Now, the idea of meeting through a newspaper personals ad makes for a pretty great story, but for many years Anne never told it. She’s a high-achieving professional with a fancy degree from an elite university and a straitlaced family, and she knew there was a stigma attached to couples who met through newspaper ads. Anne made up a decoy story about her and Ed’s meeting being a setup, for the inevitable moments when people asked how they had met. Her own friends and family didn’t know the truth until her wedding day, when she confessed during her toast, at which point her family disowned her for being such a loser. Okay, that didn’t happen, but wouldn’t that have been nuts?
A few years before Ed and Anne found love through a newspaper ad, some entrepreneurs tried to bring cutting-edge technology to matchmaking by introducing video dating services, which gave singles a more dynamic sense of their prospective partners, including a much-needed visual component. With video dating, someone like Ed or Anne would go to a small studio, sit before a small crew, and spend a few minutes introducing themselves on camera. Every so often, they’d get a VHS cassette with short videos of prospects in the mail, and if they liked someone they saw, they could try to arrange a date.
Video dating never really caught on, but if you do some YouTube searching, you can observe some fantastic archived footage. One guy, Mike, led with this amazing notice:
In addition to that, most of the clips I watched contained guys setting themselves up as enjoying “having fun” and looking for “someone to have fun with.” They also shared a little bit about themselves. “I like pizza,” said one gentleman. “No fatties, no alcoholics,” proclaimed another. “I’m currently cleaning up toxic waste” is how one man described his professional life, while another described himself as “an executive by day, a wild man by night,” and a third proclaimed, “I’m interested in all aspects of data processing.”
One gentleman declared no “Donna Juanitas,” which sounded like a horrifying racial slur against Hispanic women. However, I did some Internet research and found out it was actually the female equivalent of a Don Juan. Basically, he didn’t want a woman who was sleeping around. That said, if that’s the goal, shouldn’t the term be “Donna Juan” instead of “Donna Juanita”? Where does the “Juanita” come from? Why does her last name change? Seems like the person who came up with this term is under the impression that last names in Spanish have gender-specific conjugations. So a man named Jorge Lopez would be married to a woman named Ana Lopezita? My Spanish is horrible, but even I know that makes no sense. Okay, this was quite a tangent—look for my other book, Donna Juan: The Etymology of Racial Slurs, sometime in 2023.*
After each clip, the suitor’s stats would be flashed on the screen, like this:
In a way, I’m kind of bummed video dating died out, because the clips I explored were really great. Peep the dude above. One of his interests is “adventure”!
The failure of video dating did not scare off the entrepreneurs who recognized how another new technology, the Internet, might revolutionize matchmaking. And in the mid-1990s, when personal computers and modems that connected users to the Internet were becoming more popular, online dating began to take off.
Match.com launched in 1995, and it wasn’t just an updated version of computer dating services; it had one crucial innovation: Instead of matching up clients with an algorithm, Match.com let its clients select one another, in real time. Most people were skeptical that the service would change anything. But not Gary Kremen, who founded the company and served as its first CEO. During his first big television interview, Kremen wore a tie-dyed shirt, sat on a brightly colored beanbag chair, and boldly told the camera: “Match .com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ.”4
But first it required some tinkering. Initially Match.com was hampered by the same stigma that had kept people away from previous computer dating services. During the Internet boom of the late 1990s, though, people’s relationship to computers and online culture changed dramatically, and more and more people were getting comfortable using computers for basic tasks. Over time, e-mail, chat rooms, and ultimately social media would require people to develop online personas. And the idea of using a computer to find dates became completely acceptable. By 2005 Match.com had registered forty million people.
However, once it was clear that there was a market for online dating services, competing companies sprang up everywhere, seeking out new niches and also trying to chip away at Match .com’s client base. Each new site had its own distinctive branding—eHarmony was for people looking for serious relationships, Nerve was for hipsters, JDate for Jewish folks, and so forth.
But most sites shared a basic template: They presented a vast catalog of single people and offered a quasiscientific method of filtering through the options to find the people most likely to match. Whether these algorithms were more effective than the algorithms of the computer dating services is a matter of some controversy, but as computers became dazzlingly fast and sophisticated, people seemed more inclined to trust their matchmaking advice.
ONLINE DATING TODAY