Internet Dating

Can finding love be based on game-show probability?

Life and love connections are not a game show, and the name of the game is not Let’s Make a Deal. I know you know that! But bear with me.

The iconic almost 60-year-old game show, hosted by Monty Hall for some thirty of those years, presents the probability that you might win the big prize behind door number one, two or three.

With life migrated to the computer screen, Internet Dating uses a theory of probability to present options, or doors, you might not otherwise consider. I speak from experience because I was among the “Internet Daters” at age 60 after my husband, Oh-so-Greta-Garbo, said “I need to live alone.”

So there, I, or you, are. We want to find love. Maybe you think you’re over the hill because you’re 39 or 59 and someone has left you standing at the altar or the door.

What do you do? After you recover from the affront and the heartbreak of ‘being dumped,’ you look for another door.

I’ll use myself as one example and, as another, the Pilates teacher I once had: 39, drop-dead gorgeous, long, thin, athletic ballerina body, delicate hands and feet. She got dumped by her long-time live-in boyfriend.

While she could’ve paid a matchmaking service to find her match, she dabbled on a free site.

She got 20 to 30 possible “doors” to open every day, meaning men who wanted to chat, wanted to date, who opened with bad lines like this one: “You’re so cute. Wanna have sex?”

Or the guy who asked her if she was adventurous. She said, “What do you mean?” He replied, “Have sex while a third person watches.”

Then Angel appeared. Yes, that was his real name and, even better, he was an Air Force pilot. He asked for exclusivity after one date: a glass of wine downtown, not even dinner, and a smooch at her door.

He stopped texting and calling after he saw she was still online.

Now Pilates could’ve given up at this point or she could’ve considered the probabilities of Internet Dating. I typed into Google: “Find love on the Internet” and got 1,040,000,000 results in .22 seconds.

Lots of folks are going there. What’s the probability that one of them might make a good date, mate, or might have a friend you could “swap” for?

One theory on probability is named for the host of the game show, The Monty Hall Problem. My favorite moniker for the theory of odds: The Sleeping Beauty Problem.

Here’s how that one works: The game is “heads or tails.” Sleeping Beauty agrees to take a potion to find her prince. She will be kissed after the coin is flipped and told how it landed. She won’t remember what she was told when she awoke.

On day one, a coin is flipped, she’s kissed, wakened and told “heads won.” On another day, she’s told “tails won.” And so on.

This probability game examines how Sleeping Beauty will compute the odds of heads or tails without knowing how the coin toss worked any of the times she awoke.

Like me when I entered the Internet dating game, my Pilates teacher wanted the prince to kiss her lips and wake her from the sleep of disillusionment with love.

It happens. And it doesn’t. When it does, shouldn’t it feel like magic? —not like Let’s Make Deal, or even worse, like the flip of a coin.

Internet dating operates on the theory that the more you know about the other before you date, the better your odds of finding your prince. Like everyone else, I gave information in my profile about who I was and who I was looking for. So did Pilates. That stuff helps.

I say this: If you rely only on what you know about the other, you may make a deal, or worse, you may have flipped a coin. Either way, will the magic happen?

So, the question is, did probability theory get Pilates anywhere? Maybe. But, from my experience, I concluded: Count on self-discovery and on passion and poetry. I know that sounds paradoxical.

But I learned that the better I knew myself, the more I understood my own unconscious mind, the more likely, I might find my prince.

I learned that the answer to the question, “Where in the world is my prince?” lay inside my own search for me. I had to answer the tautological question that begins and ends where it starts: Who am I?

The better I came to know myself, the more likely I might find passionate love again—and that has nothing to do with games shows or coin flips.

I don’t mean we should all go into therapy, but I don’t dismiss that idea. I mean we need to acknowledge that we love best when we know ourselves, when we stay on the road of self- discovery.

The best connections, the relationships that suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune and that last are based on self-knowledge and empathy. I speak from experience. My marriage broke. I Internet dated. I looked for my prince. But most of the time I looked for myself. I found love and wrote a book to prove it.

Transcendence in love comes hand-in-hand with transformation of the self. We don’t become the beloved. We don’t own the beloved. The beloved alters us because we feel with the beloved, his or her needs, his or her cares, his or her wants. He/she/they does the same.

Through empathy with the other, we allow ourselves to become, as psychiatrist Ethel Spector Person says in her book Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters, “the person we have not yet discovered.”

D.H. Lawrence put it best in his poem “Wedlock”:

And yet all the while you are you, you are not me.
And I am I, I am never you.
How awfully distinct and far off from each other’s being we are!
Yet I am glad.
I am so glad there is always you beyond my scope,
Something that stands over,
Something I shall never be,
That I shall always wonder over, and wait for,
Look for like the breath of life as long as I live,
Still waiting for you, however old you are, and I am,
I shall always wonder over you, and look for you.
And you will always be with me.
I shall never cease to be filled with newness,
Having you near me.

So, sure, Internet date. And, for sure, love is the answer—and, maybe for sure, the angel on your shoulder is you.

PS: I suspect that the actor, writer, comedian Brett Goldstein has insights about what I’m trying to discover in this essay. I recently watched his flick that he wrote and stars in All of You. Here’s the trailer:

My next guest is Imola — a lovely writer about the art of living.

Mary Tabor writes: