Playing Matchmaker for your Child

JHS
Wed, 27 Dec 2017 19:09:23 +0000

The thing about profiles and surveys is that they turn a bunch of qualities that are (or should be) negotiable into non-negotiables. Relationships change the people in them; it’s not just a matter of fitting two pre-cut puzzle pieces together.

I think the successful online dating services know that. My daughter met her fiance through OK Cupid a little more than four years ago. There are some obvious interests that they share, but when we met him we were stunned at how much about him we would have assumed was anathema to our daughter, except it turned out that they weren’t, at least if associated with the right person. For one, he was (and is) a competitive athlete. Our daughter never had any interest in sports, other than purely intellectual. (She prides herself on knowing the rules for football and baseball, despite never watching or caring about either.) Her preferred form of physical activity was dancing. She did that seriously, and essentially never had to play a sport. Apart from some very brief “anthropological socializing” in her first month of college, she rarely if ever even spoke with male athletes.

And yet. There she was, playing touch football in his regular co-ed weekend pickup game. That’s when we knew it was really serious. He was wrong in all sorts of objective, but ultimately trivial ways, and right in some deep way that is not associated in any obvious way with tick-list qualities. But there’s no question that each of them has been changed by the relationship in ways that have brought them much closer together than they were at first.

Somehow, though, the algorithm put them in touch with one another. Good for the algorithm! I doubt her friends or her parents would have tried that match, or his friends or parents. Of course, I don’t know how many lousy matches the algorithm made --our daughter never shared that information with us!