08/26/10
Ruth Franklin
My ideal man doesn’t exist. This, at least, is what I had to conclude after visiting alikewise.com, the much-ballyhooed new site for “dating by the book,” which purports to match people based on their taste in literature. Matt Sherman, one of the site’s founders, told the AP that the idea came to him after he broke up with a girlfriend a few years ago. Dreaming about his ideal woman, he imagined her as someone who had read The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s study of randomness and “the highly improbable.” “Books are intimate and personal and revealing,” he said in an interview with Canada’s National Post. “And they are great conversation starters, in the real world and online.” His business partner, Matt Masina, put it a little more graphically. “I had been an avid online dater and there was always that moment of truth when I would be left alone for a few minutes with the person’s bookshelf,” he said. “It would always be scary if the shelf was full of self help and ‘dating’ books. Stuff like He’s Just Not That Into You.”
I was charmed by Sherman’s choice of reading material, because Taleb’s concept of the “black swan” is a perfect metaphor for the serendipity of finding a romantic partner: an “outlier” event, Taleb explains, “outside the realm of regular expectations” that “carries an extreme impact” and becomes explainable only in retrospect. Isn’t that more or less a spot-on description of falling in love? So I headed to the site, hopeful that the highly improbable might happen to me.
Continue reading "Is It Important To Date Someone Who Likes the Same Books as You?" |
