You Do Not Need An AI Matchmaker. You Need To Go Outside.

The latest solution to our romantic malaise appears to be AI matchmakers. That’s right; if you’re feeling unlucky in love, you can now hope the algorithms will wield artificial intelligence to find you that special someone. In short, you can spend more rather than less time staring at a screen in the hopes of connecting with a fellow human being. 

Sound backwards? That’s because it is. 

Don’t get me wrong: Dating today really is a mess, and the way young people (don’t) couple up desperately needs a reboot. It’s a multifaceted problem in need of solutions. But matchmaking that puts ever more emphasis on the “perfect one for you” while requiring ever less socialization represents an exacerbation of these problems, not a solution to them. 

Expect known imperfection

Until quite recently, most people got married relatively young to partners they met in high school, in college, or through friends and family. Those drawing room scenes in Jane Austen novels are exciting because they typically involve the introduction of a new romantic prospect to a well-worn social circle. Similarly, the romantic tension in girlhood classics such as Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” and L.M. Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables” stems from suspense about which girl the dreamy “boy next door” will marry. That he will marry a girl he’s known since childhood is all but taken for granted.

By the mid-20th century, a more anomic form of “dating” — the one to which we still pay lip service — had replaced the old, organic process of “friendship unto courtship.” This regime encouraged couples to interact one-on-one, on “dates,” before taking their relationship public to friends and family — rather than the other way around. As psychologist Esther Perel has noted, that sequencing is sometimes not particularly helpful for truly getting to know another person. There is no substitute for observing someone in a shared setting, independent of his curated, private interaction with you.

Online dating takes the atomization of modern dating to an extreme while adding the illusion of endless choice. While the “meet a guy in a bar” model expanded the range of potential partners beyond the neighborhood or the college campus, many people still met in those settings because, after all, they had to meet somewhere. Today, many people walk through the world without expecting to find love or even friendship anywhere other than their phones.

Meanwhile, with each descent further into existential isolation and the solipsism it breeds, the bar for a romantic partner becomes higher. This makes a paradoxical kind of sense: When you only know someone online, you don’t actually know him. It’s Perel’s critique of modern dating, taken to an extreme. The fake, disembodied nature of the initial connection — the heretofore historical impossibility of interacting without ever having been in the same room — is fertile soil for more fantasy than reality. 

In reality, no doubt, you will find imperfections. But, of course, that’s because you might have actually found a person. 

Live while you’re alive 

In the hit 2021 television series “Mare of Easttown,” Colin Zabel is a calm, 35-year-old never-married male police detective who lives comfortably and sterilely with his mother. He falls hard for Mare Sheehan, a scattered, 43-year-old single mother with a drug-addicted son who died by suicide, a needy grandson, a teenage daughter, and dozens of other personal and professional problems. 

No online dating service and certainly no AI matchmaker would ever pair Colin with Mare. And probably they aren’t a good match anyway (spoiler alert: He dies in the line of duty before we can find out). 

But the insightful point about this plot line is that Colin is attracted to Mare precisely because of how large she lives, even when (especially when) things don’t go her way. Like many millennials of all classes, Colin has mostly built a life around avoiding the liabilities of truly living. His career as a police detective notwithstanding, he has followed what he ultimately sees as the self-defeating path of always keeping his options open and never moving too fast. 

No, I am not recommending that we idolize unwise marriages, divorce, or anything of the kind under some “you only live once” banner. But I do think millennials and Gen Zers have so far overcorrected for these all-too-human risks by optimizing and outsourcing everything we can that we’re at the precipice of optimizing and outsourcing living itself. 

Instead of relying on an AI matchmaker to find a dream prince (or princess), maybe today’s singles should try dreaming less and doing more. Use your phone to reply “yes” to church meet-ups and friends’ birthday parties and to sign up for a running club or a community service group. Text people you haven’t seen in a while to meet for coffee. Ask friends to go to an event where lots of single people are likely to be.

And, if you’re still in college, listen to the “Princeton mom.” Yes, she was annoying, but she was also right: Find a classmate to marry. Don’t get seduced by the endless choice promised by little pictures on a tiny screen or by the alleged certainty provided by an AI agent that does your discernment for you.

Try, in short, to re-enchant your own world. Like, by actually looking at the people you see in real life, and engaging the ones you see repeatedly as friends who could become something more. The thing about getting to know people for real like this is that you will not meet your soulmate. But you may live your way into the understanding that soulmates are made, not met. That process, too, requires living — in all its perfect imperfection. 

And there is no app for that.

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Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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