Dating Sites and Determinism

Dating sites, it could be said, are where nobody knows anybody and everything is bought and sold on the basis of attributes and illusions.

I imagine that's not far from what Hell would be like.

I don’t know who invented dating sites, but I suspect the inventors have a background in either business or economics because everything about dating sites says transaction. In fairness, relationships do exhibit all the signs of transactionship, but if a relationship is a transaction, then something feels horribly off about treating it as this kind of transaction, where you look through a lineup of profiles, all in the same cookie cutter format, with no profile really any different from any other, making judgments based on some photo she has posted of herself, likely the best one she has, meaning there will be disappointment later, and competing against a bunch of other faceless dudes who are pursuing the same illusion.

You can toss a private message to the abyss, spending a not insignificant amount of time picking your words so as to sound cool and composed and unneedy, trying not to be too long-winded, to make a few observations that show that this is not some generic message and that you are actually interested in her, or, more accurately, some attributes thereof, all while knowing that this message has about an 85% chance of being read and about a 35% chance of being returned. She’ll spend roughly 15 seconds reading the message you so carefully composed, maybe another 5 seconds browsing the highlights of your profile page, make a quick judgment, and then will proceed to never think about you again.

And yet people do this. And I can’t blame them, because every so often it works. They find a great girl or guy who is attributionally sufficient and whose smile brightens their day. Good for them.

But I ask, is this the best way to do it? Is this even a tolerable way to do it?

This is all bound to sound very pretentious and first-world-y and probably at least a touch over-romanticized, but I can’t worry about that, because that’s Me.

It seems to me that the problem might be an absence of the perception of determinism. I'll explain.

We can perceive life as being something we actively create, or we can perceive life as being something that happens to us. In my mind, it’s never one or the other. It’s always both. But, in certain contexts, it’s probably important to lean more toward the side of life being something that happens to us, and a romantic relationship is probably one of those contexts. The reason is because stories are important. Maybe they shouldn’t be – probably they shouldn’t be – but they are. Whether or not there is some god or Universal Force that pushes things in the direction of determinism, when you are choosing to commit, indefinitely, to one person whose attributes, personality, and life history, while technically unique, are indistinguishable from billions of other people at a 1,000 mile view, it’s helpful to think so. It’s helpful to think that this one particular soul was in some strange way meant for you, that the two of you met not because you willed it but because some grander thing or force or being willed it. And only then, once you have that sense of meant-to-be-ness, can you feel safe to explore, up close, what makes her unique and special.

And it’s hard to get that sense when you’re picking from an Internet lineup.