For someone who has been happily married for seventeen years, I am strangely fascinated by online dating websites. A number of my friends use Match.com. My neice and my nephew are the product of that website. I am addicted to other social media applications. Being rather boy-obssessed in my youth, a younger version of myself would be all over those websites. Perhaps it is not so strange.
Tinder sounds particularly interesting. Instead of reading though essays and plugging in all sorts of variables about dating preferences, you swipe through pictures of potential partners. It has nearly 50 million users. I was talking about this application with some 20-somethings a few weeks ago, and they all whipped out their phones to show me the app.
There is something offensive about judging people simply on appearances. People aren’t dresses that you flip through on a rack in Macy’s. How can really tell if someone is cool or not based on a five second swipe on a dating website? But maybe Tinder is onto something.
An article in the New York Times said that appearances matter more than other variables that can be plugged into a database. Appearances can give you thousands of subconscious clues about a person’s identity.
Services like eHarmony, OKCupid and Match.com have proclaimed that their proprietary algorithms could calculate true love, or that math equations could somehow pluck two strangers to live happily ever after. That appears to be more fiction than fact.
All that really matters, according to scientific researchers I spoke with from Northwestern University and Illinois State University, at least in the beginning of relationship, is how someone looks. (Of course, these companies disagree.)
About twenty years ago, I sat down at a table in the grad school library with my friend Tracy. She said “hey” to a guy across the table, and they chatted and laughed about something long forgotten. Later, I passed her a note, “blue eyes, wow.” Of course, just by being in a grad school library together, we had a lot in common. But the blue eyes. They hooked me. And I married him.
