Must Love Biits

eHarmony can be diverting—amusing, even—once you get past the interminable questionnaire and once you shrug off the vague feeling of being a beggar. Don’t get me wrong. The candidates all appear to be decent people online. But my friends also built me up and let me believe that I was an attractive and rare (if aging) catch. I never foresaw myself peddling my emotional wares on the online love marketplace. At least I didn’t think I would have to resort to such measures. But, for the past six months, my Ta-DAAA of singlehood has been met with the humbling sounds of crickets.

Abstinence and the City.

Still, I tell myself to be reasonable. First, that kind of thinking is too passive. I owe it to myself to find rather than wait to be found. Second, there is no way to accomplish this when I spend the bulk of my waking hours in a cubicle at a cursed technology company—especially when this excessive focus on career only leads to more attrition in my small and ever-contracting social circle. Maybe there are lots of other busy people out there who need to outsource this process, too. Or, maybe my friends just don’t want to let on that I’m a freak from the planet Chiik.

I began in November by filling out an extensive battery of multiple-choice questions, short-answer items, and rubric selections. I hit send, setting the famous 29-point matching process in motion. And, lo! The site returned with no matches, explaining in the most conciliatory fashion that my personality profile did not have any corresponding counterparts and, therefore, eHarmony would rather give me nothing rather than risk an incompatible introduction. Oh god, I am a freak. Damn you, Dr. Warren!

"You’re supposed to find Bingley, not Darcy," said Waldorf, close friend & sex-life consultant rolled into one. "Now go back and moderate your answers. Take every response on those rubrics and ratchet it a notch closer to the middle. And don’t make those wisecracks about illegal NSA wiretapping." Okay, fine.

It isn’t surprising but slightly disappointing that my romantic possibilities increase manifold after blunting all sharp corners and suppressing these carefully cultivated eccentricities. It only affirms the idea that bland is indeed better. Next, I had to finish filling out the remainder of the "About Me" profile.

It was difficult not to fall into self-parody:

Q: What is the most important quality that you are looking for in another person?
A: Must love biits. Neurotic female writer seeking genial ginger-haired propertied gentleman (w/ 5000£ p.a) who is blissfully uncaring about class differences. Angry depressives, Asian fetishists, and small-talking simpletons need not apply. Emotional maturity. Curiosity and a sense of play.

This is a cheat, in a sense, because they asked you to pick a single important quality. Most of these prompts ask that you either speak in superlatives or top-five rankings. On top of that, none of the prompts are particularly inspiring. One calls for random conjecture about what people say or notice about you and another asks for a list of your best "life-skills". Yuck.

Halfway through writing "About Me", I felt my resolve dissipate into self-doubt and conflict. My every fiber rejected this idea of packaging myself like a box of (dry) goods. Any attempt would be little more than a caricature—one which makes me out to be a cross between Andy Rooney and Miss Marple. And I'm no longer young enough for the fogey-ness to be ironic or cute. One could assume that love for NPR, coffee, cheese, biits and film means only that the person is dorky, nervous, smelly, unkempt and socially dysfunctional. In my case, that would be a spot-on assumption. But how do I make that sound good? And should I even have to? At the same time, hiding behind self-deprecation is only self-defeating. I did pony up $40 like everyone else on this site, in hopes of some success—at what, I wasn’t sure. I needed to stop behaving as if I were above it all.

Also, based on the profiles of my new matches, I doubt that anyone agonizes about this as much as I do. For the most part, they were agreeable sorts open to anything and everything. They love being outdoors and enjoy spending time with friends. Maybe this namby-pamby nicey-nice works well with other women, but the indiscriminate pleasantness says nothing to me about a person’s character except cowardice and flabby thinking. They exist in the same sphere as those who only state the obvious ("Everybody loves chocolate!") or appropriate demographically-inappropriate catch phrases ("Holla!")—people who cannot utter a single thought that has not been first devised, packaged and approved by multimedia marketing. So call me a curmudgeon. It’s a new low when a third of my eH matches wrote that the last book they read and enjoyed was The Da Vinci Code. This all may be my just desserts for manipulating the 29-point system by impersonating insipid Jane. Bingley always seemed like a halfwit anyway.

The good news is that among the lackluster 250-or-so matches with whom I closed communication in the first month, there are also a handful of promising candidates and one exceptional front-runner. So stay tuned.