As so many means for communicating love and romance have developed, the logical successor to the old "dating service" concept would be the likes of match.com or eHarmony.com. Thankfully match.com's marketing blitz has faded, but eHarmony, and this Neil Clark Warren bozo, holy hell is it getting tiring. Based on the "success stories" I've seen, the slogan should be "where nerdy guys can find girls with fat asses". And the whole concept is bogus anyway - as people are matched on 30 different dimensions. Yeah, but remember that it such a system is still based on that person's self evaluation; about as subjective as possible. This near flawless matching system and evaluation is only as reliable as the lunatics which submit them. Nobody's going to be honest with themselves and fill this evaluation out with the famous 30 dimensions:
"Well, let's see, I'm an asshole - check, I want a big fat person,
check. I like fighting, crime, laziness and anger, check. Hey now
I'll turn this gem into the soulmate-o-matic and grab my princess!"
That Neil guy on all the eHarmony commercials, grumble. Hey, I'm all excited if his site brings people together and they find happiness with this method. But ol' Neil started characterizing the wondrous, amorphous concept of love as a chemical formula; mix some compatibility with chemistry and blammo. It isn't quite so simple, and with the understandable tendency for all participants of such dating sites to subtly misrepresent themselves in favor of a better portrayal, rather than a sanguine, accurate depiction, drives dating "systems" into the flaws of misrepresentation that led these isolated souls to the web in the first place. Such supposedly innovative sites like eHarmony will forever waste obdurate, yet innovative, scientific "logic" on the hasty frameworks of inaccurate, poorly sketched personality profiles, drafted by all who sought to camouflage their flaws within a supposedly multidimensional autobiographical profile.
With my countless essays on romantic injustice and relationship imbalances, it may appear that I suffer from some related pang of unrequited love. In a sense, that impetous might be true, but in truth, it's a combination of common sense and the suffering of those around me which angers me and drives me to comment on our innate zest to find a perfect partner with which to fill egos, build security, and erect an indirect sense of fulfillment. The desperation and hurried approach to finding one's soulmate is exactly what creates embitterment, dating services, and most of all, the constantly rising propensity toward divorce. Finding that one perfect partner is not to be hastily derived, calculated, or arranged. It might happen or might not. Some people are perfectly happy eliminating that goal from their existence, and quite happily pursue a path of independence and self-sufficiency. More power to them.
The point is simple; love is an aspect of fate and otherwordly destiny that transcends any type of human wisdom or scientific processing. Success stories may exist, but meeting a true love will happen as a serendipitous aspect to life's journey, not from a fiendish set of calculated maneuvers through a scientific dating service or similar system. The eHarmony slogan touts the ability to assess compatibility, and that word is so tasteless and harsh - people are not pieces of computer equipment. True emotion, fulfillment, and altruistic peace has so little to do with the objective, emotionless harshness of a statistically crude personality rating system - I'm surprised so many people accept faith in this ironic application of science to such an amorphously soft, mysterious, spiritual concept as true love. While many will find true love and happiness by meeting their beloved in a crude setting like a dating service, I can't see how the concept could ever be true to the heart and soul, as the spirit defies numbers and statistics, and always will surpass these finite inventions of the finite, narrow human mind.
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