Yes, I did it.
I am a 42 year old single mother with a Masters degree in Poetry and I went on Match.com. I'm also a Taurus, which I add because they ask that on Match. I also add it because I am about as earth-bound and stubborn and unchangeable as they come. And I never thought I'd turn to the Machine for a date. But I did.
In hindsight, I did it well.
In hindsight, I ran it like a well-prepared high school science student.
But when I recall certain moments, I have to face to truth. There is no such thing as dating from a purely rational perspective. I got sucked into it. At times, the machine ran my life. At other times, the men it "brought to my door" got to me, for better and worse. Hundreds of them have written to me. I didn't always write back. Thousands were paraded before me above little boxes that let me check "yes," "no," "maybe." I sent them in droves into the no-pile, mostly because they weren't wearing shirts, or because they provided photos of their car or because they lived an hour away in Tennessee. I can recall the faces as I write these: all these men among the 7 million men on match.com. I can't quite bring myself to burst into a girl version of Julio Iglesias paean to all the girls he loved before. I didn't love them, any of them. I saw their pictures, and I imagined (it's kind of impossible not to) what kind of a person they were. If they said, "I'm looking for a good woman," I got an idea.
With some, I corresponded on and off for the entire time. They never asked me out. I never suggested they do so. We just occasionally wrote to one another. They were the sleepers. They were almost my friends.
I went out on more dates than I care to count.
By the end, I walked away from dates the way I walk out of movie theaters, sometimes moved or shaken, often wondering why.
I got enormous crushes on men who may or not have deserved it. I learned it was so much about me and my own projections, and I took a little break. I wanted to be thrown. I wanted to experience the "riot in the heart" that Gwyneth Paltrow's character speaks of in Shakespeare in Love. After a time, I realized that maybe the really nice turf salesman in _______ maybe doesn't really search for the same thing. He wants a girlfriend he can relate to. Not a literary dynamo, a woman who finished college. I learned I had enough imagination in me to turn a guy just struggling to make it through dinner before his shyness caused him to break into sweat appear as an answer to my prayers.
Something this quiet and safe and yet still with the riot in the heart. Was it possible to have both? Was it possible from a date or two to have any idea whether person #572 was the one for me?
2 comments:
The unconsious is autonomous. It's not under our control. We can't execute some rational procedure (like signing up to a website and ticking some boxes) to make the unconsious do what we want. We have to wait, until it wants to do, whatever it wants.
Exactly what algorithm do Matching agencies use to match people. Do they try to match like with like - intelligent introvert with intelligent introvert. Because Jung says that that doesn't necessarily work.
And how can you possibly tell anything from a photograph.
Jolande Jacobi (a Jungian) has a great quote (in her book 'Psychology of Jung', p 115): 'frequently a highly cultivated intellectual [man] will become entangled with the worse form of strumpet ... equally familiar is the woman who ties herself to a swindler...'. Marie-Louise von Franz (another Jungian) quotes some very similar examples.
Shakespeare seems to have had some similar ideas to Jung, 'A Midsummer Night's Dream': 'love and reason keep little company'.
Regarding: "and how can you possibly tell anything from one photograph". Once one gets past the psycho-babble gobbledygook, what are you really saying? You don't trust love or your gut? You have to let Carl Jung make up your mind? I don't know, sometimes a photograph just speaks volumes. It can have a kind of Helen of Troy affect on the viewer. Thanks to modern technology, a picture now paints a thousand tweeted words to the 21st century neural net of the subconscious with just one glance. The law of attraction is a fickle minx...it can strike at any time and any place, live or digital. There is so much unaccounted for nuance that can pluck at our heartstrings with just one singular image of a man or woman.
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