Category: Chemistry

BLOOMBERG — Nov 18 — The Web-based Sperling's BestPlaces guide this month ranked Seattle the #1 place in the U.S. to hook up, based on 33 factors, including male-to-female parity, membership in online dating services and the number of coffee shops and dog parks.  Match.com chose Seattle as one of four cities in the country to test a new dating site called chemistry.com, designed for people "actively seeking meaningful long-term relationships." There are 186,480 Seattle Match members, ~6.1% of the population of 3 million. That's the highest proportion of online daters among the 12 largest metropolitan areas. 47% of men and 40% of women in Seattle have never married. 

BLOOMBERG — Nov 18 — The Web-based Sperling's BestPlaces guide this month ranked Seattle the #1 place in the U.S. to hook up, based on 33 factors, including male-to-female parity, membership in online dating services and the number of coffee shops and dog parks.  Match.com chose Seattle as one of four cities in the country to test a new dating site called chemistry.com, designed for people "actively seeking meaningful long-term relationships." There are 186,480 Seattle Match members, ~6.1% of the population of 3 million. That's the highest proportion of online daters among the 12 largest metropolitan areas. 47% of men and 40% of women in Seattle have never married. 

YAHOO NEWS — Oct 13 — Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and research professor at Rutgers University's Center for Human Evolutionary Studies, specializes in love, marriage, and gender differences. She's the author of four books, including her most recent, titled Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. She believes that the type of person we are attracted to is hardwired into our neurons, etched by a combination of hormones, brain chemicals, and childhood experiences.  As an adviser to new spinoff, Chemistry.com (backed by Match.com), Fisher is trying to quantify that certain something we're all looking for in a mate. "Most people fall in love because they have shared values, but they stay in love because their personalities mesh.  Childhood also plays an enormous role in shaping likes and dislikes.  I want to know not only what your brain chemistry is, but what was successful for you in the past.  What really astonishes me is that I came up with four basic personality types in my research, and these same four types have been described by Plato, Aristotle, Carl Jung, Myers-Briggs." One of the questions on Chemistry.com asks how long your index finger is compared to your ring finger. A person with an index finger shorter than the ring finger will have been exposed to more testosterone while in the womb, and a person with an index finger longer than the ring finger will have had more estrogen. In women, the two fingers are usually equal in length, as measured from the crease nearest the palm to the fingertip. In men, the ring finger tends to be much longer than the index finger.

Mark Brooks: My interview with Jim Safka, Match.com CEO, goes live on OPW on Tuesday.