They call him the King of Love. Reclining on a purple velvet throne, inside his castle – a sixth-floor office in a grey tower block in central London – Karl Gregory is reeling off some of his favourite statistics. “517,000 relationships, 92,000 marriages and around a million babies,” he grins.
“We’ve been responsible for all those. Isn’t it incredible?” He whisks a print-out from a pile of papers on his desk and prods a blurry image in the middle. It’s a picture of a customer’s baby scan under the words: “all thanks to Match.com”.
At the British HQ of the world’s biggest dating agency, every day is Valentine’s Day. The lift doors ping open to reveal a wall plastered in photographs of happy couples – cliché upon cliché of wedding shots, beach scenes, even a pair strolling through a sunflower field.
In one corner is a cluster of Hallmark-red sofas; romantic slogans adorn a board above the photocopier. There are hearts everywhere – from the pendant on an employee’s necklace to the novelty fruit bowl.
Match.com is not only the most popular dating website on the planet; it’s the granddaddy of them all. This year, it celebrates its 20th anniversary – marking two decades since a little start-up suggested that Cupid’s arrow might strike through a screen.
Today, one in five new relationships and one in six marriages are estimated to begin online. The global online dating market is worth at least a billion dollars.
Match.com’s piece of this pie is huge. Its users are spread across 40 countries and exchange 415 million emails a year. It has a Google-like track record of gobbling up its competition: it purchased OkCupid in 2011, and also owns Tinder, a wildly popular mobile app founded in 2012.
“Try this experiment next time you’re out for dinner with a group of friends,” suggests Gregory, who is Match.com’s UK manager and European director. “Mention Match.com, and see how many say they met their partner on there, or encouraged a relative to go on it, or know someone who has.”
When Match.com launched in April 1995, there were only 25 million internet users worldwide, compared to 2.92 billion in 2015. Having web access at home – like owning a mobile phone - was considered quite exotic.
Match.com was a flare from the future. It promised a clever algorithm, which used character traits and interests to pair users with their perfect partner. Within six months, 100,000 people had registered.
At first, online dating occupied a seedy corner of the internet, ranking in people’s minds just above red light services. The first users of Match.com were a motley bunch: all of them tentative; some optimistic, others outright weirdos.
Bill and Freddie Straus, aged 76 and 72, fall into the first category. The couple from California are among the first in history to have gone on an online date – and, two decades later, have a long, happy marriage to show for it. “I had just broken up with somebody and I decided, aged 53, that maybe it was time to get married,” says Freddie. “It was very limited back then – most of the men on it were so old, they could have been my father. I was about ready to give up, and then Bill came along.”
Bill had been on seven dates by the time he got an email from Freddie. They messaged for a few days by fax and email before speaking on the phone, and then went on their first date to a Chinese restaurant in 1996. Freddie wasn’t technical enough to upload a picture, so Bill had no idea what she looked like - which was relatively common in the early days.
“It started off as sheer geek territory,” says Gregory. “It was 80 per cent guys, no profile pictures. Stigma was high.”
Jane Stuart barely told anyone when she set up a profile on the site in 2001. “Back then, there was a sense of 'Oh, you must be really desperate,’” she says.
“I was worried that people would think I couldn’t get a boyfriend normally. It was a bit creepy. Things were different, too – I didn’t have a laptop and certainly didn’t have internet on my phone, so I was logging on in my lunch break at work.”
Then, Jane, a 28-year-old travel saleswoman from Twickenham, west London, came across Andreas Palikiras, an olive-skinned marketing manager from Corfu. Fourteen years later, the pair are married, with twin four-year-old daughters, and, rather aptly, their own Greek wedding business. “It’s amazing to have been a pioneer of something that is now so normal,” she says.
Though early users were taking a gamble by signing up to the site, the real leap of faith in Match.com’s history took place on December 27, 1992.
Eric Klien, a Las Vegas-based entrepreneur, had spent six months pondering the dilemma of dating. “Traditional methods of courting and flirting are risky generally,” he wrote at the time. “Not only are they risky, but they are ineffective.” So he created a 170-point questionnaire, covering users’ horoscopes, their preferred mode of transport, taste in music, cleanliness, condition of their hair and how often they participated in dangerous sports.
He called it the “Electronic Matchmaker” and uploaded to his private internet database (called a “usenet”) just after Christmas 1992. It was free to fill in and provided users with a report informing them how many of the men/women on his system matched their responses. It was the birth of online dating as we know it.
Klien, a somewhat eccentric philanthropist whose interests include cryogenics and the Lifeboat Foundation (an NGO dedicated to the preservation of human life in the event of global disaster), now lives in Reno, Nevada. He has never spoken about the “Matchmaker”, and when I track him down he is brusque and to-the-point.
“In person, it is uncomfortable to ask a lot of questions up front,” he says. Giving your preferences to a faceless machine, on the other hand, is far less awkward. “And a person only has to answer the questions once and then they will be applied to all future matches.”
In 1993, Klien sold his questionnaire and the domain name Match.com so he could focus on a new mission. It was called the Atlantis Project and it aimed to build an independent city called Oceania in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.
Match.com’s buyer was Gary Kremen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur frustrated by the amount of money he was spending on 1-900 dating hotlines. He purchased Match.com for $2,500 (£1,650) and launched it as a dating service on the open internet in 1995. In his first TV interview, Kremen wore a tie-dyed shirt and sat on a beanbag. “Match.com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ,” he pronounced.
Kremen himself found a girlfriend online, but sadly lost her to another man she met on Match.com – a painful lesson, but at least he knew the site worked. His term at the helm didn’t last, however: in 1998, he argued with his board and the company was sold. Its current owner, the American media company InterActiveCorp (IAC), bought it in 1999 for $50 million (£33 million).
Officially called “Synapse”, but known by insiders as the “magic sauce”, the Match.com algorithm is based on a streamlined version of Klien’s original matchmaker (the questions on hair condition have gone). It takes into account a user’s stated preferences – age, profession and so on – as well as their actions on the site. So, if a woman says she doesn’t want to date anyone under 6ft, but looks at profiles of men who are 5’8” or 5’10”, Match.com “knows” that she is open to them. The results of the algorithm’s sums are shown in users’ “daily six”: a series of previously-unseen, tailored profiles that are sent to your inbox each day.
Yet philosophers have spent centuries studying love, and concluded that it defies logic – so what hope has a computerised algorithm of matching us with a mate? In 2012, a major study, led by Prof Eli Finkel of the department of Social Psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois found that “to date, there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works.”
Others agree. Prof Jerry Mendelsohn, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, tells me that he “knows of no replicated, refereed study by a disinterested researcher that demonstrates an effective algorithm for finding love.”
But Match.com insists that love is not its aim. “In the early stages, we used to promise the highest level of love, and we’ve moved on from that,” explains Gregory. “Now, it’s all about going on dates and broadening your horizons.” Dr Marina Adshade, author of Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love, believes that if “that’s the true purpose… they are like a good friend who forces you to try on clothes that you would never have picked up.”
Match.com’s biggest user-group is aged 25-44 (56 per cent of all subscribers), while its fastest-growing demographic is the over-55s. There are marginally more men than women on the site. The most common professions among men are engineers, finance and retail; among women it’s secretaries, doctors and teachers. There are men looking for men, women looking for women, serious daters, those looking for flings and others simply seeking friends.
Prospective daters spend hours writing their profiles - and the Match algorithm uses them to find dates for them - but a recent experiment by OkCupid found that the photograph accounts for 90 per cent of what prospective dates think of you.
A trawl through the 75 million profiles uploaded to Match.com since its inception reveals a rich tapestry of changing fashions, hobbies and societal trends. Perms, Wham and shell-suits are out; Facebook, selfies and hipster beards are in.
It is Kate Taylor’s job to study these anthropological details. She is one of Match.com’s eight European “relationship experts” – a role that involves picking out trends in online dating and helping users build their profiles accordingly. Dressed in vampish black and velvet, her face framed by tresses of auburn hair, she looks the part of a modern-day Cilla Black.
Taylor met her first husband and her current fiancé on Match.com. “Summery pictures or ones of you engaged in an interesting activity lead to more conversation,” she says. “Women smiling into the camera get 15 times more responses than women smiling away from the camera; whereas that’s the reverse for men. It’s also been shown that photos taken with smartphones don’t do as well as photos taken with a proper camera.”
Last year, one of the most extensive analyses of online profiles revealed words such as “surfing”, “yoga”, “skiing” and “the ocean” attracted people to men; while women did better with “sweet”, “athlete” and “fitness”. Liking the band Radiohead, the TV series Homeland and reading The Great Gatsby scored highly among both sexes. Gay men get more interest if they pose outdoors. Men who refer to females as “women” rather than “girls” are 28 per cent more likely to get a date. Men who use “whom” get 31 per cent more communication online.
Match.com hasn’t escaped the internet’s darker side: the spammers, con artists, trolls and psychopaths. Tales of dates gone awry abound, ranging from awkward encounters to allegations of criminality. Just last month, Match.com removed a profile purportedly belonging to a former New York police officer dubbed the “cannibal cop”. His conviction for conspiring to kill and cook several women has since been overturned.
Mercifully, most mishaps are less serious. There is a tendency to exaggerate online: to play up your charismatic, amiable side and conceal your less attractive traits. Because of the sheer size of Match.com, Gregory says oversight on an individual level, beyond weeding out the illegal and offensive, simply isn’t possible.
At Telegraph Dating, however, a much smaller operation with 55,000 members, there is far more interaction between members and admin staff. “You get people who put up pictures that aren’t current, and occasional messages saying things like, 'I’ve been on a date with this guy who says he’s 50 but he’s nearer 80,’” explains Emma Iversen of The Dating Lab, the company that runs the Telegraph’s service. “These require delicate conversations with the users – what you say in your profile is a sensitive subject. We know it’s Big Brothery, but it can get a bit like a school playground and sometimes we have to step in to calm things down.”
A study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin showed that, on average, women make themselves four kilograms lighter, men tend to exaggerate their income by 20 per cent and both sexes make themselves two inches taller on their profiles.
Nonetheless, a tranche of serious scientific study into the durability of relationships forged online has found that they work. A study by psychologists at Chicago University in 2013 found that marriages that begin online are 25 per cent more likely to last than those between couples who met through more traditional means.
Women entering the workforce, people leaving their hometowns to study and work, people marrying later and divorcing more frequently are all things that have affected our courtship rituals in the last two decades. And our expectations of relationships have changed dramatically: Valentine’s Day, weddings, hen nights and stag dos have become global businesses; women’s magazines, cougars and sexting are all late twentieth century phenomena.
Time-poor, convenience-hungry consumers who already live much of their lives online see the internet as an obvious gateway to love. Choosing a partner has become pragmatic, akin to logging on to book a flight or buy a vacuum cleaner.
Susan Quilliam, a psychologist who runs an online dating course at London’s School of Life, says meeting someone on the internet actually bears remarkable similarities to courtship conventions dating back centuries. “It helps people focus on background, religious beliefs, life values, life goals – rather than physical appearance. I am a huge fan of that aspect because all too often partners in the first flush of love ignore these essentials. Online is much more akin to the 'slow’ love of traditional arranged marriage.”
But there is a downside. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and consultant to Match.com since 2005, points out that “when you have so many choices, you can get into a rat race where you’re always seeking something a little bit better.”
You don’t have to be in love to work at Match.com, but it helps. On their first day in the job, employees receive a copy of the “Match Manifesto”, a handbook containing the company’s guiding principles. “We believe that love is the most important thing in the world,” it begins. All staff members – coupled up or single – have obligatory profiles on the site, including Gregory (though he explains that they’re not all “active”). He actively encourages office romances, too. “People in a happy relationship are so much more productive at work,” he says.
The London HQ is staffed by a team of young, trendy bright sparks, their desks cluttered with romantic paraphernalia – framed photographs, paper hearts, lollipops. Match’s global HQ takes the company ethos even further. A towering, dusty office block in Dallas, Texas, it has been compared to a disco, a themed bar and a swingers’ hotel. Romantic films are played on a loop in the lobby, and coloured lights flash garishly from the ceilings. There are racy animal print carpets; plush banquettes; dance music blaring.
I meet Gregory, 41, in his office. Throne aside, it resembles a chic Scandinavian furniture store: all white, clean lines. This is his busiest time of year: new members to the site peak between the end of December and the third week of February. “We increase our staffing levels around this period,” says Gregory. “The holidays make people think about finding a partner. Around Valentine’s Day there’s a surge, too, because nobody wants to be alone then.”
Competitors are springing up all the time: VeggieDate (for vegetarians), Cupidtino (fans of Apple products), Clown Passions (you can guess). There are sites for casual sex, virgins and extra-marital affairs. And when Match.com launched, Facebook didn’t exist. Research by the Oxford Internet Institute found that of the UK couples who met online after 1997, only 50 per cent found each other through dedicated dating sites; the rest met on social networks and chat rooms.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, a huge chunk of its annual investment goes into innovation; working out how, after 20 years in the game, it can stay fresh. So what’s next?
The King of Love can barely contain his excitement. He’s tapping his foot on the floor and making big, wild hand gestures, his green eyes skipping around the room. “Imagine someone goes to a Match social [face-to-face meetings over cookery lessons, dog walks and golf days],” says Gregory. “They can check in, log the people they meet, and use wearable technology to monitor their pheromones, heart rate, sweat. Then the technology could introduce you to people who provide that chemical connection. What a conversation starter: 'You sent my chemistry into orbit.’”
Funnily enough, Gregory has never tried online dating himself. He met his wife, Sybelle, 13 years ago. “Call me old fashioned,” he grins, “but we met at work.” And, with that, he jumps up, strides out the door and gets back to playing Cupid.
This article was written by Sarah Rainey from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
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