Quick, because I have to go
Fatal combination of between-project boredom and morbid curiosity: I filled out a profile at eharmony.com: supposedly, a place ensuring you "fall in love for the right reasons". An intelligent matchmaking website, supposedly, if you can believe such a thing exists, and if I were looking, anyway. It will only match you to people who really do match your character profile exactly, maintaining anonymity all the way until both parties consent to be introduced.
So. The personality test was extensive and exhaustive. And I completed the whole thing, because I'm sad like that, sometimes.
And when I finished, what I got:
UNABLE TO FIND A MATCH.
I think there's some kind of message here. Yesno?
Eventually I got around to thinking of the probability of something happening. The chances of you winning the lottery, for example, are so minute, so negligible as to be nought; i.e. impossible. Yet, someone must win it. And similarly, the probability of you, or I, or anyone, discovering a "perfect match" of the sort that this website proposes to locate - it must be so remote as to be impossible. And yet, people still fall in love.
I'd like to know how eHarmony matches couples; whether it's formulaic or automatic, or simply some perfunctory ticking off of a confluence of characters. What if I preferred someone different from myself? Or if I value something about myself that I wouldn't necessarily appreciate in someone else, such as my ability to WIN ARGUMENTS? (example, not fact). I find it peculiar, somehow, that dating agencies online, to me, always serve as a reminder of how the internet has this ability to reduce everything to a free market, and how if one had perfect knowledge of all the goods and commodities available in the market, they would achieve, well, maximum satisfaction.
No time for a tighter conclusion. Off to meet my apparently non-existent match.