Would you leave the future of your love life in the hands of some old geezer in a lab coat, asks David Cohen.
In a cover story in this month's issue the Atlantic, Lori Gottlieb recounts how the psychologist Neil Clark Warren, a grandfather whose intellectual influences range from Carl Jung to Mr Rogers, took an academic research project on marital longevity and fashioned it into the nine million-member-strong dating site eHarmony.
The story reveals how new, science-based online dating sites - sites like Perfectmatch.com and Chemistry.com - are relying on academics to help predict romantic compatibility through their growing use of special algorithms and sophisticated questionnaires. These are part of what Ms Gottlieb, a onetime medical student, describes as a 'social experiment of unprecedented proportions', in which the realm of love is aided by cold, hard science.
When the author uses the new technology, she finds herself paired with a film editor wearing a kilt - a mismatch of titanic proportions, the article suggests -but is told that the algorithm is set up for long-term compatibility rather than short term attraction.
An academic's wet dream come true? The full story is not available online, but Ms Gottlieb kindly explains all in an interview posted on the magazine's website.
But before you mock, is it really any worse than the hormone-driven chaos of a love life that the rest of us have endured at some point or othe
