For instance, the Internet knew, better than Rebecca did, that what she wanted to do right then and there was open up an account on a brand-new dating site called Lovability. It showed her three ads for Lovability within a half hour, in fact. The first appeared when she checked her Gmail account, the text above her inbox claiming that Lovability would let her “find a match through twenty-six axes of compatibility!” The second showed up during a quick binge of clips from old Simpsons episodes on YouTube (a photo of an ambiguously ethnic woman with curly hair and clunky black eyeglasses, sitting across a table from an equally ambiguously ethnic man with hazel eyes, a shaven head, and a sweater vest; both had the self-satisfied look of people who were glad they were themselves and not someone else. They probably both had apartments that got lots of sunlight. “Twenty-six axes of compatibility!” read the caption beneath them). The third came when she was scrolling through a catty comment thread on the Huffington Post, the woman here an aggressively freckled redhead who was getting a piggyback ride from a square-jawed guy who looked like he’d stepped off the set of a soap opera. That one was the charm. She clicked it, and when she saw how easy it was to get started—you just needed to give them your gender, age, e-mail address, zip code, and a couple of other things—she figured: hell, why not. Curiosity killed the cat; satisfaction brought him back.
The next morning Rebecca woke up in the house alone, the clock on her nightstand reading ten thirty, the empty wine bottle on its side next to her bed. Mom and Dad must have already left for church, letting her sleep in.
She sat up, feeling like her skull had been stuffed with cotton. Pancakes and black coffee would stave off the incipient headache—the stuff to make them was already in the kitchen. But first she opened her laptop to take a quick look at Facebook and Twitter and e-mail.
Oh.
Oh yeah.
She didn’t not remember doing that—it was just that seeing the Lovability web page, its muted blues decorated with tastefully playful pink accents, reminded her of what she’d been up to before falling asleep. She’d apparently filled out forty percent of her profile. She’d answered a few questions (things she was good at: laughter; sleeping late; receiving back rubs. Things she couldn’t do without: family; friends; electricity. Wasn’t she more interesting than this? This part would need work if she was going to be serious about it, which she wasn’t—she was just goofing around). She’d uploaded a couple of cell-phone photos from when she’d been out nights with Britt and Kate and Jen. She was making a duck-faced pout in one of them, her face harshly lit by the phone’s flash in the darkened bar, but so were Kate and Britt—surely the irony came through.
A heart pulsed insistently in the upper right corner of the screen, with a numeral 2 inside it: she had messages! Already, she had messages. But the first was just a link to a video welcoming her to the site, featuring Gaia Williams, the Lovability CEO. Gaia was a woman who’d probably always look thirty, with a slender face, a long modelly swan’s neck, gorgeously lissome legs, and a wide, welcoming smile. “Now it’s time for the magic to happen!” Gaia said, going on to talk about the “efficiency,” “precision,” and “effectiveness” of Lovability’s proprietary personality-matching algorithms. “The more you tell us about you, the more we’ll be able to help,” she said, clasping her hands and winsomely cocking her head to the side. “So fill out that profile, answer some of the questions in our super-fun quizzes and compatibility surveys, and let’s get going!”
The second of Rebecca’s two messages was from one Jonny9266, and read, in its entirety:
hnnghnnnnggghh
To be fair, she had only filled out forty percent of her profile, so perhaps preverbal grunts were all she could expect in return. But Lovability promised a custom match for her if she brought her profile completion rate up to fifty percent—for now, the face of her potential beau was a featureless silhouette hiding behind a hovering question mark.
Just a few more stupid questions. Hell: why not.
A couple of days later, working on and off, she’d gotten the profile as good as she could get it. She’d listed a selection of books she liked that would make her look smart but not eggheaded; she’d said she loved to laugh (trite, but true, and everyone else was saying it, so she didn’t want to seem like the girl who sits in the corner at a party with a frown on her face). She said she liked peace and quiet, but also the energy of clubs or a night in the city. She’d scattered a few emoticons through her text even though using them made her feel like a failure when it came to using the English language, but again, all the other women were doing it, and she didn’t want to seem humorless. She said she loved a nice glass of wine.
For some reason she found it difficult to express herself, like she could have in an e-mail or even a text message. There was some intangible thing about the site itself that made everyone seem sort of the same. It wasn’t that they were boring, exactly (if anything, people were always going on in their dating profiles about how they were the exact opposite of boring, even as they all listed the same five things they wouldn’t be able to do without in life). But they weren’t nearly as interesting in their descriptions as they would probably be if you met them by chance out in the world. It was as if the questions that were meant to serve as conversation starters, or allow the site’s elves to begin plotting your personality on its compatibility axes, worked instead to make everyone seem equally bland and anonymous.
Were there fads that dictated the content of profile photos, certain poses and features that were thought to be more alluring for one reason or another? Almost all of the thumbnails of women looked similar—cropped tightly to avoid providing an initial hint of the shape of the body, their faces cocked in coy three-quarter profile. Many of them had their lips pursed (and Rebecca, noticing this, quietly deleted the photo of her making duck faces with the rest of the old gang). If you clicked through to look at a portfolio of photographs, you could generally get a little more of the story: those women who considered themselves in shape posted shots of themselves hiking, or assuming yoga poses, or, in one particular instance, curling a twenty-pound dumbbell; others had photos of themselves draped in fabrics that confused the eye and obscured their curves, or displayed their bosoms if they had them to show.
Some of the profiles were clearly fake, jokes set up by teenagers to bait the lonely—stock photos of nubile babes reclining on beach towels with drinks in their hands. The fake profiles usually spoke boldly of sexual proclivities; real women tended not to talk that forthrightly about that sort of thing, though you could sometimes tunnel down into the data of the ladies who seemed the most demure to find they’d blithely answered questions in quizzes like “Do you like the taste of semen?” or “Would you consider acting out a rape fantasy with a partner who asked you to?” The whole site was set up to get its users to yield up their privacy, one way or another. It put Rebecca on guard, but as Gaia Williams cheerfully cautioned her in somewhat different words, guarded people didn’t score on Lovability. Guarded people ended up forever alone.
Once Rebecca started getting messages from guys (and it took about three days for them to start arriving in force, four or five a day), she started to understand why the profiles of some of the women she’d looked at before she filled out her own were so bizarrely defensive—surely it would have been easier not to have a profile on Lovability in the first place than to spend thousands of words describing the kinds of guys you didn’t want to talk to. (“let me just state this right upfront before you start reading about me because I do not want to waste your valuable time. do NOT message me if you are OVER 35, if you are MARRIED, if you are just looking to have a good time because I am NOT a good time girl, if you are not 5'11" or taller, if you are not white (I am not racist, my parents did not raise me that way), if you are not living in your own place with your own job, or if you cannot write REAL SENTENCES in REAL ENGLISH without using f***, b****, or c***.”) If the men’s profiles were generally unappealing to Rebecca on first gla
nce (with a photo from a senior prom, the guy’s date cropped out of the image except for a disembodied, bracelet-clad arm draped across his shoulder; or a shot taken by pointing a phone’s camera at a bedroom mirror, one hand lifting up the hem of a sleeveless T-shirt to reveal a scrupulously maintained six-pack), then the messages they sent were truly awful. They seemed to have been written by men who had learned what little they knew of women by watching James Bond movies through a scrim made of cheesecloth.
There were the nonsensical gruntings, and the f and the b and the c (meant, Rebecca was sure, with endearment). The messages that were longer and more coherent either showed signs of being sent en masse to every new woman who showed up on the site, or were mistakes made by guys who probably had multiple browser windows open. It was news to Rebecca, for instance, that she wore eyeglasses, and it was further news that for some guys, girls with glasses was, like, a thing?
Heyyy youre really hott! Ever since I was a kid I have fetish for girls with bad eyesight. I like to think about when were in bed together and I take her glasses off and hide them and its dark and she cant see and she gets a little scared. Would you tell me your prescription? I am -4 in both eyes. You look like youre at least -5 which is super hott!
Then there were the guys who must have been watching reality shows about pickup artists on cable, and thought it would be a good idea to lead with an insult:
Don’t take this the wrong way—I don’t mean to be critical—but I can tell from your profile that you really think you’re hot shit. Arrogant, and pretentious, too. But I like that in a woman. You aren’t going to find many guys around here who are willing to deal with arrogance. (I am going to go out on a limb and predict that with an attitude like yours, you haven’t had much success on this site so far.)
If you want to try to convince me that you’re something other than what I think you are, reply to this message, and we’ll talk. But you probably won’t write back. I know when I’ve hit a nerve.
How this whole thing had worked out for Britt and Kate was a mystery—one had met the love of her life right out of the gate, and the other had more guys than she knew what to do with. It was hard to imagine them having the patience to deal with all this stuff. And yet the whole experience was somehow compelling. If you could keep in mind that what people were communicating with wasn’t you, but a stripped-down version of yourself, a little marionette made out of data, then the things that other people said to your puppet became amusing rather than insulting, and the act of puppetry became a game instead of something that mattered. Once you got it straight in your head, the whole thing became, in a weird way, fun.
Eight days after opening her profile, Rebecca struck gold—or, if not gold, something that at least held the promise of a precious metal, a shining glint of a vein:
Hi! My name is Bradley, and I’ve just moved out to the New Jersey area from Los Angeles, where I worked in entertainment law (don’t hate me!). I took a pay cut for my new job as a corporate consultant on copyright law, but the decrease in my cost of living makes up for it, and my hours are better. However, I don’t know many people here, and I’d like to meet someone new!
In my free time I like to go biking (twenty-five miles on a temperate spring day is not unusual for me). I also like board games (my Scrabble scores come in at around 325–350 when I’m playing seriously and sticking to the official dictionary; my chess Elo rating is around 1600, which isn’t too shabby).
I’d like to invite you to check out my profile! Let’s talk if you like—you seem really cool, and I’d love to hear from you.
Okay. So there were some things about the note that were a little off. The information about taking a pay cut was, she supposed, meant to make him sound selfless, but it came off as self-congratulatory. And all the numbers gave the impression that he was maybe a little anal-retentive. You got the idea that you’d be playing Scrabble one evening, and he would lay down some bullshit two-letter word like ZA for thirty-three points, and if he saw you roll your eyes he’d throw a fit and say he really didn’t think this relationship could continue. And though he said he thought she was cool, he didn’t say why: he gave no real sign that he’d even read her profile in the first place. This might be a batch message, like so many others.
But it was so well written: it was amazing to her that she’d come so quickly to find proper grammar and spelling to be a turn-on, but here she was. Look at that properly nested series of punctuation marks after “don’t hate me.” That’s hot. Look at that semicolon! Bradley might have been the first guy to message her who’d used a semicolon.
And the message was polite, too. It didn’t just assume that she wanted to screw. Maybe she just wanted to be friends. Maybe if it turned out that she had a chess rating around the same as his, he’d call it a win.
And he was cute. His profile pic showed him with his bike, one of those expensive bikes that required special shoes that attached straight to the pedals. He had, it had to be said, the perfect body for spandex bike gear. And a bright smile (though his cleanly shaven head was likely meant to disguise a receding hairline). And a totally ripped upper body. And…yeah. Yes, I will. Yes.
She clicked the pulsing heart at the top of the screen, and it quivered as a window sprang open with a text box for her reply to his message:
Hey, Bradley! Nice to e-meet you. I’m new here, too. (I mean new to Lovability, not new to New Jersey—I haven’t been able to escape here, and can’t figure out why anyone would come here voluntarily. But maybe you’ll be able to explain that to me.)
I have a confession to make: one of the proudest moments of my life was when I was able to play QUADRANT in a game against this guy, and it covered two triple-word score squares.
Entertainment law! Did you meet any famous people? I rode on a subway with Christopher Walken once in NYC. You would think he’d take cabs everywhere, but there he was, just like the rest of us. Everyone was trying to look like they weren’t staring at him.
Thanks for getting in touch!
He wrote back within a few hours (his favorite Scrabble play: SYZYGY with a blank for the third Y; his most memorable celebrity encounter: Marty with Bobby D). And after a flurry of e-mails during which they exchanged all manner of trivia about themselves (the first R-rated movies they’d seen; their favorite alcoholic drinks; their preferences in ethnic restaurants), they decided to just skip the intermediate step of talking on the phone, and meet for a happy-hour drink after Bradley got off work on Wednesday.
Bradley picked the place, a sports bar in Princeton, which wasn’t the most intimate place for a conversation—it was baseball season, and Mets and Phillies games were blaring from the dozens of HDTVs in the place. But Rebecca figured that Bradley was a sporty kind of guy—he was probably planning in advance for the opportunity to flick his gaze over her shoulder occasionally to check a score. And indeed, when he showed up, the first thing he said, before he even greeted her, was that games in Citi Field were a lot more interesting since they moved the left field wall twelve feet closer to the plate.
“It’s nice to meet you finally,” Rebecca said as Bradley seated himself at the bar (no kiss, no hug) and loosened the knot of his tie. She felt that strange confusion she’d seen displayed in others’ faces during her wanderings through the silent world, as she tried to reconcile the breathing, living man in front of her with the pictures of him she’d seen online and the texts and e-mails he’d sent. The rumpled lines of his suit disguised the shape of his body, but she suspected from the stubble of his hairline, which sat farther back on his head than she’d expected, that that shot of him with his bike had been taken a few years ago, at the beginning of the end of his prime.
“Guess how old I am,” Bradley said, as if he’d noticed her quick glance at his forehead. “Go ahead.”
His profile had said he was twenty-eight; she figured thirty-four, though he looked a little older—the lines around his eyes suggested time spent in the sun. “Well, you said in your profile that
you were twenty-eight,” she said.
“That was maybe a bit of a lie.”
She pretended to mull it over. “Thirty?”
“Thirty-four,” Bradley said gleefully. “But I don’t look like it! That’s the crappy thing about these dating sites—they make age into nothing but a number, and they penalize you for having good genes and aging well. If I don’t look thirty-four, I shouldn’t have to say I’m thirty-four, at least at first. When I’m sixty I’m going to look forty.” He placed his hand on hers: it was a little cold, but she repressed a flinch. “That was the only lie I told on my profile, and I just confessed to it. The rest of the data I provided you with is correct. Total honesty from here on out.”
She forced a laugh. “Everybody lies a little,” she said.
Over the next half hour, as she nursed her gin and tonic while Bradley drained his Miller Lite, Rebecca would have ample cause to reflect on the slight strangeness of what he’d said: The rest of the data I provided you with is correct. Bradley was a man made out of numbers; nearly every sentence out of his mouth bespoke his belief in the quantifiable life. He talked about how his move to New Jersey from LA had shortened his commute. (“Forty-three minutes to eleven, on average. So thirty-two minutes each way, times two: sixty-four minutes. A little over an hour a day; five hours a week. You can do a lot with five hours.”) He went on about his change in income, though in a concession to tact he spoke in terms of percentages gained and lost rather than absolute values. (“When they made the offer, I did the math and saw I’d see a drop in income of twenty-eight percent. But my expenditures could easily drop by thirty-five percent, and I’d be able to maintain roughly the same standard of living. My apartment’s square footage is actually slightly larger, in fact.”) Every once in a while, when he looked up at one of the TVs to see a batter he knew at the plate, he’d cut himself off in mid-sentence to say something like “Oof, that guy is on the interstate” or “He’s just making absolute hash out of his PECOTA projections—good for him.”
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