Chemistry.com is Match.com’s attempt to meet eHarmony’s bet on “scientific” testing for love, and to raise them one. Without doing a blow-by-blow comparison of the two “scientific” methods for matchmaking, based on my own limited experimentation with both — Chemistry’s system is as ridiculous, labyrinthine, and self-defeating as eHarmony’s!

Full disclosure: I’ve never first-hand experienced eHarmony beyond the “free” compatibility test. I flunked eHarmony! After answering the compatibility test’s umpteen questions, they sent me an email saying there were NO, ZERO, ZILCH prospective matches for me in their database! I didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or insult…

So, last week I got an invitation to interact with a Chemistry.com guy, who had somehow arrived at me as a prospective match. And so, in the name of science, business, and curiosity — I responded to the invitation. Ironically, from the beginning, our scientific match was unlikely, according to Chemistry’s comparison of our profiles. That didn’t deter him from contacting me anyway. So I assume he was more interested in something he saw in my profile than the so-called scientific service offered by Chemistry. We were then subjected to a series of FOUR levels of systematic, structured back-and-forth emails — at the end of which laborious process I was both exhausted with the correspondence and sure that we were not a match. Had it been a simple, ‘hi, how are you’ straight from him, I’m certain that the odds of us not matching would have been no greater. What I’m saying — Chemistry.com is not very much fun. It does not produce the desired results: self-expression, communication, and possibly making a date. And, it’s as lame as its Christian counterpart, eHarmony.

Dating, romance, and relationships are as much art as science, it seems to me. That’s an important premise of flirtysomething.

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