A survey from 2017 tracked the change in how Americans meet their spouses and romantic partners. Couples whose first interaction occurred online are the majority. In 2023, Online Dating is still strong: an Online Dating magazine found out that nearly twenty million people visit al least one online dating website each month.
Since 1959, when Jim Harvey and Phil Fialer at Stanford University used a questionnaire and an IBM computer to match men and women, other computer-assisted matching initiatives have appeared. In 1965, Jeff Tarr and Vaughan Morrill at Harvard launched Operation Match also using a questionnaire and a IBM computer to match students and charging a $3 fee for submitting a questionnaire. Only six months after the launch, 90.000 Operation Match questionnaires had been received, making $270,000 in gross profits (about $1.8 million in 2014's dollars).
“Their answers were then recorded on punch cards and read by an IBM computer that filled a whole room. After three weeks, the client received a sheet of paper with names and contact of their top six ideal matches. The criteria for the matches included not only data like height and ethnical group, but also answers to relevant questions like whether they were sexually experienced or believed that romantic love is necessary for succesful marriage.”
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| Photo: Madrona Rose |
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