Our Story
Brandon Wade’s struggle with relationships inspired a revolution in online dating with the creation of SeekingArrangement.com. Seeking has since become the most successful luxury dating website.
Our Story
Brandon Wade’s struggle with relationships inspired a revolution in online dating with the creation of SeekingArrangement.com. Seeking has since become the most successful luxury dating website.
1980s: Childhood Lack
As a teenager, Seeking’s Founder Brandon Wade struggled with a lack of confidence, directly affecting his ability to interact with girls. Seeing Brandon’s heartache, his mother offered him a valuable piece of advice that would ultimately shape the rest of his life. “Focus on your school, don’t worry about dating, someday you’ll be successful and generous and all the girls will fight for your attention,” his mother told him—and from that point forward, learning became his top priority.
Winning multiple science fairs and math olympiads throughout his early school years, he finished first in physics and third in mathematics in Singapore. An aspiring physicist, Brandon moved to the United States to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he would pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Electrical Engineering and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
1990s: MIT and Beyond
In college, Brandon’s dating life remained nonexistent but he finally had his first kiss at the age of 21. After graduating from MIT, Brandon went on to serve as a management consultant with Booz Allen and held executive roles at several Fortune 500 companies, including General Electric and Microsoft. While at such companies, Brandon realized that successful men have significantly less time than the average man to invest in developing and fostering romantic relationships.
While he was building a successful career, his love life continued to suffer. He tried a dating agency and dating websites like Match.com with no luck, realizing looks were all that mattered in video and online dating. There was no venue where people who are anything other than conventionally good-looking could shine or where successful, intelligent, and interesting people could thrive.
2006: The Birth of
Deciding to take matters into his own hands in 2006, Brandon coded night and day for a month straight, and SeekingArrangement was born. The name “SeekingArrangement” was chosen because he wanted people to be upfront, honest, and transparent about what they want in relationships, a modern twist to a very traditional practice of arranged relationships or marriages. A new concept was created in the dating industry where intellect and success became “hot”.
2007 – 2015: An Online Dating Revolution
SeekingArrangement offered a completely new approach to online dating, one that captured the imagination of the public. SeekingArrangement.com was featured in major newspapers, television news shows, and tabloids. The success of SeekingArrangement, and his own experiences using the site, convinced Brandon that the formula for a healthy dating life was centered around wealth, not love. In 2014, he even wrote a controversial op-ed for CNN titled “Love is a Concept Invented by Poor People”.
2016 – 2020 Part I: A Change in Narrative
As the lifestyle promoted by SeekingArrangement.com became increasingly popular, some people, organizations, and competitors coopted the idea and took it in a very different direction than intended. A constant negative refrain led to inaccurate assumptions, problematic associations, and stigmas.
The corruption was due to three main factors:
- First, the adult industry misappropriated certain terminology in an attempt to lend legitimacy, and in some cases legality, to their work.
- Second, influencers posted “clickbait” content on social media misrepresenting the SeekingArrangement concept to get clicks from sensationalism.
- Third, advocacy groups mislabeled and then used SeekingArrangement as a straw man villain in their efforts to drive narratives about how people, particularly young women, should act and behave.
2016 – 2020: Part II Protecting the
Community
Despite these challenges, SeekingArrangement continued to grow rapidly. To ensure the protection of the community from being exploited, SeekingArrangement underwent several proactive steps, including:
- Development of enhanced age identification and verification technologies
- Establishment of a 45-member global community moderation team
- Integration of anti-scammer software
- Implementation of keyword detection and image moderation AI technologies
- Participation as a founding member of Freedom Light (a non-profit organization focused on preventing all human trafficking)
- Proactively supporting anti-trafficking organizations through both contributions and outreach programs
2021 – Present: The Seeking Evolution
To further pave the path for personal choices in dating and clarify the founding principles SeekingArrangement has always stood for, the company recently launched a complete rebranding effort to modernize our brand while evolving with the ever-changing dating landscape. However, SeekingArrangement has not entered into this next phase lightly. The company began by collecting feedback from thousands of members to better understand their needs, usage, challenges, and relationship goals.
We have taken these incredible insights to redesign SeekingArrangement to align with our members’ aspirations and to help people find and foster genuine connections, ones wherein everyone is honest and open to define their own ideal relationships. Members have seen some significant changes to the website. We have shortened our name to Seeking, as it has become synonymous with our website.
We will continue to use the well-known SeekingArrangement brand in our marketing while focusing instead on the principles of dating up. In addition to the terminology and design changes, members can expect to see more community and public education and user enforcement.
Our goal remains steadfast in helping success-minded people find what truly makes them happy, whether it is romance, travel, luxury, freedom, or whatever it is they aspire to in their connections.
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