在线交友正变成主流 用科技战胜孤独

Neil Clark Warren has a bold ambition. He wants “people to have a job they love and a marriage they wouldn’t change for anything”. For the 79-year-old founder and chief executive of dating site eHarmony now wants to match job hunters with employers.

尼尔•克拉克•沃伦(Neil Clark Warren)有一个大胆的愿望。他希望“人们拥有一份自己热爱的工作和一段他们拿什么也不会去换的婚姻”。这位80岁的交友网站eHarmony创始人和首席执行官，现在希望实现求职者与雇主的配对。

The dating marketplace is crowded. Online dating, once stigmatised, is now mainstream.

交友市场已经饱和。曾背负骂名的在线交友正变成主流。

Eharmony, founded in 2000, today competes with niche sites catering for users from vegetarians to Ayn Rand fans, as well as social media and apps such as Tinder. Though Dr Warren patently sees his site, which claims to have been responsible for 600,000 marriages, as a cut above those facilitating mere hookups. “Tinder and eHarmony are in two different businesses. Tinder is very superficial; it’s based on looks.”

Eharmony创建于2000年，如今与其竞争的是一些专门服务于各类细分用户（从素食主义者到艾恩•兰德(Ayn Rand)的粉丝）的网站以及社交媒体和Tinder等应用。然而，沃伦博士显然认为自己的网站优于那些只是安排约会的网站。该网站声称促成了60万桩婚姻。“Tinder和eHarmony处于两种不同的业务。Tinder非常肤浅；它基于外表。”

Dr Warren wants to broaden eHarmony’s appeal and become a “relationship company”. Not just making love and job matches but also fixing retirees up with advisers and the isolated with friends. He sees loneliness as one of the biggest problems in modern society. Technology, he concedes, is a double-edged sword, both contributing to and combating isolation.

沃伦博士希望拓宽eHarmony的吸引力，使其变成一家“关系公司”。不仅撮合爱情和工作，还会帮助退休人士与顾问、孤独人群与朋友牵线。他将孤独视为现代社会的最大问题之一。他承认，科技是一把双刃剑，既导致了孤独，也能被用来战胜孤独。

But first he is going after the jobs giants, LinkedIn and Monster. In December eHarmony’s subsidiary Elevated Careers will launch in the US. Dr Warren believes there is an untapped market of unfulfilled professionals. “Over 70 per cent of employees identify themselves as not engaged or actively disengaged from their jobs. We think we can reduce the amount of turnover and raise the level of productivity for companies by matching candidates with the right job, in the right career, with the right company.” He insists he can counter the modern career pattern of serial jobs in multiple companies and turn employees monogamous.

然而，首先他要效仿那些猎头巨擘LinkedIn和Monster。今年12月，eHarmony的子公司Elevated Careers将在美国创建。沃伦认为，怀才不遇的专业人士市场尚未被开发。“超过70%的员工认为自己没有投入到工作中或者根本无心工作。我们认为，我们可以通过帮助求职者找到合适的工作、合适的职业、乃至合适的公司，来降低企业的流动率并提高生产率。”他坚持表示，他能够应对现代职场中连续跳槽、供职于多家公司的模式，让员工对企业忠诚。

The fallout of those who flit from job to job is far-reaching, he says. His wife’s father, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, moved jobs 17 times. “That has an impact”, he says. “When a person is unhappy at their job . . . it affects their home life, their marriage, their personal relationships, their relationships with their co-workers . . . [It has] a negative effect on the productivity of the organisations for which they are working.”

他表示，员工不断跳槽的影响深远。他的岳父、一位麻省理工学院(MIT)毕业生换了17份工作。“这是有影响的，”他表示，“如果人们对工作不满……这会影响他们的家庭生活、婚姻、私人关系、与同事的关系……（这）会对他们所在企业的生产率造成负面影响。”

So for the past two years he has set social scientists and technology employees to work on the criteriaand algorithms that will help employees and employers find “the one”. The dating site asks subscribers to answer about 150 questions to help identify values and personality. So Dr Warren envisages a questionnaire to unearth a candidate’s skills, expectation of culture and personality.

因此，过去两年，他聘请社会学专家和科技员工开始研究相关标准和算法，帮助员工和雇主找到匹配的“另一半”。该交友网站要求用户回答约150个问题，以帮助确定他们的价值观和性格。因此，沃伦博士设计了一份问卷，透视求职者的技能、文化预期和个性。

Few recruiters do well on matching an employee with a company culture, he says. “The majority of the workforce change jobs for reasons directly related to company culture. It is imperative we bring candidates verifiable company-culture data that matches to their core work values so they can find the best possible opportunities to experience a meaningful and emotional connection with their work.” The details of such data remain secret.

他表示，招聘机构一般做不到让员工与企业文化匹配。“大多数员工换工作的原因与企业文化直接有关。我们必须为求职者提供能够符合他们的核心工作价值观的可以查证的企业文化数据，这样他们就能找到最佳可能的机会，与自己的工作产生有意义的、情感上的联系。”这些数据的具体细节仍是机密。

Dr Warren knows about being faithful to one career. He worked as a relationship psychologist for 40 years before setting up eHarmony. Originally from a small town in Iowa, he went to a school attended by only 17 pupils. He was the only child in his class. “I came both first and last,” he jokes. His father was a “true entrepreneur” who, says Dr Warren, “owned the town”.

沃伦懂得对一项事业忠诚。他在创建eHarmony之前，做了40年的婚恋心理学家。他来自爱荷华州的一个小镇，他所在的小学只有17个学生。他们班只有他一名学生。他开玩笑说“我既是第一个到，也是最后一个到。”他的父亲是一位“真正的企业家”，沃伦表示，他“是这个小镇的所有者”。

Dr Warren’s brother-in-law took an interest in him as a teenager and encouraged his intellectual curiosity – no one else in his family had been to university. He studied at Princeton Theological Seminary before doing a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Chicago.

沃伦的姐夫在他十几岁时对他产生了兴趣，鼓励他对知识的好奇——他家里其他人都没上过大学。他先是在普林斯顿神学院(Princeton Theological Seminary)攻读，而后在芝加哥大学(University of Chicago)获得临床心理学博士学位。

His interest in relationships came from his Christian beliefs but also a sense that despite their 70-year marriage, his parents were incompatible. “My father was brilliant, very vital. He liked to talk about big things like the Middle East but my mother couldn’t keep up with him. They didn’t talk about much.”

他对婚恋的兴趣来自于他的基督教信仰，也来自他的人生经历。他的父母尽管结婚70载，但并不相配。“我父亲聪明，非常有活力。他喜欢讨论大事，比如中东问题，但我母亲跟不上他。他们交流不多。”

He says the relationship still worked very well for their children: “They never said anything sarcastic to each other.” But his parents’ example instilled in him the belief that a “long marriage is not necessarily a great marriage”.

他表示，对于子女而言，他们的关系仍非常不错：“他们从不互相挖苦。”但父母的例子让他深信：“长久的婚姻不一定是美满的婚姻”。

So Dr Warren set up as a marriage counsellor, seeing more than 7,700 people over the decades. The counselling only confirmed his convictions that divorce was due to incompatibility that should have been evident before the wedding. “I thought people had found the wrong person. They had never received any training about who they should meet.”

于是，沃伦成为了一名婚姻顾问，几十年来有超过7700人向他咨询。辅导工作强化了他的信念：导致离婚的不和谐因素本应在结婚前就显而易见。“我认为，人们往往找错对象。他们从来没有接受过任何培训，告诉他们应该找什么样的另一半。”

Pre-marital counselling did not seem to work. “I never had one couple cancel their wedding as a result.” He recalls one session in which the man told his fiancée: “Nothing this man says will stop me marrying you.”

婚前咨询似乎不管用。“从来没有一对情侣因为咨询过我而取消婚礼。”他记得在一次咨询中，一位男子告诉他的未婚妻：“这个男人说的任何话都不会阻止我娶你。”

It was this that set him – together with his son-in-law – on the idea of matchmaking online. Dr Warren had also reached a point in his career when his work had become “samey”. Despite diversifying into writing relationship books and running seminars, he craved stimulation. So in 2000, just before the dotcom bubble burst, the pair managed to raise $2.5m funding.

正是这一点让他（以及他的女婿）产生了在线做媒的想法。当时沃伦的事业也到了“单调乏味”的时刻。尽管他会撰写有关婚恋的书籍，还举办研讨会，但他渴望刺激。于是，在2000年，就在网络泡沫破裂之前，两人成功筹集到了250万美元资金。

It was difficult to find subscribers at the start, he says, because internet dating was relatively new. The first users tended to be those living in sparsely populated areas so there were a lot of long-distance relationships. But gradually, the California-based site grew.

他说道，一开始很难找到用户，因为当时互联网交友还是一个相对新鲜的事物。首批用户往往是那些居住在人口稀少地区的人，因此有很多异地恋。但逐渐地，这个以加州为大本营的网站开始壮大。

In 2007 he stood down from the privately owned company and moved to Maine with his wife to enjoy their 30-acre grounds, complete with golf course, swimming pool and tennis courts. Despite trying to stay active, he got bored, and, convinced that his company had lost its way, returned as chief executive.

2007年，他从这家私人所有的企业退下来，与妻子搬到缅因州，享受30英亩的田园空间，包括高尔夫球场、游泳池以及网球场。尽管他努力保持活跃，但他还是感到了厌倦，他认为他的公司迷失了方向，于是回去重新出任首席执行官。

During retirement he read a lot of books about comeback kings such as Starbucks’ Howard Schultz and Steve Jobs. He felt “glad to have a chance to run the company as he wanted it”. In doing so he cut his staff from 320 to 190 and says the reorganisation is aligned with his views on job-matching. “We matched people with the right jobs in our own company.”

退休期间，他阅读了很多有关王者归来的图书，例如星巴克(Starbucks)的霍华德•舒尔茨(Howard Schultz)以及史蒂夫•乔布斯(Steve Jobs)。他“很高兴有机会按照自己的意愿来管理这家公司”。在此过程中，他将员工从320人裁减至190人，他表示，重组与他有关工作配对的想法是一致的。“我们在自己的公司实现了员工与合适职位的匹配。”

Dr Warren also believes he has made his “peace with same-sex relationships” after the company created a partner website for gay singles, called Compatible Partners, as a result of court cases that said eHarmony violated discrimination laws upholding equal rights regardless of sexual orientation. “We welcome everybody,” he says.

沃伦博士还认为，他与“同性婚恋讲和了”，此前该公司为单身同性恋者创办了一个同志交友网站，名为Compatible Partners，这源于一些法庭诉讼，这些诉讼称，eHarmony违反了反歧视法，这些法律支持不同性取向的人士拥有平等权利。他表示：“我们欢迎所有人。”

Can the 79-year-old grandfather keep on working? “I don’t think I’ll ever retire. I was bored in retirement.” He hopes, however, that the company’s chief operating officer will take over when that day eventually comes. “He’s a verb and I’m a noun.” What does he mean? “I’m more of a visionary and he’s more of a do-er.”

这位80岁的祖父还能继续工作吗？“我认为我永远不会退休。我厌倦退休。”然而，他希望，当那一天最终到来时，公司的首席运营官将接替他。“他是动词，我是名词。什么意思？“我在更大程度上是一位梦想家，而他在更大程度上是一位实干者。”