each other well.

Begin with what the photographs are worth. We take them ourselves rather than accept what a therapist sends us, so the woman in the picture is the woman at the door and there is no gap to brace for. Each of the forty-five was met in person before she joined. Past that the cards are honest and thin. They will tell you she is twenty-six and Brazilian; they will not tell you whether she is quiet.

The first name is easy, the second is not

Most couples settle on one name in a few minutes and then stall completely on the second. The instinct is to match: two of a height, two of a colouring, a matched pair. It is usually the wrong instinct. Two therapists who look alike often work alike, and an hour in which both of them move at the same speed has less in it than an hour where one is slower than the other. A pairing earns the second rate through difference, not through symmetry. With twenty-four nationalities on the roster and the ages running from twenty-one to thirty, the material for a contrast is there if you look for it rather than away from it.

Or you can describe instead of choose

Nobody has to pick two names. Tell us what each of you wants from the evening, and where the two of you differ, and we will put names to that. Disagreement between you is information. It is the most useful thing you can send us, and it does more work than a shortlist.

Availability is settled in the same ten minutes as the hour and the address. If one of the two you chose is already out, we say so and offer the nearest alternative by name; nobody is quietly substituted on the way to your door.

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