Take the Leap

David Brooks, conservative columnist at the New York Times, recently wrote about online dating.  You can see his full text here.  I like Brooks because he strikes me as usually prioritizing being honest and thoughtful over grinding an ax or sneaking in his sides talking points.  I only sometimes agree with him.

A column about online dating struck me as an odd choice.  Turns out there is some interesting research being done by data mining the big data available on these sites.  For instance, as Brooks noted

“It’s better to have a polarizing profile than a bland one. People who generate high levels of disapproval — because they look like goths or bikers or just weird — often also generate higher levels of enthusiasm.

Racial bias is prevalent. When Asian men are looking at Asian women they rate them as 18 percent more attractive than average. But when they are looking at black women, they rate them as 27 percent less attractive. White and Latino men downgrade black women by nearly the same percentage. White, Latino and Asian women have similar preferences.

When people start texting or tweeting to each other, they don’t turn into a bunch of Einsteins. Rudder looked into the most common words and phrases used on Twitter. For men they include: good bro, ps4, my beard, in nba, hoopin and off-season. For women they include: my nails done, mani pedi, retail therapy, and my belly button.”

I am not sure I know what all these terms mean.  I am sure I do not use them and would be embarrassed to hear many of them used among friends.  

Right before I was about to start feeling superior to online daters, Brooks cut me off at the knees and I immediately recall that two friends whom I deeply respect in every way found their partners through an online dating service.

“People who date online are not shallower or vainer than those who don’t. Research suggests they are broadly representative. It’s just that they’re in a specific mental state. They’re shopping for human beings, commodifying people. They have access to very little information that can help them judge if they will fall in love with this person. They pay ridiculous amounts of attention to things like looks, which have little bearing on whether a relationship will work.”

Brooks then reviews briefly research that suggests dating sites do not do a good job of mining their own data to deliver on their promised match making.  Is anyone really surprised that we do not have an algorithm that finds life partners?  

Then Brooks surprised me a bit with the lesson he chose to draw from this research.  He argues that the algorithm is MIA because good relationships are lovingly unpredictable and we succeed here, not through a linear and utilitarian analysis of net worth and cuticle care, but by taking “the enchantment leap.”

“This is when something dry and utilitarian erupts into something passionate, inescapable and devotional. Sometimes a student becomes enraptured by the beauty of math, and becomes a mathematician. Soldiers doing the drudgery of boot camp are gradually bonded into a passionate unit, for which they will risk their lives. Anybody who has started a mere job and found in it a vocation has taken the enchantment leap.

In love, of course, the shift starts with vulnerability, not calculation. The people involved move from selfishness to service, from prudent thinking to poetic thinking, from a state of selection to a state of need, from relying on conscious thinking to relying on their own brilliant emotions.

When you look at all the people looking for love and vocation today, you realize we live in a culture and an online world that encourages a very different mind-set; in a technical culture in which humanism, religion and the humanities, which are the great instructors of enchantment, are not automatically central to life.

I have to guess some cultures are more fertile for enchantment — that some activities, like novel-reading or music-making, cultivate a skill for it, and that building a capacity for enchantment is, these days, a countercultural act and a practical and fervent need.”

Thanks David.  Your column was a great way to start my day today.