PerfectMatch.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

PerfectMatch launched in 2003 out of Seattle, founded by Duane Dahl and built around the work of Dr. Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington who had spent three decades studying long-term couples. The matching system was called Duet, and its claim was that compatibility is not a matter of shared hobbies but of how two people handle conflict and money. You answered a long questionnaire and the site did the sorting.

For about five years it worked. Between roughly 2005 and 2010 PerfectMatch was a genuine third option in American online dating, with Schwartz doing the talk-show circuit and the site turning up in Must Love Dogs, the 2005 film in which Diane Lane's family puts her on a dating site without asking. It sat in the same conversation as eHarmony and Match without ever getting close to their spend.

FriendFinder Networks bought it in June 2011 and Dahl went along with the deal, taking over the company's general-audience dating group. From there the site stopped changing. It never got a phone app, in the years when the entire category moved onto phones, and by November 2015 it was gone. Visitors landed on friendfinder.com instead, and anyone with subscription time left was refunded the balance.

~ the dossier ~

~ the duet test ~

Duet asked about eight dimensions and then did something the competition mostly avoided: it told you which of them mattered for similarity and which mattered for difference. Schwartz's research position was that couples do not need to match on everything, and that some mismatches are load-bearing. A cautious person and an impulsive person can hold together as long as they agree on how decisions get made.

Whether the questionnaire was better than eHarmony's is not answerable and never was. What it did have was a named academic attached to it who would defend the method in public, which in a market full of unexplained black boxes was worth something.

~ the question the competition would not ask ~

PerfectMatch offered same-sex matching from the beginning. eHarmony did not, and in 2005 its founder told USA Today that the company did not want to participate in something that was illegal in most of the country at the time. A gay man in New Jersey sued over the exclusion that same year. Schwartz's answer, from the other side of the market, was that she had researched gay couples her whole career and that the extra questions you would want to ask them were not hard ones.

That is the part of PerfectMatch worth keeping. A mid-size competitor with a fraction of the advertising budget took the position that its larger rival spent years and a lawsuit refusing to take.

~ the quiet part ~

Online dating in Turkey in those years ran on entirely different rails. American sites did not localize here and the local attempts had a reputation problem that took most of a decade to shake off. In 2005 I was finishing university, MSN was where people met people, and a subscription dating site with a sociologist's questionnaire would have looked like something from another country's television, which is exactly what it was.

The end was not dramatic. FriendFinder had bigger problems in 2015, including a data breach that would define the company's public reputation, and a slowly shrinking twelve-year-old dating brand was an easy line item to close. The refund notice was the last thing PerfectMatch ever published.

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