Let me start by saying I have never tried a dating site having been happily married for over two decades. But the sheer numbers of people trying them and related personality trait data volumes and matchmaking algorithms are staggering.
NY Times "(eHarmony customers) pay up to $60 per month to be offered matches based on their
answers to a long questionnaire, which currently has about 200 items.
The company has gathered answers from 44 million people, and says that
its matches have led to more than half a million marriages since 2005."
And then there is new book Love in the Time of Algorithms which provides even more color
"It’s the mother of all search problems: how to find a spouse, a
mate, a date. The escalating marriage age and declining marriage rate
mean we’re spending a greater portion of our lives unattached, searching
for love well into our thirties and forties.
It’s
no wonder that a third of America’s 90 million singles are turning to
dating Web sites. Once considered the realm of the lonely and desperate,
sites like eHarmony, Match, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish have been
embraced by pretty much every demographic. Thanks to the increasingly
efficient algorithms that power these sites, dating has been transformed
from a daunting transaction based on scarcity to one in which the
possibilities are almost endless. Now anyone—young, old, straight, gay,
and even married—can search for exactly what they want, connect with
more people, and get more information about those people than ever
before."
Finally, Time columnist
Joel Stein talks about a trend where even happily married couples are curious to be benchmarked against these databases:
"The dating site eHarmony designed an algorithm to identify people who
would make the happiest 25% of couples based on its research of
thousands of marriages"
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