29-year-old Ren Lu You is so fed up of trying to find his soul mate that he’s actually outsourcing the job. The young man from Alabama has created his own dating website which explicitly states: “Find me a girlfriend and I’ll pay you $10,000. Seriously.”
Ren, a Harvard Business School graduate, moved to Birmingham last year for work. He spent the last 12 months going on a lot of dates, “some interesting, some dull, and a few utterly bizarre” ones. But then he felt like he was wasting too much time, so he decided to cut to the chase by offering money in exchange for connections. “If you introduce me to a girl and I date her for more than 6 months, I’ll pay you $10,000,” his website states. There’s a catch, though: if a woman submits her own name, she isn’t eligible for the reward.
Ren’s dating strategy is unconventional, and also a bit weird, but he offers an explanation: “Look at it this way: if you work 12 hours/day, how would you want to spend the few waking hours you have left?” he writes. “Probably not standing around in a bar with your fingers crossed. This way is more fun for me.” And he told Business Insider that he thinks $10,000 is a pretty reasonable fee for such a service, given the importance of meeting someone you may end up marrying.
“I’ve always kind of been wanting to experiment with stuff like this,” Ren said. “I’ve been kicking around this idea that I could pay someone on a contingent basis to help introduce me to people, that would actually save me a ton of time. It would help get around some of that kind of adverse selection problem that you get from online dating services or Tinder.”
“I’ve been on a bunch of dates and gone through all the usual methods: friends of friends, introductions through coworkers, OkCupid, Match.com, Tinder, everything,” Ren told Business Insider. “With online dating you have this problem of adverse selection. Only the people who self-select into a particular dating website are the people you have access to.”
But with his own website, Ren gets access to profiles of women that are involuntarily submitted. “With this site I have access to basically everybody,” he explained. “You don’t have to see the site or know who I am, you just have to know somebody who has seen the site.”
Dateren.com features a submission form, through which people can add information about women they think might be interested in dating Ren. “If you think any of your single friends would be interested in going on a date with me, use the form below to share some info, photos, and whatever else you’re comfortable with,” he writes. “The next step would be to chat over the phone, Skype, or even a cup of coffee to mutually reassure each other we’re not crazy people.”
“I understand there’s always the potential hazard of people thinking you’re an a**h**e and the internet deciding it doesn’t like what you’re doing,” Ren admitted. But he has had his share of bad dates, some so awful that his decision to spend $10,000 isn’t all that surprising. “There was some bad stuff that happened,” he told Al.com. “She showed up like an hour late, and she couldn’t find the restaurant we were supposed to meet at, and I had to pick her up in a parking lot, which I thought was kind of weird.”
“I thought I was going to get stabbed or something. When she got out of the car she was smoking a cigarette, and she said she didn’t smoke. And she was missing some of her teeth.” They had dinner anyway, and he drove her back to the parking lot afterwards. And that’s when things got really bad. The woman supposedly asked Ren if he is racist. “I was like, ‘No, this has nothing to do with race, I just don’t think we have chemistry, I’m sorry.”
“As she was stepping out of the car, she muttered some racial epithets at me,” Ren said. “It was pretty bad. It was really just not pleasant.” He added that not all his dates have been this bad, but he just doesn’t want to waste any more time on dating the traditional way. “I’m trying to make dating as efficient as possible,” he said.
And he’s supposedly getting lots of good responses – about 20 suggestions within a few days of setting up the website. “I’m getting a lot of young professionals, people like doctors and lawyers and other sorts of folks that wouldn’t frequent a dating website normally, or people maybe too afraid of blemishing their professional image (by appearing on a dating website) – which apparently I’m not afraid of,” he said.
“Those are the kind of people that I feel like are being referred to me now. Which is kind of cool, because they don’t have to expose themselves the way they would on a dating website.”
Is six months good enough time to figure out if he’s ready to part with $10,000? After all, there’s a good chance of him getting scammed. But Ren says he’s thought about that too. “Frankly, if two people – or at least one person – is willing to put in six months of basically full time work, charming me, and hanging out with me all the time, dating me and all this, and they’re successful at fooling me for six whole months, I think they’ve earned the five grand or whatever is their cut of the scam,” he said.
“That doesn’t actually concern me all that much. I’m a pretty good judge of character, and, given six months, you can find out a lot about a person,” he added. “It might fail spectacularly, but who knows.”
Believe it or not, Ren Lu You’s idea is not exactly original. In 2012, New York based plastic surgeon Emil Chynn also offered to pay $10,000 to whoever introduced him to the woman of his dreams, and two years ago, a female management supervisor from San Francisco offered $10K to the person who could hook her up with Mr. Right. I guess for some people, finding love doesn’t come cheap.
Photos: Ren Lu You/Dateren.com
