Degrading to DateHarvardSQ and the Harvard Community

To the editors:

We were surprised by The Harvard Crimson’s critical staff editorial about DateHarvardSQ, “It’s Not All in a Name,” and concerned about the paper’s portrayal of our online community as a divisive flashpoint for the national gender equality debate, rather than as a resource for bringing people together.  We hope that the paper will grant us this opportunity to clarify several inaccuracies in the piece, and explain why DateHarvardSQ is an excellent resource for both women and men.

First of all, we did not launch DateHarvardSQ to combat stereotypes about gender inequity. Rather, our goal has always been to offer an easy-to-use platform that helps busy Harvard students and alumni find meaningful romantic relationships.  We rolled out to Harvard men first (with platforms for Harvard women and same sex couples currently in development) because this is a community we know well, having been part of it while studying at Harvard Business School. Most importantly, we have never made the claim that a Harvard affiliation is the foremost quality of the men on our site.  Quite the contrary, we view that affiliation as a reasonable verifier of an array of admirable personal qualities, including love of learning, ambition, and success. We then rely on our proprietary matching mechanism to pair members based on personal information they upload to their profiles.

We would also like to clarify the motivation behind our payment model, to combat the misinterpretation advanced by the Crimson’s editorial. We ask our female members to pay a subscription fee because DateHarvardSQ provides them with unprecedented control over the dating process when compared to almost every major dating site. Unlike the women on our platform, the men on DateHarvardSQ cannot view five profiles a week automatically, and can only communicate with potential matches if first contacted by a female member. In other words, male Harvard students and alumni are asked to sacrifice a modicum of control in order to benefit from a simple, effective, and free online dating platform for people who may not have time to find romance through traditional dating channels (such as the bar scene or more cumbersome dating sites).

Choice is a wonderful thing, and with existing dating platforms matching singles with all kinds of different groups, we wonder why The Crimson was so quick to criticize the members of our site.  Finding a significant other is an important pursuit for everyone, and the prospect of helping Harvard men (and soon women) find the love of their lives is what motivates us above all else.  We look forward to many success stories and hope that this has been a useful clarification for The Crimson’s many readers.

BERI MERICA and PHILIPP TRIEBEL

Cambridge, Mass.

Sept. 11, 2010

Beri Merica and Philipp Triebel are the founders of DateHarvardSQ.