Meditation on Lavalife

Try it sometime: create a profile, using no more than 250 words, in which you’re supposed to attract the attention of your gender-of-choice. Despite the fact that most of us consider ourselves individuals, you’d be shocked at how generic the results of this exercise are. This has been my experience with Lavalife, an online introduction service for people that refuse to meet while drunk in a bar or who are leery about the people that approach them while shopping in the frozen food section of the grocery store. The irony, that profiles tend to come across like shopping lists, where one attempts not to find a date or a mate, but find people with commonalities that will presumably lead to a successful courtship means it is less of an exercise in attracting a compatible mate, than it is an exercise in attracting, or rather, finding similarities in one another’s shopping list. But how successful can comparisons on paper actually be? So much of a healthy relationship depends on what lies beneath the surface, rather than, “you like peanut butter, I like peanut butter—we both like peanut butter!” Some couples I’ve chatted with actually enjoy the differences in their respective likes and dislikes, in hobbies and pastimes; it grants a degree of independence, a reprieve from the mental construct of thinking solely as a couple, and allows them to be more like two autonomous beings that frequently find themselves on the same track.

And finding people with similar interests on a dating website is easy. Everyone appears to enjoy the outdoors, cooking, and quiet nights at home with a movie. These aren’t bad things, and yet they illustrate some of the shortcomings of trying to find a partner through a picture and a paragraph. Assuming for a moment that the people filling out these profiles are telling the truth (and that statement opens up an entire septic tank of worms, because yes folks, people on the internet sometimes lie), there still exists an exceptional amount of ambiguity in any of their statements. I don’t mean to call into question the veracity of all of Lavalife’s profiles, but am forced to entertain three important considerations whenever I see the results of someone doing a little self-reflexive analysis.

1) The list of likes and hobbies are the types of things that are written to intentionally try and attract a mate. And I could be wrong here, but there are a lot of women that say things to the effect, “I have no problem with you going out with the guys, or you inviting them over to watch the game.” And maybe these women are so confidant, so self-assured, that generously donating a night a week to a future partner’s frat-boy-habits-die-hard antics is something that they legitimately enjoy doing. But the fact that they’d put that out there, as if it were the Rapala at the end of the line, makes me question their motivation. Benign is the woman (or man) that actually believes the statement they’ve just written; dangerous is the person who thinks they believe this. If you’re willing to suggest you enjoy certain things—things that deep down in your heart you find kind of difficult to stomach—simply to attract a mate, how much of yourself are you willing to sacrifice in the search? Should you really make that sacrifice? Wouldn't you attract the same amount of interest if you simply wrote somewhere in your profile: “Willing to compromise”?

2) When people list their attributes, who’s there to correct them? Some profile parole board actually exists to make sure you haven’t uploaded any naughty pictures, but no one is there to inform readers of your profile that you cheated on your last three partners, six times, each! I have yet to see a profile that looks for someone who is “dishonest,” “disrespectful,” and interested in “gold-digging.” And yet, based on a number of dating horror stories I’ve heard, those people do exist, and I bet those people haven’t listed any of those social maladjustments in their opus of redeeming features. Again, for the moment, let’s assume that what everyone writes on their profile is true—or at least what they believe to be true; all things considered, Robert Mugabe probably considers himself a pretty affable guy. A major problem with the idea of profile-based, get-to-know-ya websites is that how we perceive ourselves may not be how the rest of the world perceives us. Look at Jena, Louisiana: The world sees this town in Louisiana as being abjectly racist and culturally insensitive because some people feel it’s ok to hang nooses and trees and from the back bumper of pick-up trucks to keep a marginalized African American populous “in-line.” Of course many community members in Jena don’t consider themselves racist, how could they? They haven’t lynched anyone in at least a month! In a culture that considers both picnicking and 55-day-canoe-trips-in-Canada’s remote-North, “outdoor activities,” context and clarification stand for a lot.

3) And if we can assume for a second that the profile your reading is a reflection of the person you’re reading about, and that reflection is written by them rather than a group of their peers—which is interesting given how many profiles contain the words, “my friends would describe me as…”—but assuming that their profile is written by them, and that said reflection reflects their reality (real or imagined), then maybe their list of likes and dislikes has less to do with the, “now” than in the wish, the dream, the goal that they hope every morning, that upon finding their soul mate, their life will become. There is little doubt, that when you find that right guy or girl, those evenings in front of the fire while lounging on the bear-skin rug are kind of nice, romantic even. More so than sitting there alone, watching the rug’s dead, glass eyes staring back at you, asking the same question over and over again: “why are you still single?”

The last thing I want to do is be overly critical of a website that has afforded me the opportunity to meet some really great people. What I offer here are some legitimate questions, questions that I think anyone should at least “entertain” any time they read something that someone has written about themselves in an attempt to distill themselves into some formalized, profile-essence. It also serves as a warning of the limitations of websites like Lavalife, which has allowed some people the opportunity to forgo any and all non-insular forms of meeting potential life partners, mates, or hot dates. Sure there’s comfort in meeting people from behind a keyboard; aside from a sense of anonymity, the internet provides a “technological courage,” (effective, albeit imbued with far less of the interesting side effects that its alcoholic counterpart, “liquid courage” provides). But the cost is the opportunity you just missed, with that cute cashier at the grocery store who was checking you out while you fumbled with your grapefruit. They would have loved it if you’d asked them for coffee, or desert. They noticed you, but you were too worried about updating your profile to notice them.