In its new television ad campaign, online dating site Match.com criticizes rival eHarmony.com’s inability to match 20 percent of personality types and refusal to connect homosexuals. While the commercial may shift eHarmony users over to Match, it also illustrates the imperfections with online dating and with matchmaking in general.
Web sites like eHarmony use lengthy personality tests to determine who is romantically compatible with other registered users. After answering hundreds of questions on interests, political opinions, spirituality and parenting styles, an electronic database tallies the results and shows the user what the test has discerned about their personality.
While the test fairly accurately identifies personality aspects, such as “you are impulsive,” that any self-aware person should know, the problem becomes obvious when the database “matches” users with others whose personalities complement their own.
This feature only works when singles fit an archetypical personality type. More than 20 percent of eHarmony users are unable to use the service because they are deemed “unmatchable.” While this label may cause many singles to resign to a life of being a bachelor or old maid, it simply means that their interests and opinions are diverse, and that they don’t fit into a predetermined personality type.
While city officials are concerned with the rising crime rate in New Orleans, singles are much more likely to find a clean, interesting, intelligent and sane date on the streets of the city than the Internet. Though sites like OkCupid.com are marketed toward twenty-somethings, perverts, freaks and crazies abound. Although they too are deserving of love, in a regular social setting such as a bar, singles can reject unwanted advances by turning a cold shoulder, leaving the bar or throwing a drink in someone’s face.
Online, users cannot prevent an undesirable from looking at their profile or contacting them. While they can be ignored, an online stalker can easily become a real life stalker. There’s a reason Dateline does investigations on online predators, not drunks at Miss Mae’s.
When the Partridge Family performed their 1970 hit “I Think I Love You,” it’s doubtful that David Cassidy was professing his love via e-mail. In her angry 1990s hit “You Oughta Know,” Alanis Morisette certainly wasn’t telling her former lover, “Full House’s” Dave Coulier, “Are you thinking of me when you check her online profile?”
Even personal matchmaking services seem to be inadequate. Matchmakers, like Bravo’s seemingly transvestite “Millionaire Matchmaker,” use testing methods similar to dating Web sites to match clients. It seems unlikely that questions such as “How often do you do laundry?” and “What online search engine do you use?” can effectively match two people looking for love.
Stick to the tried and true method, Loyola: find potential love at a bar.
