For many people in their twenties, Internet dating is no less natural a way to meet than the night-club line.
In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis
Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air
display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked
and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious
pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the
machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address
of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match.
Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert
Ross, a programmer at I.B.M., and they began considering ways to adapt
this approach to find matches closer to home. They’d heard about some
students at Harvard who’d come up with a program called Operation Match,
which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, Altfest
and Ross had a prototype, which they called Project TACT, an acronym for
Technical Automated Compatibility Testing—New York City’s first
computer-dating service.
Each client paid five dollars and answered more than a hundred
multiple-choice questions. One section asked subjects to choose from a
list of “dislikes”: “1. Affected people. 2. Birth control. 3.
Foreigners. 4. Interracial marriage,” and
so on. Another question, in a section called “Philosophy of Life
Values,” read, “Had I the ability I would most like to do the work of
(choose two): (1) Schweitzer. (2) Einstein. (3) Picasso.” Some of the
questions were gender-specific. Men were asked to rank drawings of
women’s hair styles: a back-combed updo, a Patty Duke bob. Women were
asked to look at a trio of sketches of men in various settings, and to
say where they’d prefer to find their ideal man: in camp chopping wood,
in a studio painting a canvas, or in a garage working a pillar drill.
TACT transferred the answers onto a computer punch card and fed the card
into an I.B.M. 1400 Series computer, which then spit out your matches:
five blue cards, if you were a woman, or five pink ones, if you were a
man.
In the beginning, TACT was restricted to the Upper East Side, an early
sexual-revolution testing ground. The demolition of the Third Avenue
Elevated subway line set off a building boom and a white-collar influx,
most notably of young educated women who suddenly found themselves free
of family, opprobrium, and, thanks to birth control, the problem of
sexual consequence. Within a year, more than five thousand subscribers
had signed on.
Over time, TACT expanded to the rest of New York. It would invite dozens
of matched couples to singles parties, knowing that people might be
more comfortable in a group setting. Ross and Altfest enjoyed a brief
media blitz. They wound up in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune
and in Cosmopolitan. The Cosmo correspondent’s first match was with a
gym teacher. One of TACT’s print advertisements featured a photograph of a
beautiful blond woman. “Some people think Computer dating services
attract only losers,” the copy read, quoting a TACT subscriber. “This
loser happens to be a talented fashion illustrator for one of New York’s
largest advertising agencies. She makes Quiche Lorraine, plays chess,
and like me she loves to ski. Some loser!”
One day, a woman named Patricia Lahrmer, from 1010 WINS, a local radio
station, came to TACT to do an interview. She was the station’s first
female reporter, and she had chosen, as her début feature, a three-part
story on how New York couples meet. (A previous installment had been
about a singles bar—Maxwell’s Plum, on the Upper East Side, one of the
first that so-called “respectable” single women could patronize on their
own.) She had planned to interview Altfest, but he was out of the
office, and she ended up talking to Ross. The batteries died on her tape
recorder, so they made a date to finish the interview later that week,
which turned into dinner for two. They started seeing each other, and
two years afterward they were married. Ross had hoped that TACT would
help him meet someone, and, in a way, it had.
After a couple of years, Ross grew bored with TACT and went into finance
instead. He and Lahrmer moved to London. Looking back now, he says that
he considered computer dating to be little more than a gimmick and a
fad.
The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving
and rearing children, or for enhancing one’s socioeconomic standing, or
for attempting motel-room acrobatics, or merely for finding
companionship in a cold and lonely universe, is as consequential as it
can be inefficient or irresolute. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we
have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals,
late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute.
Online dating sites, whatever their more mercenary motives, draw on the
premise that there has got to be a better way. They approach the
primeval mystery of human attraction with a systematic and almost
Promethean hand. They rely on algorithms, those often proprietary
mathematical equations and processes which make it possible to perform
computational feats beyond the reach of the naked brain. Some add an
extra layer of projection and interpretation; they adhere to a certain
theory of compatibility, rooted in psychology or brain chemistry or
genetic coding, or they define themselves by other, more readily obvious
indicators of similitude, such as race, religion, sexual predilection,
sense of humor, or musical taste. There are those which basically allow
you to browse through profiles as you would boxes of cereal on a shelf
in the store. Others choose for you; they bring five boxes of cereal to
your door, ask you to select one, and then return to the warehouse with
the four others. Or else they leave you with all five.