Chemistry & Reason in Dating

A recently-single friend sent me an article from The Atlantic about online dating sites. Lori Gottlieb interviews the founders of eHarmony and quickly moves on to Chemistry.com, which was apparently started to find not just compatible people, but those who actually click:

On most of the other sites, there’s this notion of ‘fitness matching’: You may have the same goals, intelligence, good looks, political beliefs. But you can walk into a room, and every one of those boys might come from the same background, have the same level of intelligence, and so on, and maybe you’ll talk to three but won’t fall in love with any of them. And with the fourth one, you do. What creates that chemistry? (Dr. Helen Fisher)

I’ll leave out the conclusions of the article and my own opinions on these sites, but I think this comment captures something that many of my friends and I have encountered in the dating world: lack of chemistry.

I know what type of person I’d like to meet, and if you asked me to list out all the ideal traits I’d probably keep typing until you took the keyboard away. At different times in my life I’ve met variations on this ideal (or the ideal at the time) and in some cases it’s turned into something…in others nothing came of it. Why?

In the times that it’s worked for me it’s never been subtle. Every person with whom I’ve had an emotionally significant relationship (that term’s just a little ambiguously loaded!) has had somewhat of a similar inception. The contexts have been different, but it’s been in some variety of:

1. Boy and Girl meet (or meet suddenly in a new context). Then they:
2. Have a short delay or not, but soon they…
3. Talk/write/email/IM for an insane amount of time. All the time. This feels natural & comfortable.
4. Don’t think about roles.
5. Boy and Girl become Boy&Girl.

On the other hand, a lot of dating, or at least the ones that even make it past a few dates, seem to fit the following pattern:

1. Boy and Girl meet (or meet suddenly in a new context). Then they:
2. Play out a polite ritual of when to call and write.
3. Go on a series of dates and have a fairly good time.
4. Notice all the things they have in common. Or maybe not…
5. Notice just how attracted they are to each other. Or maybe not…
6. Boy and Girl go through questioning in their head (perhaps interrupted by “physical distractions”)
7. Maximum time together: 2 months.

Once again: why?

Natural chemistry. I don’t know what that means, I don’t know how to recognize it at first, but it always follows the first set of steps for me (or at least the first steps 1-4). The last time it happened came as a shock to me: after almost 2 years of “things that worked and interesting people” I was completely surprised to find myself suddenly comfortable with a completely unexpected person. Why was it so different? Oh yeah, it just fit; I was conspicuously at ease.

Sadly that’s not the whole story. Chemistry is just one piece, though perhaps it may be the strongest one. In this last case it wasn’t enough.

But I feel like it’s the crucial piece that’s often missing. It seems to be easy to dismiss people because they’re not “as involved with X as you” or they cheer for a different political party. But I don’t know that I could dismiss people for these sorts of things if there were chemistry, at least not as quickly. Chemistry is often not subject to reason, it’s just what happens naturally.

I think there are times in our lives when we’re open to meeting people and times when we’re not; I imagine that plays a great deal into chemistry. I also think there are certain things we need to have in common to click in such a way. But the more I’m confronted with this topic, the more I wonder what these things are…and whether they’re what we’ve traditionally associated with “the list of requirements for an ideal.”

Once again I guess I’m just questioning the role of logic in the heart’s affairs. But I feel like it’s something we all need to remember as we go out to meet the perfect people. What’s perfect for you? Is it really that list of traits you wrote down?