The Pharmacy(tm)

Love Happens – is an online dating and introduction network. It’s like Friendster, but more obvious. People on it are REALLY looking for some er… affection (i.e. none of that “it’s complicated” and “just looking around” bullshit).

A female friend of mine invited me to Love Happens a couple of years ago (not failing to raise an eyebrow, if I remember correctly), and although I didn’t completely fill up my “Love Profile”, I didn’t cancel my account either — more out of curiosity than anything.

The result: every week I get a “Love Update” of people who matched my “preferences”. Although, for the record, no “Love” has ever really happened out of my faux-membership, it has, on the other hand, succeeded in giving my spirits a humorous boost at least once a week. Consider for instance, this week’s instalment of “Love Matches”:

Never fails to elicit at least a mild smile (usually a stress-releasing laugh) everytime! And everytime I also really wonder: could these be actual real people, um… looking for love, out there?

Thankfully, even my friend who “referred” me hasn’t appeared once in this “love network” or I’d be laughing silly. (You know who you are girl.)

Meanwhile outside of HSDPA enabled mobile broadband, I-Phones, I-Pods, voice activated super cars, and near-artificial-intelligence, somehow the digital age hasn’t quite come up with an adequate update to the match-making rituals. Sure having email and SMS have practically eradicated phone pals and pen pals, and have made it possible to make (and break) relationships on a click of a button, however so far computers and the internet have not yet become that reliable source of “Love” yet. As easily as we can order books and CDs, we can get instantaneous research, we can perform super calculations, but as far as finding that “special someone”, we haven’t really gotten any further than where we were decades ago.

Having worked in a financial institution, I’m accustomed to looking at reams of statistics. Back when I worked in a credit department, we used historical data on other people’s behaviour and characteristics to predict whether another person would be likely to pay their debt or run away with the cash. Elaborate statistical models called scorecards were built on these seemingly random data, and pretty soon you could isolate the likelihood of default to a particular location, age, and occupation.

The use of statistics to make judgements falls under a cool-sounding field called decision science where computers, armed with these scorecards are given the duty of making decisions that used to take days, and render judgement in split seconds. Now credit card applications, insurance claims, traffic light placements, train station ticketing, bookshelf arrangement, movie schedules, and countless other seemingly mundane decisions are all being influenced by decision science in order to better serve us.

On Amazon for instance, order a book about flowers, and the computer automatically shows you a book about pots, and perhaps flower arrangement–or whatever historical data shows what other books people who bought flower books also bought. So how come, match-making, and Love-matching, still doesn’t happen with the same characteristic smoothness as when we order a box of toothbrushes or golf clubs? How come I can’t simply select: blonde, busty, cheerful, and easy-going, and have the computer match me with someone like this delectable fraulien to the right?

(Although at second, maybe third glance, something seems to be wrong with this chick.)

The answer is deceptively simple.

Any decision model is only as good as its data. In the realm of love and relationships, data is either unavailable, or unreliable.

And as Dr. House always says: “People lie.”

Yes! The reason why computers have not helped us in our love-lives is the same reason why our love-lives are shitty in the first place: we lie about ourselves. No one, and I mean NO ONE has been completely honest with themselves and with their significant others, even while they are about to get married people keep things from each other.

Lies kill relationships, but we’ve done it so much and so well it’s nearly an art, so much so that we now believe that:

Lies keep relationships.

It’s an interesting thought to ponder. I know from my experience in financial markets that people are hardly rational agents when it comes to money unlike what we were all taught in economics. Sooner or later we all realize what even worse fools we all are when it comes to relationships.

It’s interesting with many dysfunctional and love-hate couples we all (as in WE ALL) know, you try to think why people just don’t hook up with someone really compatible. This is an open-ended question for now, because to even remotely do it justice will eat up too much space in this post, but I’ll revisit this topic again in due course.

Meanwhile, about that blonde chick, I think I finally figured out what’s wrong with her.