Chemistry.com Teaches Me About Me

It's been six days since I began looking for love on Chemistry.com, and I don't think it's going the way I expected. The way it works is every day, you log in and rate whoever the Chemistry's sophisticated algorithms matched for you. Then — this is what I look forward to every day — you click on the "Refresh Matches" button and five new matches appear. It's like a slot machine of love: "Big money! Big money! No whammy! Stop!" The site is supposed to spit back personalized relationship matches approved by Dr. Helen Fisher's insights into human nature, but I think it's just handing me profiles at random. (Either that, or I'm inscrutable.... that's probably it.) But then yesterday, Anne signed up with Chemistry.com and I was the very first match it sent her.

Now this shatters my whole view of logic gate generated relationships. First thought was maybe Dr. Fisher is onto something. Or there are five or fewer guys on Chemistry.com in the first place.

It's tough to judge anybody from their profile alone (because most people write crappy profiles) but Chemistry does provide you with everybody's personality, in pie chart form. I'm not a big subscriber to the whole Myers-Briggs type dichotomy matrix idea, so I guess it shouldn't bother me too much that I'm a "Director/explorer" but this match is an "Explorer/builder" and this other one's a "Negotiator/director" and whatever, but it does. I'm expecting consistency from the algorithm.

One thing that Chemistry.com is almost certain about — and I did know this about myself — is that I have a secret, unexplored five-foot-four fetish. Exactly: seventeen out of my twenty matches so far. Is it trying to tell me something, like maybe I should be hanging out in the petite section of Lane Bryant to look for love?