Neil Clark Warren
Neil Clark Warren is a prominent psychologist and the founder of eHarmony, an online matchmaking service launched in 2000 with the goal of helping individuals find long-term marital partners. Warren created eHarmony from his counseling practice, initially targeting a Christian audience but later broadening the service to appeal to a wider demographic. He is well-known as the public face of the company, featuring in numerous advertisements and media appearances, and has authored several books and articles on relationship advice.
Warren’s approach to matchmaking is based on a proprietary algorithm that assesses compatibility through a detailed questionnaire, focusing on what he describes as "twenty-nine dimensions of compatibility." This method differentiates eHarmony from other dating services, as users are matched without the option to browse profiles. Over the years, eHarmony has faced legal challenges, particularly regarding its policies on same-sex relationships, which led to changes in its services to accommodate a broader range of users.
In addition to his work with eHarmony, Warren has held academic positions and maintained a private psychology practice. He stepped down as CEO of eHarmony in 2016, having briefly returned to the role in 2012 after an earlier departure. On a personal note, Warren is married and has three daughters, as well as nine grandchildren.
Subject Terms
Neil Clark Warren
Founder of eHarmony
- Born: September 18, 1934
- Place of Birth: Urbandale, Iowa
Primary Company/Organization: eHarmony
Introduction
Neil Clark Warren is best known as the founder of eHarmony, an online matchmaking service, and as an author of popular articles and books giving relationship and marriage advice. A professional psychologist, Warren has said that he founded eHarmony as an outgrowth of his counseling practice and that his motivation was to help people identify partners with whom they could form a lasting and happy marriage. Warren is the public face of eHarmony: His image has appeared in many advertisements for the site, and he has made many media appearances. Warren has also published several books and hundreds of articles promoting his views on relationships and marriage. Although eHarmony began as a primarily Christian dating site, in 2005 Warren moved away from focus on that particular market and toward appealing to a much broader market.
Early Life
Neil Clark Warren was born in Urbandale, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines, and grew up on a farm. During his childhood, Warren's father pursued many business endeavors: He owned a Chevrolet dealership, a John Deere store, and a grocery. Warren describes his father as very bright man and his mother as a very sweet woman who was not in her husband's intellectual league. Consequently, his parents rarely spoke to each other, and Warren found home life boring. He left for Long Beach, California, to study at Pepperdine University. It was there that he met his wife. He earned his bachelor's degree in social sciences from Pepperdine University in 1956, his master's degree in divinity in 1959 from Princeton Theological Seminary, and his doctorate in psychology from the University of Chicago in 1967.
Life's Work
In 1967, Warren accepted a position as assistant professor in the Graduate School of Psychology of Fuller Theological Seminary, a Christian, multidenominational institution headquartered in Pasadena, California, with branch campuses in Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and California. He also maintained a private practice in psychology in the years 1967–2000. Warren founded eHarmony, an Internet matchmaking site designed to be compatible with his Christian beliefs; the site began operation on August 22, 2000.
From the beginning, eHarmony has emphasized some characteristics that make it distinct from many other online dating services. One difference is eHarmony's explicit restrictions on who may use the service: The goal of eHarmony is to make matches resulting in successful marriages, and individuals were initially barred from using the service if they were younger than twenty-one (later eighteen), had been divorced more than twice, or did not state that their goal was marriage. Another key difference is the method whereby clients are matched with prospective partners. When clients join eHarmony, they fill out an extensive questionnaire intended to determine aspects of their personality and to facilitate matching them with members of the opposite sex with whom they would be compatible. This information, along with preferences stated by the user (such as age and location), are used by eHarmony to provide lists of potential matches; unlike most online dating services, eHarmony does not allow users to browse the profiles of other users in order to select people in whom they might be interested in dating. Some individuals who take the test are rejected by the site because they are considered poor matches. The matching algorithm is proprietary and thus not available for public scrutiny; it is registered with the U.S. patent office (under U.S. patent no. 6,735,568).
In 2005, Warren decided to downplay the Christian origins of eHarmony and to seek a wider clientele. The site's advertising (the company spent an estimated $80 million on advertising in 2005) made no mention of Warren's seminary background, and Warren explicitly distanced himself from Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian organization founded by James Dobson. (Prior to 2005, Warren had been a regular guest on Dobson's radio program, and Focus on the Family had published several of Warren's books. In fact, Warren bought back the rights to three of them—Learning to Live with the Love of Your Life, Make Anger Your Ally, and Finding the Love of Your Life—so he could remove the name of Focus on the Family from their covers. Because of this change in the company's image, Warren's public image, and the site's emphasis on marriage, many users are aware of the service's religious background and orientation toward moral issues, and for some this background offers a particular appeal, bringing eHarmony a niche market of users who may perceive that rival dating sites do not serve their needs as well because they are not founded on conservative moral values.
The eHarmony website allows anyone to sign up for free, take the personality test, and review information about people with whom they have been matched; however, to use the service requires payment of a subscription fee. The website also includes a number of free articles on different aspects of dating and relationships, including advice for people in particular geographic locations.
When it first began operation, eHarmony recognized only opposite-sex relationships. The company was sued, in both California and New Jersey, for discrimination against individuals seeking same-sex matches. In his defense, Warren said that his matching system was based on heterosexual couples, and he did not know that it would work for same-sex couples. As part of the settlement in the New Jersey case, eHarmony in 2010 began directing those seeking same-sex matches to Compatiblepartners.net, an affiliated website. Settlement for the California suit included making the option of same-sex matches more visible on the eHarmony website and creating a $2 million settlement fund to compensate Californians who can demonstrate that they were wronged by the company's policies. In 2010, eHarmony was also sued by Lynda Kelly and Miranda Soegi, who claimed that eHarmony does not deliver on its promise to match people using a scientific process and that many of the people in the eHarmony database are scam artists; Kelly and Soegi filed their case in the U.S. District Court of Los Angeles with class action status.
The core concept most identified with Warren's work is the “twenty-nine dimensions of compatibility,” a series of dimensions that can be determined through a simple questionnaire and are based on his years of experience as a psychologist; Warren claims that he has demonstrated empirically that these dimensions can predict which couples will be compatible and have a successful marriage and which will not. However, high-quality scientific research supporting this assertion is difficult to find, as is noted in a review article by James Houran and colleagues that appeared in the North American Journal of Psychology in 2004.
Though Warren left the company in 2007 only to return as CEO in 2012 to take over efforts to revitalize the business, he stepped down once more in 2016.
Personal Life
Warren is married to Marylyn Mann Warren. The couple have three daughters and nine grandchildren, and one of their sons-in-law, Gregory Forgatch, served as eHarmony's chief executive officer for several years.
Bibliography
“eHarmony Settles Lawsuit, Will Offer Same Sex Matches.” Quest: Wisconsin's Gay News Leader 15.19 (2008): 8. Print.
Gupta, Atul, Rebecca Murtha, and Niharika Patel. “EHarmony: More than Traditional Internet Dating.” Journal of the International Academy for Case Studies 18.1 (2012): 43–52. Print.
Houran, James, Rense Lange, P. Jason Rentfrow, and Karin H. Bruckner. “Do Online Matchmaking Tests Work? An Assessment of Preliminary Evidence for a Publicized ‘Predictive Model of Marital Success.’” North American Journal of Psychology 6.3 (2004): 507-526. Print.
Paumgarten, Nick. “Looking for Someone.” New Yorker 87.19 (2011): 36–49. Print.
Sharabi, Liesel L. "Finding Love on a First Date: Matching Algorithms in Online Dating." Harvard Data Science Review, no. 4.1, 2022. DOI: 10.1162/99608f92.1b5c3b7b. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.
Smith, Aaron. "EHarmony's Co-Founder and Star of Its Ads Is Stepping Down." CNN, 26 July 2016, money.cnn.com/2016/07/26/technology/eharmony-ceo-warren/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019.