Let's meet?

 IF finding true love were an exact science, we wouldn’t need matchmakers, singles bars or, of course, online dating services.Like job seekers who take the Myers-Briggs personality test to help steer them to suitable professions, we’d simply take a relationship test, whose results would identify our most compatible types of mates and rule out the frogs. Problem solved. Of course, Cosmopolitan magazine has been running pop psychology love quizzes  “Which Bachelor Is Right for You?,” “Is He Naughty or Nice?”  for decades, prompting young women the world over to assess how sexually or socially compatible they might be with their objects of desire. Now, a handful of dating Web sites are competing to impose some science, or at least some structure, on the quest for love by using different kinds of tests to winnow the selection process. In short, each of these sites is aiming to be the Netflix of love. Instead of using a proprietary algorithm to recommend movies you might enjoy, based on your past choices, however, these dating sites offer you a list of romantic candidates whose selection is based on proprietary analyses of personality characteristics or biological markers. At the end of the day, however, it may be that the success of such sites is attributable not so much to their proprietary methods as to their choosy, self-selected members who don’t want to wink at and woo the first person whose profile they read online. The sites attract cohorts of people interested in slowing down the online dating and mating process, in finding out more information about potential partners  or in ruling out unlikely suitors  before they graduate to the meet-and-greet stage. THE more advanced the partner prediction sites, the more they may actually serve a more old-fashioned role. The sites provide background details on a person’s family, education, aspirations, character, genetic traits and general health of the type that was once public information in farming or immigrant communities or even in hunter-gatherer societies. Indeed, at least from the point of view of evolutionary science, you’d be better off spending $50  and more likely to find a mate  by using a premium dating site than by dropping $50 on drinks in the uncertain waters of singles bars.