If my parents had ever been deconstructed by a questionnaire about their likes and dislikes and fed separately into a dating algorithm, they might never have met. He was into Beethoven. She is into big band dance music. He was a reclusive artist and gardener, forever in old painty clothes. She likes high heels and holidays. She eats Mediterranean food, rarely red meat. He was a roast beef man. She reads romances. He read only history. He liked old westerns. She’s a family drama watcher. They had the happiest marriage I’ve ever encountered and wouldn’t have been paired up on a dating site in a million years.
Sites that present members with matches the system has chosen for us are so focused on the similar that they don’t consider the compatible. My parents didn’t need to be similar. Their being different was what made the marriage stimulating and their dialogue ongoing. It meant that each did things the other was interested in; life was broadened. It was that unquantifiable extra thing – love – that made it all synthesise into happiness.
One website I use lists candidates in descending order of compatability, giving a percentage score. At least, in that case, it’s possible to have a look at the 35 per centers. Some of my most fun onscreen conversations have been with 35 per centers. If you fed my old friends into this sausage machine they might not score better than that, and yet we love each other unconditionally. But another website doesn’t allow you to see their workings at all. There are no hints or clues. You answer 250 questions, pay up and they deliver people to your inbox.
The results of this process have been baffling. I’m bookish and into art and none of my matches have been. I’m a lefty and some of the offerings have been of the Ukip sort. There have been many practitioners of mountaineering, and restless yompers, the Machu Picchu set (legion, believe me). I like Saturday morning at a food market, cooking lunch together, an afternoon on a sofa with newspapers and music, a trip to the cinema. The algorithm knows all this: what’s it playing at? Perhaps it’s making a stab at compatibility, acknowledging that opposites attract. Perhaps the offering of K2-climbers is a joke they like to play on couch potatoes.
Behind the wall, where I am not allowed access, there are people who answered questions differently, but who nonetheless are people I would like: where are they and who have they been matched with? The first morning’s batch included an anxious-looking bloke in the Midlands who wants “a traditional wife” and three Americans, one a big tattooed biker who lives in Nebraska. A puzzled email to one of the site administrators drew the response that whether I liked the look of the guys in Birmingham and Nebraska or not, they are my best matches and that’s that.
Perhaps there’s a blip in the algorithm, but pages and pages of Americans have begun to arrive, hunched men pictured in small sitting rooms in small houses in small towns, patiently waiting for love from the worldwide web. Some are poignantly, undeservedly alone, widowed by cancer, looking for help with motherless children (there’s a book to be written in agreeing to partner up in a shack in Tennessee, but I’m resisting). Some are holed up in New Mexico, pictured with cabinets full of guns or standing next to finned saloon cars, and some are divorced red-pill types (a frame of reference taken from The Matrix) in a rage about womankind. These men have demonstrable trouble, in their profiles, in squaring their misogyny with a friendly, wooing sort of tone.
I’ve tried to be open to matches who are in any kind of geographical proximity. I’m paying top dollar for this service, and need to persist. I wrote a bland, “Hello, I see we’ve been matched. Isn’t this funny as we have nothing in common that I can see, but hello and how are you today?” to a handful of them. I was interested in the responses: perhaps they would show the subtleties of the algorithm, that it had bypassed the banal and gleaned deeper personal truths. But no one has replied.
A friend, commiserating, said she’d seen a piece about the dating site in question, in which the founder admitted that it was difficult to match the intelligent/academic. But these are beyond near misses. They seem absolutely random to me.
Stella Grey is a pseudonym
