Jeffrey Rubel is a historian of business and technology and a PhD candidate in the History Department at NYU, where his dissertation reconstructs the history of the American dating industry from the 1960s to the present. Before NYU, he worked as a management consultant at Bain, taught high school science in Philadelphia, and served as chief of staff at the education company HMH; he holds a BA from Williams College in geosciences and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in history of science. His research — supported by fellowships from the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center and the Smithsonian Institution — draws on court dockets from more than fifty lawsuits, over three dozen oral history interviews with matchmakers, chat line operators, and TGI Fridays staff, and archival collections ranging from the GLBT Historical Society to the Smithsonian’s Warshaw Business Ephemera Collection. His writing on the industry’s history has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine.
In this conversation, we trace one thread that runs through Rubel’s dissertation: the recurring belief that each new dating technology — a 1960s IBM mainframe, a 1970s home video camera, a 1980s telephone chat line, today’s matching algorithm — is finally the rational, honest alternative to the mess of ordinary courtship. We talk about the “omniscient” mainframes that launched computer dating on college campuses, the fraud scandals and consumer-protection laws that followed when that trust collapsed, the industry’s decades-long split between “marriage-minded” businesses and the rest, and how the internet quietly dissolved that divide.
