Love Machines

William Daniel is looking for love. At 60 years old, he's had his fair share of disappointment. A tall neurokinesiologist with a gentle smile and a handlebar mustache, he's no bum. And as he stands backstage at Dr. Phil's Valentine's Day show with a long-stemmed rose in hand, he's hopeful that this may be the day he finds his perfect match.

Daniel is one of about 250 members of the online relationship site PerfectMatch.com that have trekked out to Paramount Studios between January rainstorms to meet someone whose scientifically calculated relationship profile might click with their own. PerfectMatch unites its users based on its DUET™ Total Compatibility System, a modified version of a well-known personality test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. PerfectMatch uses questionnaires to suggest a match between users whose test results indicate that their personalities and relationship needs work together.

Daniel has used online dating sites since 1997. "I've had a couple of really bad experiences," he says. "You find that most people do not see themselves the way other people see them. With PerfectMatch, everybody's being evaluated by the PerfectMatch standards."

Dr. Phil's producers initially keep the male and female PerfectMatch members in separate parts of the overly air-conditioned studio. The women, who sit in the audience, don't know that their scientifically selected suitors await them backstage. "These women are all part of PerfectMatch.com, " Dr. Phil tells the audience, as the whole thing is taped for TV. "What they don't know is we have their perfect match here."

The bachelorettes clap and cheer with delight at the canned talk show stunt, their enthusiasm heartening the men, who file past the cameras sporting suits, leather jackets, and diversely landscaped facial hair.

Among the women is Ronique Nilson, 55, a retired civil engineer and fashion designer wearing a short, hot-pink dress and a silver heart-shaped pendant. In 1996, the early days of internet dating, Nilson began corresponding with a man she met online. After four months of "very honest and very profound" communication, they exchanged photos via fax. "Within six months we were in Mooréa celebrating our honeymoon," she says. When the marriage failed after a few years, Nilson logged back on to the internet, hopeful that she might find a more compatible partner.

"I'm looking a lot into myself," Nilson says, explaining how the PerfectMatch assessment has helped her this time around. "I'm more skeptical, because I recognize that if there was a failure before, probably I am not perfect either."

In the last few years, the stigma that once cast internet personals as being only for the pathetic or dangerous has virtually disappeared, with tens of millions of Americans spending upward of $400 million in 2004 to hook-up, date, long-term relate or marry. Sites like PerfectMatch.com and eHarmony.com have carved out a niche they call the "relationship" site, differentiating themselves from the more abundant dating sites by a commitment to lasting love. Women, who are less likely than men to join dating sites, make up more than half of the membership on these new sites.

Relationship sites sell themselves based on a "scientific" approach to matchmaking, using such personality factors as intensity and intellect. True.com does this, too, but isn't above finding "a great date for the weekend." Even established dating sites, such as Yahoo! Personals, have begun to offer supposedly scientific matching.

As in other sectors of cyberspace, however, skepticism is warranted. Matchmaking "science" is still far from a peer-reviewed science accepted in academia. But does that matter? Do these sites have an ethical obligation to guarantee that their tests are proven effective? After all, they're helping people make one of the most important connections of their lives: finding someone to share their bed on lazy Sunday mornings, to tend to their sick children, to grow old together. Are sites that offer scientific solutions to suffering singles merely "trading on our loneliness," as one frustrated user puts it? Or do they truly offer a computer-age breakthrough that guarantees, as Dr. Pepper Schwartz of PerfectMatch says, that we "don't ever have to be lonely again?"