other people, other places

OK Cupid winds up with a lot of data. This enables the researchers to conjure from their database the person you may not realize you have in mind. “Like that guy in high school with the Camaro and the mustache who bow-hunts on weekends,” Rudder said. “You can find that guy of the imagination by using statistics.” The database also gives them a vast pool to sell to academics. In no other milieu do so many people, from such a broad demographic swath, willingly answer so many intimate questions. It is a gold mine for social scientists. In the past nine months, OK Cupid has sold its raw data (redacted or made anonymous to protect the privacy of its customers) to half a dozen academics. Gregory Huber and Neil Malhotra, political scientists at Yale and Stanford, respectively, are sifting through OK Cupid data to determine how political opinions factor in to choosing social partners. Rudder, for his part, has determined that Republicans have more in common with Republicans than Democrats have in common with Democrats, which led him to conclude, “The Democrats are doomed.”

If the dating sites had a mixer, you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.com in the middle of the room, conspicuously dropping everyone’s first names into his sentences. The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture, the pastel golf shirt, and that strangely chaste yet fiery look in his eye? That would be eHarmony. EHarmony is the squarest of the sites, the one most overtly geared toward finding you a spouse. It was launched, in 2000, by Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist who had spent three decades treating and studying married couples and working out theories about what made their marriages succeed or fail. He had noticed that he was spending most of his time negotiating exit strategies in marriages that were already irreparably broken, mainly because the couples shouldn’t have been married in the first place. From his own research, and his review of the academic and clinical literature, he concluded that two people were more likely to stay together, and stay together happily, if they shared certain psychological traits. As he has often said, opposites attract—and then they attack. He designed eHarmony to identify and align these shared traits, and to keep opposites away from each other.Warren was also a seminarian and a devout Christian, and eHarmony started out as a predominantly Christian site. The evangelical conservative James Dobson, through his organization Focus on the Family, had published advice books that Warren had written and provided early support and publicity for eHarmony. It didn’t match gay couples (its stated reason being that it hadn’t done any research on them), and it sometimes had trouble finding matches for certain kinds of people (atheists, for example, and people who’d been divorced twice). As it has grown into the second-biggest fee-based dating service in the world, eHarmony has expanded and shed its more orthodox orientation, and severed its connections to Dobson. In 2009, under pressure from a slew of class-action lawsuits, it created a separate site specifically for homosexuals. Still, the foundational findings of Warren’s psychology practice remain in place—the so-called “29 Dimensions of Compatibility,” which have been divided into “Core Traits” and “Vital Attributes.”
These undergo constant fine-tuning in what eHarmony calls its “relationship lab,” on the ground floor of an anonymous office building in Pasadena. The director of the lab, and the senior director of research and development at eHarmony, is a psychologist named Gian Gonzaga. He and his staff bring in couples and observe them as they perform various tasks. Then they come to conclusions about the human condition, which they put to use in improving their matching algorithms and, perhaps just as important, in getting out the word that they are doing so. There is a touch of Potemkin in the enterprise.
One night in March, Gonzaga invited me to observe a session that was part of a five-year longitudinal study he is conducting of three hundred and one married couples. EHarmony had solicited them on its site, in churches, and from registration lists at bridal shows. Of the three hundred and one, fifty-five had met on eHarmony.
Gonzaga, an affable Philadelphian, introduced me to one of his colleagues, Heather Setrakian, who was running the study. She was also his wife. They’d met in the psychology department at U.C.L.A., where Gonzaga was conducting a study on married couples. Setrakian, who had a master’s in clinical psychology, was the project coördinator. To test their procedures, they needed a man and a woman to impersonate a married couple for multiple sessions. Gonzaga and Setrakian became the impersonators, and fell in love. “Some of our fake marriages had a lot more money than we have now, and a trampoline, and in-laws in Utah,” Setrakian said.
The eHarmony relationship lab consists of four windowless interview rooms, each of them furnished with a couch, easy chairs, silk flowers, and semi-hidden cameras. The walls were painted beige, to better frame telltale facial expressions and physical gestures on videotape. “With white walls, blondes wash out,” Gonzaga explained. Down the hall was the control room, with several computer screens on which Gonzaga and Setrakian and their team of researchers observe their test subjects.
Each couple came for an interview three or so months before their wedding, and then periodically afterward. They also filled out questionnaires and diaries according to a schedule. In the lab, they were asked to participate in four types of interaction, where first one spouse, and then the other, initiates a discussion. (The discussions ranged from two to ten minutes.) One was called “capitalization,” in which each spouse starts a discussion of something good that has happened to him or her; Gonzaga and the team would monitor the other spouse’s manner of dealing with his or her mate’s good fortune. (“The more you are similar to someone, the easier it is to validate them,” Gonzaga said. “Sharing the event requires sharing a sense of self.”) Another is called “the tease,” in which one spouse adopts a funny or critical nickname for the other, and they discuss its origins and appropriateness. “We look at the delivery of the tease,” Gonzaga said. “Is the tease relationship enhancing or bullying? When done well, it’s verbal play. It helps test the bond.”
“Then you have to think about the valence of the tease,” Setrakian said. “Teasing can be overwhelmingly negative yet delivered with positive emotion.”
A third interaction is conflict resolution; the husband chooses something that has been bugging him about his wife, and they spend ten minutes hashing it out. Then the wife gets her shot. Gonzaga is on the lookout for what he calls “skills”—techniques and behaviors that a couple may or may not have for dealing with good and bad news. “Skills come into sharper relief when spouses are under duress.” He cited eye-rolling as an example of a contemptuous gesture that might indicate a lack of skill: “When you see that, it does not bode well for the marriage.”
Gonzaga showed me recordings of several sessions involving some couples in the program. (Their participation in the study is confidential, but they had consented to let me watch their sessions.) Each couple appeared in split screen, although they’d sat across from each other in the lab. In the conflict-resolution segment, each spouse chooses an area of grievance from a list called the Inventory of Marital Problems, developed by psychologists in 1981. The list encompasses, to name just a few, Children, Religion, In-laws/Parents/Relatives, Household Management, Unrealistic Expectations, Sex, Trust. Each subject rates each category on a scale of 1 to 7, ranging from Not a Problem to Major Problem. One couple, who had met on eHarmony, had as its issue the wife’s moods, and the husband’s fear of them. “Why is my temper a problem?” the wife said.
“I’m not saying it’s serious,” the husband said.
“If it’s not serious, why are you bringing it up?”
“I walk on eggshells around you.”
“I asked you to wash the toaster, and you gave me a hard time about that.”
Setrakian said, “See, she’s turned it into a conversation about him again.”
“Look at how she belittles him,” Gonzaga said. Apparently, this behavior did not augur well.

second couple—I’ll call them Leon and Leona—had also met on eHarmony. He was a third-generation Mexican-American from the San Gabriel Valley who worked for the city of Los Angeles. She was a Mexican immigrant who worked as a family therapist. They were both heavyset and inclined toward a projection of light amusement, although hers seemed more acerbic. He had had a mostly fruitless dating career. “I was a novice,” he said. She had mostly dated guys from her neighborhood who lived with their parents, hadn’t gone to school, and couldn’t communicate as well as she. “I want a man who doesn’t have a rap sheet and doesn’t sell drugs out of his mama’s house,” she said. EHarmony selected her as a compatible partner for Leon, but he put her aside at first, because her name was too much like his. Finally, they went through the stages of communication. (Since they had both studied psychology, he asked her in an e-mail early on, “What’s your theoretical orientation?” to which she recalls thinking, Do you really fucking care? Who asks that question?) On the day of their first date, she spent the morning helping a friend buy a wedding ring in Beverly Hills and the afternoon attending the wedding of a friend in the Valley, where she caught the bride’s bouquet. (“I wasn’t trying to get it or anything. It bounced off the ceiling into my hands.”) So perhaps she was inclined, when she met Leon, at a Ben & Jerry’s in Burbank, to see him in a favorable light. After three years, they moved in together, and married a year later. They have a one-year-old son.I watched the tease. Typically, Gonzaga gives the subjects initials to choose from, and the couple uses them to come up with a moniker. “My favorite nickname of all time, in a study out of Wisconsin, someone got the initials L.I. and came up with Little Impotent,” Gonzaga recalls. “You get a lot of Ass Detective and Huge Fart.” Leona was given the initials B.D. and chose the moniker Boob Dude.
“Boob Dude?” Leon said.
“Boob Dude.”
“Boob Dude. Why?”
“Because, like, you tease me about not paying attention to little details, but hello!” Leona looked at him coolly and said, “You’re such a boob, dude.”
“That’s pretty good.”
“It’s pretty good, huh?”
“I like this part of the study.”
“You’re such a boob.”
“No, you’re a boob.”
“No, you’re a boob. You’re, like, ‘Put the dog down,’ but your ass is in an air-conditioned car, and I’m holding the stuff. You’re such a boob, dude.”
Back in the control room, Gonzaga explained that their teasing had a flirtatious and sympathetic tone, which was a sign that their senses of humor were aligned and that therefore they were harmonious—tease-wise, at least. Perhaps eHarmony had chosen well.
“And then you come out with some grapes,” Leona said.
“And you’re, like, ‘Are those for me?’ ”
“I didn’t say, ‘Are those for me?’ I said, ‘Oh, that was really nice.’ ”
“And then you said, ‘They’re mine.’ And that’s something I probably would have said.”
“You don’t share, dude.”
“I do, too. I share.”
“You share after you’re done.”
“That’s not true. I share with you my pastrami.”
As they giggled, Gonzaga’s voice came over the intercom, announcing the end of the session.

n 2005, in response to the success of eHarmony, Match.com began developing a new site—a longer-term-relationship operation with a scientific underpinning. The white coat whom Match.com recruited for this new counter-venture was a biological anthropologist named Helen Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers and a renowned scholar of human attraction and attachment. Fisher’s observations and findings regarding the human personality, romantic or otherwise, are rooted in her study of the human species over the millennia and in the role that brain chemistry plays in temperament, especially with regard to love, attraction, choice, and compatibility. She has used brain scans to track the activity of chemicals in the brains of people in various states of romantic agitation. She has devised four personality types, or “dimensions” (explorer, negotiator, builder, director), that correspond to various neurochemicals (respectively, dopamine, estrogen/oxytocin, serotonin, testosterone). Although the proposition of four types is not new (Plato, Jung), her nomenclature and their biochemical foundation represent a frontier of relationship science, albeit one that is thinly populated and open to flanking attack. The new site was christened Chemistry.com. To sign up, you take a personality test that Fisher designed, which asks you questions about everything from feelings about following rules to your understanding of complex machinery and the length of your ring finger, relative to your index finger. Once you have a type, the site uses it to choose matches for you. You don’t necessarily always wind up with your own type. Chemistry.com’s algorithms rely primarily on your stated preferences, but the various alleged compatibilities between this or that type are factored in. My wife took the test, and I was among her first ten suggested matches.
Fisher contends that dating online is a reversion to an ancient, even primal approach to pairing off. She conjures millions of years of human prehistory: small groups of hunter-gatherers wandering the savanna, and then congregating a few times a year at this or that watering hole. Amid the merriment and the information exchange, the adolescents develop eyes for one another, in view of their elders and peers. The groups likely know each other, from earlier gatherings or hunting parties. “In the ever present gossip circles,” Fisher once wrote, “a young girl could easily collect data on a potential suitor’s hunting skills, even on whether he was amusing, kind, smart.”
It wasn’t until the twentieth century that it became normal for young people to pair up with strangers, in real or relative anonymity. “Walking into a bar is totally artificial,” Fisher told me. “We’ve come to believe that this is the way to court. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. What’s natural is knowing a few fundamental things about someone before you meet.” Vetting has always occurred at many levels, ranging from the genealogical to the pheromonal. In her view, dating via the Internet enables, as she wrote, “the modern human brain to pursue more comfortably its ancestral mating dance.”
I met Fisher for lunch one day on the Upper East Side, not far from her apartment/office, off Fifth Avenue. She’s sixty-six, once-divorced, childless. She goes out pretty much every night she’s not working, to plays, movies, concerts, and lectures. She’s an explorer/negotiator, which means she’s restless and open to adventure but also, of course, eager to please others. She expressed happy surprise that Chemistry.com had suggested me—an explorer/negotiator, apparently—as a match for my wife, who is a director/explorer. Fisher told me that her current boyfriend has read the complete works of Shakespeare aloud to her in bed, as well as some Dickens and Ibsen.
She identified two big social trends that have led to a greater reliance on online dating: an aging population, and women around the world entering the workforce, marrying later, divorcing more, moving from place to place. “Our social and sexual patterns have changed more in the last fifty years than in the last ten thousand,” she told me. “Our courtship rituals are rapidly changing, and we don’t know what to do.”
She was especially excited about some research she’d been doing with Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, who had been studying a hundred thousand test responses from Chemistry.com, in the hope of one day synching up such data with buccal-swab results. “We’re all combinations, but we also all have distinct personalities, and we know that, damn it,” Fisher said. “This is not dreaming. Up until recently, we’ve been looking only at the cultural basis of who we are.” That said, she does not foresee, anytime soon, the development or commercial sale of, as she put it, “a vaccine against falling for assholes.”

Full artical via the NY