If done well, ‘arranged’ can triumph, delivering the objectivity of chance, the reassurance of destiny, the pragmatism of growth. Like chance, an externally determined partnership can avoid personal bias or the temptation to let lust dictate terms. Like destiny, it can remove the burden of choice, allowing us to relax rather than agonize about our own responsibility. Like growth-love, ‘arranged’ can mean we don’t demand instant compatibility, or call foul if things don’t prove perfect always and for ever.
But there does need to be a high level of competence here. Matchmakers – whether they be friends, family, the Jewish Shadchanim or the upmarket urban introduction service – need to know us at least as well as we know ourselves, need to know our partners well enough to judge the fit, and need to have a deep understanding of how relationships play out. The problem is that this level of wisdom is unusual in today’s society. Few people witness others profoundly and consistently enough to judge what is needed in a mate. Few relationships are sufficiently exposed to public gaze to deliver a real understanding of partnership dynamics. Which is why, though popular, modern matchmaking services can be infamous for high prices but low results. That said, in the right context and if the arranger is insightful and practised, ‘arranged’ can work well.
Let us be grateful we don’t live in 1917. Herbert Rawlinson and Alice Lake in the one-hundred-year-old black-and-white film Come Through.
A quick note on the extreme of ‘arranged’, those serried ranks of mass marriages where hundreds of couples meet for the first time on their wedding day, their partner choice made entirely by religious leaders. For most of us, this is somewhere between incomprehensible and appalling; how on earth does it ever work? The answer is that spouses’ contentment with the arrangement is constructed on their deep belief that they have the blessing of the deity; that their culture, community, family and religion will support them; and that love grows over time rather than instantly strikes. Despite individual horror stories, that’s a pretty big resource to bring to the table.
Online choice
Does online dating take control out of our hands? At first glance, no; we seem to have a multitude of options. But look more closely and we see that what we get is pre-sorted. Most sites cherry-pick attractive users and profile them on the home page to catch incomers’ attention. Many sites also highlight profiles of particularly popular users and present them as a separate and therefore more noticeable subcategory. We’re getting a choice, but only after the site filters have done their secret work.
And then there are the algorithms. It was way back in 1959 that a group of Stanford University maths students working on a final class project programmed their IBM 650 computer to pair up forty-nine men and forty-nine women according to their answers to a questionnaire; the result was one marriage and a deserved A-grade for the dissertation. More than half a century on, and that early study has led to a billion-dollar industry; almost every online dating site has a visible ‘questionnaire’ and they all have hidden algorithms to guide us firmly towards matches of our age, location and gender of preference. Choice is, if not taken out of our hands, at least slightly compromised.
There’s also another problem: dating sites only do the top level of the job. Yes, most sites match those who, on tick-box criteria, are similar, which replicates the surface-level criteria that attracts us to a mate; some sites then aim for more, with personality questionnaires or hormone-based matching systems. But while these matching systems maintain that the criteria for compatibility are well-established and that it’s therefore possible to predict relationship success, in fact ‘neither of these assumptions is true’. (I quote here from a recent research review of studies of online love-search by Professor Eli Finkel of Northwestern University, Illinois.) By allowing sites to try to match us, we are not only limiting our own options, not only failing to take into account the deeper compatibility factor, but also entrusting our fate to completely unproven systems.
Trusting chance
I’m not suggesting that abandoning choice altogether is either a good or a bad idea. But it is a possibility. What you may find useful is to think about what degree of abandonment you’ve used in the past without even realizing it. Have you ever started chatting to someone near you at the theatre, during a party, on a train – then spent a delightful half-hour even though that didn’t lead to romance? Probably. Have you ever met a partner by chance, circumstance or sheer happy coincidence? Again, probably. Have any of your intimate relationships been 100 per cent predetermined and predicted? Probably not. Start to gauge the extent to which you’re comfortable with serendipity and you may feel more inclined to accept it as another tool in your decision-making kit.
Coin-tossing, random chance and a belief in fate are all quite risky. But handing over some of the burden to others is certainly worth considering – so perhaps let online dating sites screen the undesirables or let matchmaking services do the legwork. Allowing ourselves to widen our initial love-search beyond our personal preference is also useful – so perhaps make a deliberate effort to contact (or start talking to, or agree a date with) someone who on the surface doesn’t seem like a possible. Gathering emotional support is vital to get us through the process – so perhaps actively enrol trusted friends and turn to them for guidance, consolation and celebration.
Above all, when it comes to choice, be prepared to occasionally take a risk, accept uncertainty, let go of control. As ex US president Jimmy Carter once said, ‘Go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.’
From time to time, they both wondered what the next forty years of marriage would bring.
5. Focussing
Focus is about saying No.
(STEVE JOBS)
Surely the more options we have, the more chance we have for love. Especially if we blame previous romantic disappointments on a lack of alternatives, then richness and variety of choice seem the obvious keys to success. Which is why the first question we may be asking about our love-search is how to find ‘more’ possibilities.
This is a great question if we’re short on options, if our circle of single contacts has dwindled to nil; if we live in a town – or country – where we know no one; if we’re not meeting any potential partners either at work or at play. It’s an especially useful enquiry if we are in a majority gender for our life-stage: research suggests that men in their twenties have only half as many partner possibilities as women do, but that in the forties the balance begins to reverse. If we can’t find a partner in these situations, the main problem is certainly the numbers. We’re a seller in a buyers’ market and the solution is to find more buyers.