In order to express my views on this new "scientific" online dating service, I have to tell a somewhat convoluted story, which might also disclose private information. Here goes.
When I was in college, I belonged to a sorority. As far as sororities go, it wasn't your typical Greek house. Although, to be fair, I no longer know what "typical" means, since the Greek system seems to include a vast amount of diversity. (Service and honor fraternities, Ethnic houses, traditional houses in the Southern States, the northern states, etc)
But our campus had this one big party every year around the time that rush ended. Sororities and fraternities teamed up to throw elaborate bashes for their new members. It was a fun night. Before it began, as a mixer, the new fraternity boys from each frat would put on their best suits and go and "mix" with the new girls who'd just joined each of the houses. (These were completely chaperoned, PG mixers! Usually involving formalwear and all!) During the mixer period, the guys would put on a brief presentation about exactly what their frat was all about.
Each guy also carried four or five long-stemmed red roses with him. If a girl caught his eye, he had the option of presenting her with one of these roses.
This was a fun and harmless ritual. Most girls got at least one rose, some came home with bleeding bouquets. One of my friends, let's call her Lucille (because that was NOT her name) was one of the girls who came home with a bouquet. Fast forward four years. We were sitting on her bed in her room, and I remember her telling me sort of sadly, "I look around and it's just a sea...no interesting men..." This sounds like a typical complaint, but it's easy to understand her difficulty: she was not only very beautiful but very intelligent and relatively fearless.
A new online dating service claims to pair people through genetic matching. It's a little bit Gattaca, but is not as eugenic as it sounds (the theory is that some people are better "genetic matches" than others, which isn't exactly news). The scientific premise is completely shaky, but that's ok, since we're talking about online dating. The method reminded me of that long-ago red rose ceremony (I'm worried that I'm unintentionally referencing the Bachelor here). The operators of the dating service are trying to quantify that "red rose factor" - that moment of inexplication but real attraction that prompts one person to give another a rose. The service, of course, misses the grand point: this factor doesn't really matter in a lot of long term relationships. (After all, it's not exactly hard to guage attraction...)
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