He didn’t see the point not because he was one of those people who always, always had to be paired up, and not because he didn’t think of himself as whole without a partner, and not because otherwise it was too hard to have sex, but because when he wasn’t spending time with people he loved, Sam found he was spending a lot of time with people he didn’t. His work colleagues were fine at work, but they didn’t have much to talk about when they went out afterward. Happy hour with friends he’d lost touch with since college reminded him why he’d lost touch with them. Small talk at parties held by friends of friends meant a lot of pretending to think interesting a lot of things he didn’t think were interesting.
When he left the East Coast for Seattle, Sam tried internet dating and couldn’t believe he’d been alive for thirty-two and a half years and never thought to before. Sam believed in computers and programming, in codable information, in algorithms and numbers and logic. His father was also a software engineer as well as a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, so Sam was raised to believe: computers were his religion. Everyone else pitched online dating as the only option after not meeting anyone in the vast ocean of college. But Sam liked online dating because it took away the mystery. Maybe you met someone and liked her and she liked you and you hit it off and you started dating and that went pretty well and you got closer and closer, shared more and more, starting building lives around each other, fell deeply in love, and still she slept with your roommate when you went home for the weekend. Computers would never allow for such outlying variance.
Online dating had yet to work for Sam. But it did pay well. And that came in a close second as it turned out. One too-pretty-to-go-to-work morning in June, Sam’s whole team got a sheepish text from their boss. “Fair warning,” Jamie wrote. “BB’s agenda for OOF today: Quantify the Human Heart.” Jamie referred to the company’s enormously important CEO, his boss’s boss, as BB. Sam loved him for this. BB had recently decreed that each team would begin every morning with a stand-up meeting, the idea being that the company wasn’t wasting its brilliant programmers’ time with a real meeting but only a brief encounter in the hallway. Generally, this meant it was the length of an actual meeting but without the comfort of chairs and a Danish. Jamie therefore called it OOF, theoretically for On Our Feet, though actually for how those feet felt at the end of the meeting. Sam loved Jamie for this too. Also because he wasn’t a superstickler for punctuality, which gave Sam time to run back inside his apartment and change into more comfortable shoes.
“So here’s the story,” Jamie began when Sam got there. “BB thinks we need a better bottom line. Some online matchmaking sites promise ‘most fun dates.’ Some boast ‘highest percentage of marriages.’ BB wants to up the ante. Too many dates end in failure. Too many marriages end in divorce. What’s better than dating and better than marriage?”
“Friends with benefits?” guessed Nigel from Australia.
“Soul mates,” said Jamie. “BB wants an algorithm that will find your soul mate. Therefore I turn to you. Love is a tricky thing. All that human variable. The soul is not logical. The heart wants what the heart wants. Hard to nail down. Hard to quantify and program. But we are computer programmers, and this is our job. So we must. Tell me how.”
“Increase the odds of getting laid,” said Nigel. “Looser dates lead to more and earlier hooking up. The farther you go on a first date, the more information you have about sexual compatibility.”
“Won’t work,” objected Rajiv from New Delhi. “Dating sucks.” On this, the software engineers, save Nigel, were in agreement.
“It’s not fun,” said Gaurav from Mumbai.
“It’s very awkward,” said Arnab from Assam.
“And it’s all lies,” said Jayaraj from Chennai. Five Indian states Sam had become an expert on since beginning work as a software engineer: Delhi, Assam, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal. “You are so much worse on a date than you are in real life,” Jayaraj continued. “You can’t string two sentences together without sounding like some kind of idiot. You stammer and bring up awkward topics and embarrass yourself a lot. You’re not really like that in real life.”
“Or you present yourself as better than you really are,” Sam added, “which is also a lie. You get all dressed up and do your hair and put on makeup when really you’re going to walk around the house in yoga clothes and a scrunchie all day.”
“Makeup?” Jamie raised an eyebrow at him.
“Scrunchie?” wondered Jayaraj.
“We need a third party,” offered Arnab, “like the Hindu astrologers who know everyone in the village for generations and thus make marriages at birth that last until death.”
“Many cultures have matchmakers. Japanese nakodos. Jewish shadchens.” Gaurav had been an anthropology major at UC Santa Cruz. “There are aeons of precedent. They realize a truth.”
“Which is?” asked Jamie.
“Who people think they are and what people think they want is not really who they are or what they want,” said Gaurav sagely. “Wise and sometimes magical elders set you up based on who you really are and who would be good for you instead.”
“I have no magical elders,” said Jamie.
“No, you have something better,” said Sam. “Computer programmers. We could dig a little deeper into the data users provide. See what it says about them rather than what they say about themselves.”
Everyone’s feet were getting tired, so digging deeper seemed worth a shot. “Accusing our customers of lying,” Jamie said. “I’m sure BB will love it.”
Sam stopped for coffee on the way back to his desk. (Five places within seven hundred feet of Sam’s desk to get a world-class double tall latte: the espresso stand on the second floor, the espresso stand on the fourteenth floor, the cafeteria, the coffee shop in the lobby of the Fifth Avenue entrance, the coffee shop in the lobby of the Fourth Avenue entrance. Sam loved Seattle.) Then he sat down and considered where, if not on online dating forms, people revealed the truth about themselves. He messaged Jamie: “Can I have access to clients’ financial records?”
Jamie wrote back right away. “Accusing our customers of lying and invading their privacy. BB’s going to love that too.”
First surefire proof Sam had that users were lying about themselves: everyone everywhere was always having a fit over internet privacy concerns, but promise to find them love or at least sex, and they signed access to their financial records, credit card statements, e-mail accounts, and everything else over to Sam just because he asked nicely. There he saw them not as they represented themselves but as they really were. He saw that they said their five favorite foods were organic blueberries, wheatgrass smoothies, red quinoa, tempeh Reubens, and beluga caviar, but they spent an average of $47.40 a month last year at the 7-Eleven. He saw that the five things they listed on their nightstand were all foreign film DVDs, but they saw Shrek Forever After in 3-D twice in theaters and spent the week of the foreign film festival hanging out with their old college roommates at a dude ranch in Wyoming. He noted that they said they liked to write poetry and short stories and even included a quote from Ulysses in their profile, but Sam analyzed their e-mails and knew they were in the bottom twelve percent of adjective users and had no idea how to use a semicolon. Everyone lied. It wasn’t malicious or even on purpose usually. They weren’t so much misrepresenting themselves as just plain wrong. How they saw themselves and how they really were turned out to be pretty far apart.