Courtship Blogging

NRO interviews Dr. Neil Clark Warren, founder of eHarmony, the online matchmaking service:

NRO: As many happily married couples as you've helped get together, there's definitely a stigma when it comes to online matchmaking. Only losers would have to opt for paid cyberdating, some (many?) would say. How do you overcome that presumably huge obstacle?

Warren: I've heard this argument hundreds of times. I staked my own professional reputation on my belief that it is terribly wrong. Only the Internet allows a person to get into a large pool of candidates (which makes more and more precise choices possible). And only the Internet allows for the massive storing and accessing of huge amounts of data which can be used to help people determine their level of compatibility with others over all these dimensions.

The stigma of meeting on the Internet has diminished enormously over the last three or four years. My prediction: In five or ten years, there will be such an awareness of the massive challenge of finding someone with whom you have broad based compatibility that almost everyone will use the internet for this critical task.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I met the love of my life through eHarmony and am not in the least bit objective when it comes to this wonderful, Christian-friendly service.

I came to eHarmony after doing a bit of probabilistic thinking. It's not hard. Just choose four or five aspects of your perfect mate, figure out how prevalent each is in the population, than multiply the probabilities together. The result is the percent of the population possessing all of these traits.

For example, if you're interested in someone college-educated (20%), internet-savvy (20%), voted for Bush twice (50%), and attends church regularly (35%), you're going to be discarding 99.3% of the female population. Not quite a needle in the haystack, but you're going to be attending a lot of God-Bloggers for Bush rallies in order to improve these odds.

That's what Dr Warren has realized and built into a very successful business model.