ValenPining Day

Like most people on the night of Valentine's Day, or The Night Of Eternal Darkness, as we'll call it, I spent the evening reading The Atlantic's article on the science of love. Many online dating sites are now using versions of Myers-Briggs and similar personality/behavioral indexes to match people based on similarities and complementary differences. Since I'm a longtime believer in Myers-Briggs (I'm an ENFP with a strong T rising - Hi, ladies), I suspect this experiment will be quite successful in matching people who will be happy together. They have a good shot anyway - they now have millions of active online daters helping to evaluate the accuracy of their matching algorithms. But I frankly wondered if this is what we want for humanity. I wouldn't be the same person today if I'd met my perfect match at 25 and just called it a day - every woman I've ever pursued or been involved with has inflected my life in some way, even those that have gently coaxed my heart from its shell, like a happy duckling waddling into the sun, and then stuck a knife through it. Semi-seriously though, if we get love down to a mathematical science, whereby we no longer have to spend our lives flirting with and learning about lots of different people and how we interact with them, where is there room for growth and change? Not that all of our personal growth comes out of dating of course, but for me personal interaction has been central to my development as a human being and always will be. In a way, the inefficiencies inherent in finding one's soulmate are what make meeting people interesting and exciting at all. Just less pleasant sometimes. I also logged onto JDate to see what was doing there, but I didn't filter the men from the list - I wanted to know what the scene looked like on both sides. Well, either every Jewish woman in Manhattan had a date for Valentine's Day, or they felt it was wise to make it seem so. It was jampacked with men, nary a lass in sight. I imagined those young women - there must have been a few - that were boycotting their phones, email, IM - anything that would reveal that they were alone on Valentine's Day. Though one of the few women online was a tantalizingly attractive woman my age, who said she loved long walks in the park, candlelit dinners . . . and her son. When I think about such a woman browsing JDate on Valentine's Day - 30 years old with a son, but already single - I suppose we could use a little help from science.