If we were to take a moment to reflect upon the living of any life, several disparate words might arise: beautiful, difficult, short, long, suffering, ugly, unique, wonderful… depending on temporal circumstances, beliefs, or how others are living and feeling. The idea that conflicting terms equally describe humanity either points to a beautiful paradox or to the idea of variance and complexity. Or to both. Life is infinitely complicated, bittersweet, and full of paradox. People are like clouds in this regard: everyone is incredibly different and everyone is incredibly perfect. A cloud cannot be imperfect; as humans, although flawed, error ridden, and often hurtful cannot be imperfect in terms of their ability to be a part of humanity. It’s difficult to explain ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ because they are subjective labels and are themselves paradoxical.
Life is complicated, in part, because it includes the vast possibilities and variations of living, none being more correct than another, except by moral views. Even a simple life in respect to a hurried life passing unawares is a variation of this complex nature, and is a choice among infinite choices. The notion that what is valuable is made valuable only because it is considered valuable to someone or many is endlessly confounding. It points to the fact that nobody can be alive for you, nor can you be alive for anybody else. When it comes down to it, to your own life, it is choice that empowers individuality, and the relinquishing of choice that ultimately dehumanizes. It is the active choice to break up with and leave your partner that makes you an individual. It is the active choice to commit to your partner that makes you an individual.
Because online dating sites make no effort to affirm the complexity of life, they continue to fail miserably. Instead of encouraging their users to practice the exploration of who another person is, they encourage their users to read endless profiles detailing this-and-thats of what another person might be. People are more complex that profiles allow. People are not “sometimes artistic based on a scale from 0 to 10”, nor can they be reduced by questions such as “Do you feel that you are Practical? Pleasure Seeking? Generous? or Strong-silent? (chemsitry.com)”. These questions are infuriating and ultimately hurtful. A newcomer to online dating might think that this industry is all about creating arranged marriages, or turning people into data to be chunked and sorted by an algorithm ‘designed by experts’, or that its users are just meat in the market.
Well heads up, online dating sites, your days as the slithering manipulators of valuable people are numbered. Let’s end with a review of eHarmony.com by John in Massachusetts:
Boooogus! I created two accounts (easy to do with a couple spare email aliases). For one I took 2-3 hours to complete (really thinking about the answers). For the other I consistently filled in all the multiple-guess boxes in a diagonal pattern, i.e. start at the upper right of a block and proceed down to the opposite corner across the block. When you get to the far side, reverse direction on the opposite diagonal, etc. I GOT THE SAME MATCHES ! "29 dimensions" my -ss!
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Hi. John is bluffing. I am unable to repeat his experiment. I answered the test as John specified but the system detected the invalid data and rejected it.