SUN JOURNAL -- May 6 -- "Imagine if we could lower the divorce rate by 1 percent, all the lives that would be impacted by that," said Galen Buckwalter, a former professor of psychology who is eHarmony's VP R&D. It may take a generation to figure out whether any of the Web sites will succeed, but in the meantime they are collectively engaging in a social experiment of gargantuan size. Ultimately, they may prove whether or not science has a role in the most unscientific realm of all - love. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, scientific adviser to Chemistry.com, said psychologists have understood for years which relationships work and which ones don't. People who share culture, economic status, education and religion fare much better than people who are different. Fisher, a professor at Rutgers, thinks it's genetics. Genes for dopamine are associated with motivation and curiosity, genes for serotonin are linked to stability. Testosterone is related to drive and spatial abilities. She theorized that people have different levels of those body chemicals that put them into four broad personality types. The profile on Chemistry.com is designed to assign people to one of those four. PerfectMatch relies on a combination of similar and complementary traits to predict long-term compatibility, but not instant attraction. The Duet Compatibility Profiler focuses on eight personality characteristics, including romantic impulsivity, energy and outlook. Compatible couples should match on four of them. eHarmony based its matching system on what 5,000 happily married couples had to say about why their relationships withstood the test of time. eHarmony's system does not identify what he called "the click," the spark that leads to romance instead of friendship. They're working on it. FULL ARTICLE SUN JOURNAL



Mark Brooks: A top 10 dating site will be launching a personality profiling system to rival Chemistry, PerfectMatch and eHarmony shortly. Email me at mark@onlinepersonalswatch.com for first notification. The announcement is on embargo.