Oh, February. Love and COVID-19 are in the air. Matchmaking algorithms are in your emails. I have been under the impression that people fill out those surveys in a not-so serious spirit, and it seems that these matchmaking algorithms have been sweeping across college campuses nationwide. What does the survey accomplish for campus when you can go outside, touch grass and talk to people? Should we ditch Datamatch and burn the Marriage Pact?
It is actually very possible that the love of your life is at Yale University. However, ticking the same banal boxes on the kitsch and superficial questions about the Yale experience will probably not even lead to friendship, let alone love. The brilliance of Yalies around you and your similar experiences, similar values and similar aspirations mean that it’s quite possible to arrive at E. M. Forster’s coveted idea of “only connect.” But even before I arrived at Yale, I was told multiple versions of the same dating advice: don’t date in your residential college, don’t date in your classes, don’t date in your extracurriculars. Of course people don’t take this advice seriously, but where else are you supposed to meet people?
That’s why people take a chance at algorithmic services like Datamatch and Marriage Pact, even though they don’t take it too seriously. Yet algorithmic matching services like the ones mentioned above perpetuate the very harms that prevent people from engaging with the dating scene in the first place: The Marriage Pact asks you to rank your racial preferences, and one of the Datamatch questions used a racially insensitive term to refer to a Yale figure. In this manner, they repeat the same prejudices that form the basis by which parents a century ago arranged the marriages of their children. Ultimately, all these services do is deliver to you a name of someone that bears some similarity to you, and you must do what you will with it — which, more often than not, turns out to be nothing. The vulnerability demanded by matchmaking algorithms is vacuous. Young people are invited to commodify a fictional version of themselves and feed themselves to the algorithm in order to feel desired in return.
This is not to say that all online dating is bad for you: When it works, it works. Twenty percent of 18 to 29 year olds in America began long-term relationships or marriages through online dating, which has helped many people who cannot otherwise access the dating scene begin relationships. LGBTQ+ people have met each other through online dating since the dawn of the Internet. When online dating services preserve individual agency, they could bring together individuals who would not have otherwise met each other. But these services, too, invite the commodification of the self and perpetuate existing patterns of prejudice. People are invited to market themselves in their personal lives in the same manner they market themselves in their professional lives; The vulnerability and openness that relationships demand is instead relegated to a platform. Everyone feels as though they alone stand under a spotlight, facing an anonymous audience. The consequence, then, is that desire becomes misdirected and deferred: what holds your trust is not other people, but the application itself.
Amia Srinivasan ’07 concludes her 2010 essay in the London Review of Books like so: “Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go […] in the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.” Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that we ultimately don’t know what love could be unless we’ve experienced it ourselves. The personal transcends the political, and the match is only as good as the matchmaker.
My mother always told me that love and relationships is all a matter of yuanfen 缘分, which translates roughly to fate or happenstance. She said that yuanfen cannot be forced between people, but when your yuanfen comes to you, there’s not very much you can do to stop it. So she fell in love, amidst the booming economy of 90s industrial China, with a jolly man who, as it turned out, lived only ten minutes away from her. Young people everywhere have fallen in love with each other in all kinds of ways since the dawn of time. You will too, if you’d like to.
JEAN WANG is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College. Her Column, “Frames of Preference”, runs every other Friday. Contact her at jean.wang@yale.edu