In 2001, my elder brother, who was in the same boat, and I founded LDS Singles Network to address the limitations of other LDS singles sites. |
[ HOME ] We believed we could do it better: My biggest complaint about existing LDS singles sites was that they didn't provide a way to search for people based on personality traits. You could search based on age, location, hair color, church activity level, and things like that, but as much help as that was, it still took a horrendous amount of time to wade through hundreds of profiles trying to get a sense of people's personalities. The seeds sown:Years earlier, I had listened to a Valentine's Day fireside speaker discuss the importance of figuring out the difference between what I wanted in a spouse (my "wish list") and what was critical to me in a relationship. He pointed out that while initially romance and later commitment can empower us to overlook many imperfections in our partner, there may be things that, if we get to know ourselves well enough, we know will constantly provide a mild irritation. The speaker told us that the little irritations can slowly and subtlely drive a wedge between people, and while it is possible, with effort, to overcome such challenges, it is wiser to decide before hand which issues you are willing to compromise on, and which present too great a risk to an eternal relationship. After the fireside, I refined my existing wish list, separating out those attributes I doubted I'd be happy overlooking. For example, while I'm not a slob, impeccable cleanliness is not important to me. I knew (from experience) that living with a person who demanded that things always be kept nearly spotless would not work for me. I also recognized that I in turn would constantly irritate such a person. So one of the attributes on my critical list was "not fanatically clean". Turning it into science:On the ride home from the fireside, a friend and I joked about printing up lists of critical and desired attributes and ranking potential partners on each. But it wasn't completely a joke. I built myself a spreadsheet where I listed various attributes, ranked the importance of each to me, ranked a few people on each, and calculated a score to show how well we matched. I also set a threshold for the critical items below which a person could not be ranked without being marked incompatible with me. The spreadsheet didn't do much more than confirm what I already knew, but it was always interesting to see nevertheless. A few years later, a coworker told me about a system called a "geek code", with which people ranks themselves on a number of factors related to technical issues, science fiction preferences and such. It occurred to me that a similar "love code" system could be used to enable people to rank themselves and various qualities, indicate what rankings they were looking for in others, and automatically match people up who were looking for the kinds of people that other people rated themselves as being. I did a little work on building such a system and set it aside. At one point, I suggested the idea to one of the leading LDS singles site, but received no reply. Turning it into a website:Then in 2001, my brother mentioned that he had started building an LDS singles website to address some of the shortcomings he saw in existing sites. At first, I thought I might finish up my "love code" idea, and let him link to it from his site. But as things developed, and we each kept coming up with more ways to improve on the LDS singles website experience, we decided to build the site together. Soon after, LDS Singles Network was born, featuring "Compatibility Profile", a new way of comparing two people's personalities and preferences and searching for people who match up well. Now, a few years later, some other LDS singles sites have added features suggesting a similar idea, but none has approached the power and clarity of Compatibility Profile. |