About a week ago I started noticing a change in my beloved online dating service commercials. Sure, they still feature the grinning, color-coordinated couples testifying to their true love from in front of a white bed sheet. Some self-consciously cutesy, slightly dated love song plays as the couples hold hands and proclaim variations on the theme of every online dating service ad: "Can't believe we fell in love online? Neither can we! But we did."
Only now, after the dopey grins, there's more. With Chemistry.com your first five matches are free! And Match.com offers six months of membership free after your first six months! I suppose a discount is a discount and always appreciated. But something about half-priced soulmates just didn't sit well with me.
To be fair, the entire concept of online dating never sat well with me. It seemed to suggest that personality and mutual attraction can be reduced to an equation. As a reader- and writer-type, I generally dislike equations. But I'm also a cheerleader for the ineffable qualities of that wide swath of human emotion called love, however dated that sentiment may be.
In recognizing how wide a trail the idea of love blazes through our cultural lexicon, I also have to recognize that maybe a kind of relationship does exist which can be found online. After all, binary code takes "2" as its base. And with all those 0s and 1s I'm sure my psychoanalytic mind can find some delicious metaphor for love and sexual connection via cable modem but ... something still feels amiss as far as these ads are concerned.
It's not the fact that you can meet people online that bothers me. I believe that people can find one another in a chat room just as they can in a bar, at a circus, the park or wherever - the Internet doesn't make it easier. It's just another place to look, fraught with its own problems and games to play. I suppose match-making sites can remove the guesswork in some ways, assuming everyone is honest (of course people never misrepresent themselves online).
Everyone knows what the other is after in a basic sense. But in trading sensory perceptions for anonymity and fast answers it doesn't seem like you necessarily get closer to success. You might come away from a profile knowing how many kids someone wants but can never quantify how funny their jokes are, how charming their smile is or the other human details that amount to the spark between two people who really like each other.
The fact that, after a few years of mainstream existence, sites like Chemistry.com and Match.com are offering discounts is no more revealing than any other store offering coupons or special deals. But the kind of discounts they are offering is significant. My first five matches are free? Six months free after my first six (presumably fruitless) months of searching? So I'm going to sift through at least five non-matches over a year? That doesn't sound like a faster, more efficient way of meeting people. It sounds a lot like dating.
I refuse to believe love is formulaic. It's circumstantial. I suppose as the circumstances of life change, as we work at computers, play games in front of screens and even learn in front of them maybe it is inevitable that we'll discover love via technology as well. Yet I think of the people I love and wonder: If I had met them in a different place and time would we still have clicked? I like to think not. It makes me more proud of the relationships I have and cling to the people I love more - love isn't a foregone conclusion between two people but a set of serendipitous turns resulting in a happy relationship.
And once we find them - that great friend, that amazing boyfriend, a compassionate mentor - can we really name the price it takes to keep them or the price we'd pay to find them all over again? I'm not talking about dinners, phone bills, road trips or the tangible expenses of love. I'm talking about the sleepless nights spent wondering if she's at a party talking to someone with better stories to tell, the hours listening about someone else's crappy day and the heartache and fear that comes from really sharing everything you are with another person. I suppose a discount is a nice thought, but it doesn't even begin to cover the potential for loss and the worlds to be gained in finding people to love.
I'm glad to see these sites have been humbled into deals that inadvertently admit finding a partner takes time and sifting and even a little compromise. No matter what new-fangled formula they might employ to find a mate, these sites have reaffirmed what my beloved authors and poets have known of love for generations:
Love, love ... it don't come easy.
