MONTREAL — A Canadian blogger who set out to find a wife through a unique online social experiment that grabbed worldwide attention can now officially claim success.
Montreal-born Allan Wills, the mastermind behind a hugely popular website dubbed "Are you my wife?", which chronicled his very public search for lasting love, has received a resounding "Yes" to his marriage proposal from his British-born girlfriend.
Wills, 31, who lives in London, had set a make-or-break Saturday deadline to determine whether the experiment-turned-relationship would work.
Just shy of the deadline, Wills popped the question to his girlfriend Claire Marjoram, 30, on Montreal's picturesque Mount Royal. The two hope to tie the knot sometime next year.
"Over the last year we really bonded while we lived together, so I was able to take the question mark off the site," Wills said in an interview.
It was Wills' disdain for traditional and online dating, an impending 30th birthday and a scattered life in London that prompted him to start a spouse-hunting blog that included a photo, a phone number and a solemn promise to go anywhere in the world on a date.
The project took on a life of its own and Wills, with the help of standby airline passes provided by his brother and the generosity of strangers, jet-setted around the world on some 45 dates in 13 different countries during the last year.
The dates in themselves were an adventure - an international dating spree that took him from Shanghai to Budapest to Zurich. Everything from the Elmore Bachelor and Spinsters Ball in Australia to swimming with dolphins.
"But what came out of this little social experiment is not only did I get some great dates and end up with a happy ending, I also met tons of people who said, 'Hey, I want to challenge you and test your mettle'," Wills said in an interview in Montreal, shortly before returning to London.
"At some points I must admit it did get a bit out of control, but I promised I'd put myself out there for a year and even if I stayed single, I'd lost nothing and gained everything."
It was amid all the craziness that Wills, originally from Montreal, found himself craving normalcy and found time for a simple ho-hum coffee with Marjoram, who happened to live in London and had read about his exploits in a commuter paper.
"The way we met was typical, but it was only so because everything else was so crazy," Wills said. "The real twist to the story is that I went all the way around the world only to find a girl who was in the same city as me."
They met in January 2007 and moved in together that July and have spent much of the last year together in relative anonymity, save the odd blog entry on what they call their "ultimate date."
The idea was to "strip away the games, see each other at our worst and if we look good then things can only get better," Wills said.
Marjoram says it was necessary to regain their lives after a media storm just one summer ago.
"Last summer when the press was going crazy, I got tired of it. I don't like living my life out in the public," Marjoram said.
"But the interaction (since then) has been so positive and so supportive and people have said, 'What a great story, what a great idea!' But I was very grateful to have that year."
Now Wills and Marjoram hope to offer their approach to others through a website set to launch in October. The couple hope to help others find their soul mates and Wills will continue to blog on the site.
Wills says the idea is to continue with the story-telling approach to dating, not unlike his own blogging adventures. People would be able to post a profile but include a wide array of information about themselves from pictures, video and text.
"It will give people the opportunity to meet in a conventional yet unconventional way," Marjoram adds.
The problem, both say, is that Internet dating, much like traditional dating, is labour-intensive and gives no freedom of expression except for curt word blurbs. People are generally guarded and not really saying who they are, Marjoram said.
"The problem is if you punch in the wrong statistics and you miss somebody," Marjoram says.
"If I put in (an interest) I'm more likely to find like-minded people and that's what a long-lasting relationship needs to be based on."
Even if the site doesn't work out, Wills and Marjoram have full-time jobs, busy lives and a future to plan.
"And we've got each other," Wills adds.
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