Dating Services - Show me who I love, Mr. Algorithm!

Dear reader,

Does this situation sound familiar?

You are going out with friends and there is always one who is complaining about not having a boy or girlfriend. Because they are a friend, you normally don't ignore his or her needs and the relationship-analysis starts... "Probably, I have to go more often to the gym. I am not in shape... I don't have enough money...  I am not confident enough" But sometimes these single friends also look doggedly for issues in the potential partners. These are the ones who normally don't lack in self-confidence: "Aaah, I don't like his/her hair.... No, he/she had a relationship with the person I hate... I don't like his/her hobbies". Of course, you console them, give them more or less helpful tips or you even introduce them to the nice colleague from the office. But if all this doesn't help, what next? With more than eight billion human beings on this planet, there must be a perfect (ish) match for everybody. The challenge is connecting single person A with single person B.

Here we come to the online dating services who centralized this problem as their business model: Making money by bringing lonely, desperate hearts together (Of course, not every single is desperate). But how do they do that? Is there an employee sitting in a dark office and randomly matching singles ("Molly and Mike could be a wonderful couple. Their names start with M")? Or is there a more comprehensive approach behind?

The truth is - and we are sorry for all the romantics out there - it is pure mathematics; it's just an algorithm. You might think: how could they dare? First they make money out of love and now they even do it with mathematics?! Welcome to the wonderland of dating services!

As such their principle is as easy as it is sophisticated. They characterize the singles by certain attributes and score these. The scale is not judgmental; it only indicates how similar the singles are. If you do this practice not only with hobbies but also with dozens or even hundreds of other characteristics you get a numerical description of a person's personality and preferences. The algorithm at the end just finds the singles which are closest to each other and connects them assuming that similarity is the decisive factor for the partner selection. The picture below shows this approach in an easy way. Pete, Anna and Laura are scored in six different categories. In this case, Pete and Anna are much closer too each other and have therefore more in common. The algorithm would probably connect Anna and Pete instead of Laura and Pete. 

Of course, dating services bring a lot of advantages and achieve the main objective: bringing singles together. Otherwise there wouldn't be such a high number of platforms (Match, Christian Mingle, eHarmony, etc.). But is this how love works? Is this how we want love to work? A code determining the perfect partner? That is very unromantic. But we doubt not only the lack of emotional value of finding one's soulmate, but also that love is so easy. Some people look for people who are similar to them, others want specific features, others again search for their exact opposite a la "opposite attracts." Not everybody thinks the same way. Love bears an emotional dimension which cannot be translated to a scale. Emotions lead to irrationality in our actions. It makes us unpredictable. One might say she hates football and cannot understand how people can enjoy hunting. But then she meets this unbelievable, football-loving hunter in the library. He convinces just by other features. Do we want to miss these opportunities because an algorithm pre-filters?