Okay, Cupid: A digital love story

written by Eric Ginsburg, photos by Alex Klein

When Adam Spooner landed a job at the startup OkCupid, he’d never been to New York City. Yet after growing up outside of Winston-Salem and High Point, the biggest cultural adjustment wasn’t to the city itself, but to his new gig.

It felt almost taboo being a Southern, Christian kid at a company stigmatized as a hook-up website. He felt uncertain.

Adam and his wife, Allison, had married just a year earlier, and the pair met only a year before that. They’d connected thanks to a friend at a church in High Point and bonded over similar beliefs on life and religion — both had attended Christian colleges and grown up in religious families. They quickly fell in love with each other and then New York City, but Adam didn’t fully adapt to his new workplace until about three months in.

“I learned a lot of new terms when I worked there,” he said, adding that when a colleague mentioned polygamy, he had to go and look the word up.

Underscoring just how culturally disconnected Adam was and continues to be, his coworker actually said “polyamory,” and Adam misspoke, conflating the two almost a decade later despite putting in two years alongside a polyamorous co-worker. He learned about BDSM too —well, sort of; he also messed up the letters of the acronym.

Adam Spooner didn’t want to be like his dad, an aeronautical engineer, but try as he might, he did a pretty piss-poor job eschewing the nerdy future that awaited him. Adam did his best after graduating high school in Archdale, bouncing around between UNCG, a Christian college in South Carolina and a design school in San Francisco. He switched majors constantly — medicine, fine arts, graphic design — before landing on computer science. Blame it on the home computer that arrived when Adam was in third grade, his mom’s college minor in computer science or his dad’s profession, but Adam Spooner seemed destined for a desktop.

Still in school, Adam freelanced his design and programming skills for a company in High Point —where he lived at the time — and decided he probably didn’t need to finish a degree in order to land a job. It turns out he was right; Adam applied to the nascent OkCupid and believes he landed the gig thanks to a mix of design and programming prowess.

But before that happened, he met Allison.

Adam hadn’t had much luck with dating.

He’d dated a girl for seven years, but she cheated on him twice. The experience hurt enough that he abstained from dating altogether for a while.

Adam focused on other areas of his life, traveling to Australia to work for a newly founded church as a worship leader and technical director, staying longer than originally planned due to a car accident. When he moved back to the Triad, his longtime friend Brian — whom he knew from childhood and roomed with at Southern Wesleyan University — connected Adam to a youth group at a church where he was working. And then he went a step further.

Four years had passed since Adam exorcized dating from his life. In that time, Brian hadn’t introduced him to any women, at least not a potential romantic interest. But Allison was different.

Allison is a teacher, and at the time she was finishing up her degree with a focus in special education. She grew up in High Point, not far from Advance and Archdale where Adam spent his formative years. Like him, she moved out of state to attend a Christian college before returning to UNCG. And Allison had been involved in the same youth group Adam was joining, but after working alongside Brian there for a year, she was on her way out.

Brian grabbed a friend and set up a sort of double date at Spare Time in Greensboro, though really the pair only showed up as social lubricant to ease the first interaction of Adam and Allison’s blind date.

When it ended, Brian and his tagalong agreed this qualified as the worst date they’d ever seen in their lives. It didn’t help that towards the end of the encounter, as Allison swung her arm back with her fingers laced into a bowling ball, Adam ran up behind her and tried to grab it as a joke. Allison tripped and fell.

But she must’ve seen something in him, because soon after she stopped by his office and asked him out to lunch. The date may have been a disaster, but Brian’s intuition proved remarkably accurate. Six months later, Adam proposed.

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In some ways OkCupid, especially in 2007 when Adam joined the team, could be considered the Wild West of dating. Match.com had jumpstarted the industry much earlier, but this website promised something new. In part because membership is free, people perceived that OkCupid users cared a lot less about marriage and a lot more about sleepover parties than its predecessor.

But Adam wasn’t exactly alone; the four cofounders of the company were married too, and like him, they didn’t truly experience their creation firsthand.

It took him a little while to figure out how to square the job with his station in life, a newlywed trying to remain “mentally faithful” while designing an experience that required him to put himself in the shoes of someone single and ready to mingle. But once Adam began to see it as a tool that would allow people to connect, and possibly find the happiness he shared with Allison, the whole thing sat better with him.

He joined OkCupid’s team in 2007 as the lead designer and front-end programmer, meaning he came up with and implemented many aspects of the site that users see and identify with the company. That includes the logo, the color scheme, the Quickmatch feature and more.

How did the site look before Adam showed up?

“Gross?” he said. “I don’t know what else to call it.”

During his time there, Adam also helped launch the company’s side project, Crazy Blind Date. Users provided basic info along with times and locations when they’re available, and the site matched them with someone who fit as soon as possible — sometimes as early as the same night. Pictures were provided, but only a heavily pixilated one, preventing users from telling much about their date’s physical appearance.

With this project too Adam acted as the lead designer, and this time as the solo front-end programmer.

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He knew that Crazy Blind Date didn’t stick around long, but Adam wasn’t exactly sure when it shut down, or even if OkCupid still used the same logo he designed. Sitting at Preyer Brewing in Greensboro last week, he reached into his pocket for his phone to check; yes, still the same logo, he said, and according to Wikipedia, Crazy Blind Date folded in 2010, but restarted in 2013 as an app.

Adam used to check that sort of thing regularly once he left OkCupid after two years, finding it difficult to let go of this thing he played a formative role in launching. But eventually he realized it’s like a parent sending a child off to college and relinquishing control.

In New York, the couple met a myriad of people who influenced their lives, mostly thanks to Allison who worked at a private school and was more outgoing. But the city, and its cost of living, took its toll on the pair who grew up in small, neighboring Southern towns.

“I could only last in New York City for two years,” Adam said. “It’s pretty intense. I did sleep in the office for two weeks straight once; that was during Crazy Blind Date.”

Adam and Allison moved to Anderson, SC, and at first they hated it. Moving from a city full of life, with every kind of cuisine they could fathom, to a town just slightly larger than Kernersville in a remote, southwestern part of the state didn’t exactly excite them.

By that point, Adam had transitioned away from design into programming, possibly an inevitable move but one that was certainly hastened by his Harvard and MIT-trained geeky co-workers at OkCupid who pulled him deeper into the world of his parents. In South Carolina, Adam worked as a programmer for a church, but around the same time, he’d started seriously questioning his faith.

Adam grew up in a religious household, but his family stopped attending church when he was around 13. But a girl he liked went to a congregation in Jamestown, and so he turned up, too. Christianity continued to play a predominant role in his life, including his initial bond with Allison. And that’s part of what complicated things when he told her that he no longer believed in a supernatural power.

Things were rough, he said. For several months. It led Allison to grapple with her faith too, which has shifted but not quite as much as his. Adam now considers himself an atheist, and though he quickly clarified that this doesn’t mean he’s an anti-theist, his newfound views did make it much harder for him to continue working at a church.

Allison and Adam started making arrangements to move back to New York, Manhattan in particular. He lined up work with a studio in Brooklyn, and she reached out to her old school. But then, the couple realized they wanted to take things in another direction.

They wanted to have kids.

After several years of marriage and having lived in three states together, Adam and Allison decided they should return to the Triad to be closer to their families, and from there, start their own. In 2010, they moved to Greensboro, and a year later bought a house in the Latham Park neighborhood.

They didn’t realize it yet, but they’d spend the next two-and-a-half years struggling with infertility, followed by an adoption process that lasted about as long. But almost seven months ago, they finally adopted a 2-year-old from South Korea, in part because of the country’s foster and adoption system that prevents children from being moved too frequently, thus decreasing the likelihood of attachment problems, Adam said.

Their son is “a bundle of joy and your typical toddler,” Adam said. “They call it the ‘terrible twos’ for a reason.”

But his face glowed as he described how quickly they’ve bonded, adding: “I came here from a massive tickle fight.”

Now Adam works for a Florida-based company called Authentic Jobs, a job portal for web designers and developers. Things have come full circle, and not just because the couple returned to their college town: Authentic Jobs is actually the site where he found out about the OkCupid position in the first place.

In a way, it parallels his old OkCupid job, in that he’s helping people connect with each other. It’s his full-time day job and he’s able to do it from home, and Adam also works for a startup called Spoken on the side that shares verbal stories.

“It’s like Twitter, but vocal,” he said.

Allison stays home with their new son, and tutors on the side.

When he finds the time, Adam jokes that he’s a stereotypical nerd, reading sci-fi and fantasy books, playing video games on his assorted systems and homebrewing IPAs. His wife isn’t as dorky as he is, but she still lets him name their pets after protagonists from Lord of the Rings.

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It makes sense that Adam, who recently turned 34, has learned more about love and relationships from his own than from working for two dating websites. Together they’ve been through “all the high stressors” — from shifting religious beliefs to infertility to geographic upheaval.

“Being open-minded and willing to change is a big thing for love,” he said, “if you want things to last.”

That flexible, open philosophy and critical thinking has helped them during the last decade, he said. But he’s also seen how each person, and relationship, can be different.

In his time working at OkCupid, Adam didn’t come to identify a specific type of person that would most benefit from online dating. They saw all comers, he said, and he’s seen the same play out for those around him.

Brian, his old friend who carefully introduced Adam and Allison, later found his wife through a dating website. And some of Allison’s close friends met their partners that way, too.

Despite his disastrous first date with Allison, Adam thinks he would be all the more mortified by the prospect of meeting on a blind date set up through the internet like Crazy Blind Date, or any dating website or app for that matter. And though he has no use for such a site and likely wouldn’t use one anyway, Adam still likes hearing positive stories from people who used the site he helped create.

“I’m always excited to hear when people met on OkCupid, because I had the tiniest part in it,” he said. “You want to see people happy. It’s a life-changing thing.”