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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Neil Clark Warren is an evangelist for marriage first and foremost -- but happy marriage. "My dad and mom were married for 70 years," he said. "They had a nice marriage, but they were not a very well-matched couple." Warren grew up on a farm in Iowa; his father owned a Chevrolet agency, a John Deere store, a grocery, and once ran for supervisor of Polk County, though even his mother voted against him. (She thought politics was a dirty business.) "My dad was just so stinking bright and my mom was so sweet, but she was two standard deviations below him in intelligence." Warren described his father as a guy who "wanted to talk about things like, Why do you think the Jews and Arabs are continuing to fight over the earth?" while his mother "didn't know where the Middle East was." The result for Warren, he said, was a childhood spent "sitting there with two people who never talked. I was bored to death growing up."
Warren moved to Long Beach, Calif., as a young man and attended Pepperdine University, where he met his wife of 46 years, Marylyn. Marylyn Warren handles eHarmony's public relations and was vice president and head of development for the Huntington Library in Los Angeles for 11 years. "She didn't work until our third daughter went off to college," said Warren. But when she did, "she loved it and she was treated with so much respect. That was the time when she and I learned that it was not my superiority in any way that dictated that I should be the breadwinner. She could have done it just as well as, if not better than, I."
Warren sounds like a man still breath-catchingly in love with his wife. "There is nobody on earth I want to be with every night except for her," he said. But he stressed that their meeting "was total luck. We didn't have the slightest idea of what we should have been looking for [in each other]."
Warren, with a master's in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary (1959) and a 1967 Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago (where he studied with humanist Carl Rogers), became a professor and later a dean at Fuller Theological Seminary's Graduate School of Psychology. He maintained a private practice until 2000.
Years of counseling unhappy couples left him distressed about the state of the American union, and his obsession with figuring out how to save it built as his daughters got closer to choosing their own mates. He published a pamphlet in 1975 titled "Selecting a Marriage Partner" and went on to write 10 books, including the alliteratively titled "Finding the Love of Your Life," "Learning to Live With the Love of Your Life," "Loving the Life You Live" and "Date ... or Soul Mate? How to Know If Someone Is Worth Pursuing in Two Dates or Less." Three of his tomes were published by Focus on the Family, though Warren is now trying to buy the rights back from Dobson.
Warren partnered with his son-in-law, former commercial real estate developer Greg Forgatch, in 1995. "We tried everything," he said about their attempts to get the word out about his compatibility research, including putting out a series of videotapes that sold about 5,000 copies. "Then we came to the conclusion that single people in America do not want more education about relationships," said Warren. "They're sick of that. They want somebody."
Based on conversations with 5,000 married people in the late 1990s, Warren formulated his predictive model of compatibility, the 29 dimensions, which include curiosity, intellect, appearance, sexual passion, artistic passion, obstreperousness, sense of humor, anger management, quality of self-perception, feelings about children, spirituality and values orientation. Warren and Forgatch launched eHarmony on Aug. 22, 2000.
Now the site boasts more marriages per match than any other Web site; 10,000 can be documented. But Warren and Forgatch both suspect the number is closer to between 30,000 and 50,000. They'd like to get better figures, but in an earlier conversation, Forgatch had pointed out that they're not interested in volume; they want to know if their formula is working. "Not every marriage made at eHarmony is going to last," he said. "But the purpose of being here is to lower the divorce rate. That's Neil's vision -- literally to change the world."
The Pasadena-based eHarmony is private, and Forgatch wouldn't disclose profits. But last year it attracted an impressive $110 million in venture capital and has advertising partnerships with companies such as Earthlink, ThirdAge, Friendster and Gannet newspapers. Warren and Forgatch crow about the 28-30 percent rate of conversion between those who visit the site and fill out the free profile to those who fork over $50-$250 to become active members. The average conversion rate in the Internet dating world hovers around 4-9 percent. But most visitors log on to eHarmony with a mission, because they've seen an ad or spoken to a satisfied friend, not because they're looking to get their online jollies. There are no jollies to be had at eHarmony. "We don't have anything that's revealing or promiscuous or tantalizing in our advertising," said Forgatch. "Because that stuff has nothing to do with long-lasting relationships."
