Remember a time in the distant past when people met in places like cafes, graduate school classes and concerts? When an indication of mutual romantic interest was a particularly meaningful stare, or a purposeful half-smile fraught with possibility? Oh, you don't remember a time like that? OK good. Because neither does anyone else. Today's modus operandi for romantic pairings is the World Wide Web. Whether you're Facebook-stalking your crush for indications of mutual interest or cryptically tweeting about your brother's hot friend, the Internet presents the ultimate tool for forging romantic pairings.
With that in mind, it should come as no great shock that our modern-day Cupid is not a poet or a painter, but instead a Harvard mathematics graduate partial to hipster-checkered button-downs and skinny jeans. His name is Christian Rudder, and he's most famous for appropriating the moniker of the god of desire and using it to launch a website that helped to reshape the way romance happens. That site, of course, is OKCupid, and along with services like Match.com and Plenty of Fish, it's taken something that has historically been left to chance – namely, the unpredictable world of romance – and made it something that can be quantified, analyzed and solved like any other math problem. Here's how it's done.
Breaking down attraction to numbers
It's a truth universally acknowledged that just as you look at the Internet, the Internet looks at you. You're naive if you think your data is private, and if you don't believe that, just type "data breach" into Google. Not a day goes by without private data somehow finding its way into the public sphere. But despite the hotbed of surveillance that is the Internet, many websites like to project an image of scrupulous integrity – that is, until they're found out. Such was the case with Facebook, which suffered some bad press when it came out that the networking giant had been subtly experimenting on some of its users.
But while companies like Facebook may try to be hush-hush about this tampering with customer trust, OKCupid decidedly is not. In fact, in the wake of the Facebook experiment news coming out, Christian Rudder took an unorthodox move when he piggy-backed off Facebook's bad press with the following blog post on his company's site: "We Experiment on Human Beings!" But while Rudder's post may have initially seemed like a rather odd business move – why respond to a widespread controversy by saying "We do that too"? – it was rooted in an enterprise-forward move. Indeed, what it succeeded in doing was to illuminate the very mathematical basis for romance in the modern world.
Just as OKCupid's users rely on the site to find them romantic partners, OKCupid relies on them. The site is a veritable treasure trove of dating data, since the user base provides lots of information that can be easily codified and then analyzed. The algorithmic underpinnings of the site may not be particularly romantic, but Rudder wants people to know that they're not inelegant. In fact, quite a lot of work and attention to detail goes on behind the scenes at the site.
"To identify behavioral trends at OkCupid, programmers extract raw data about users – minus identifying information like their names," the Times article stated. "Then Mr. Rudder himself analyzes the data and turns those numbers into narratives."
Now does all of this mean that true romance is dead? I guess it depends on your idea of what's romantic. But as OKCupid and other websites like it prove, love isn't necessarily blind anymore – especially when you have a calculator.
