From Time Magazine: “They Clicked”

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen and Coco Masters of Time Magazine write about how online dating reports on how “the art of pairing up people for marriage has become an increasingly international and technology-driven business.”

At the global headquarters of eHarmony in Pasadena, Calif., one blue wall is papered with testimonies of love: snapshots of couples who met on the Internet matchmaking site and subsequently got hitched. There are older couples, military couples, kissing couples, couples with physical disabilities, couples dressed in wedding whites. Soon, if all goes as planned, there will be Chinese couples, Indian couples, European couples, many dressed in the brilliant matrimonial hues of their cultures. They’re going to need a new wall. …

… That bodes well for the international hopes of eHarmony, the leader among compatibility-focused sites in the U.S. Started in 2000 by Neil Clark Warren, the folksy clinical psychologist who starred in the company’s ads, eHarmony poses 436 questions to users in order to find them the best match. It has since accrued 17 million members, 230 employees, $200 million in annual revenues and 30% yearly growth. That’s not to mention marriages at a rate of 90 a day, unions that so far have produced 100,000 children (a disproportionate number of them named Harmony).

But rather than dive quickly into promising markets, eHarmony has remained devoted–some would say slavishly–to its research-based model. In China, that means commissioning researchers at Beijing University to find out whether its model–in which 29 “dimensions” such as humor and spirituality are mined for compatibility–applies to the culture. Kaiping Peng, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who is assisting eHarmony, is unsure. “What is the best match might not be about matching exactly,” he says. “Maybe it’s complementary–like the yin and the yang.” Americans are drawn to eHarmony’s deeply probing questionnaires because as a culture we seek to know ourselves. “That probably is not necessarily the teachings of Asian philosophies and religions. Buddha used to talk about diminishing self–don’t look at yourself, look at others for information and for guidance.” Read the rest of the article