Chemistry.com

» see chemistry.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Match.com built Chemistry.com with the people who already worked on Match. It went into a four-city test from October 2005, in San Diego, Seattle, Washington and Denver, and opened to the whole country in February 2006. The pitch separating it from its own parent was seriousness. Match was where you went to find somebody; Chemistry was where you went to be matched, on the strength of what it called compatibility, for something meant to last.

The science behind that claim had a name attached, which was unusual for a dating site and entirely the point. Helen Fisher was a biological anthropologist who had spent decades on what happens in the brain during attraction, and Match approached her at the end of 2004, making her its chief science adviser the year after. She built a questionnaire around four temperament styles, each tied to a neurotransmitter system, and that questionnaire was the product. Everything else on the site existed to get you to its first screen.

The questionnaire was strong enough to get on network television by itself. ABC gave 20/20 two hours on 30 January 2009 to Fisher and the research underneath the Chemistry test. By June 2013 more than eight million people around the world had taken it.

The end was quiet in a way the beginning was not. A working Chemistry.com homepage was last archived on 4 November 2025. Ten days after that the site had stopped being served at all, and every request since has been bounced elsewhere. Match Group published nothing. The address it sends you to now ends in the word deprecated.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the eharmony ads ~

Fame arrived through a run of commercials featuring people who said eHarmony had rejected them. eHarmony screened applicants and refused the ones its model could not place, and it said so openly. Chemistry built a campaign out of that refusal.

One of the spots featured a gay man, for the straightforward reason that eHarmony did not match people with partners of the same gender at the time. The ads were not selling a better algorithm. They were selling the experience of having been turned away by a company that thought it could tell who was worth matching.

In April 2008 the campaign moved into its second phase, taking the standard wedding vows and rewriting them, as the company put it, Chemistry style. The rejection ads are the ones people remember.

~ fifty-six questions ~

The test ran to fifty-six multiple-choice questions and most people finished it inside twenty minutes. A close relative of it sits in the opening pages of Fisher's book Why Him? Why Her?, so the thing itself is still in print.

None of this was buyable where I live. Chemistry was a United States product sold through United States television, in a market where the serious-intentions dating site was a recognizable category with its own ad budget, and online dating in Turkey in those years ran somewhere else entirely. What carries across is the ending, and the dates are the part worth keeping: Helen Fisher died on 17 August 2024, and the site built on her questionnaire stopped answering fifteen months later.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »