Perfect Match?
www.ntu.edu.sg/home/ningc/paper/icalp09.pdf
Just look at the first web page of eharmony and the same phrase is shoved in your face. “The Perfect Match”. eHarmony, match.com, chemistry.com, and the multitude of other dating sites on the internet all have the exact same goal- to pair you with another person that you are compatible with. Of course it would be ridiculous to believe that these pairings, or these matches work 100% of the time since no Dr. Love can say with certainty what makes two people click together, let alone computers that work with impersonal algorithms. Yet the principles that these sites follow are similar to the principles that every boy and girl may follow on their road to love if you will.
This compatibility factor that so many of these dating sites use in their advertising schemes is a probability that these two people ( or nodes on a graph) are a good match. Additionally, many of these dating sites have each person answer a series of questions about themselves and their desires. Factoring in every bit of data about a person’s own value and their preferences, the websites’s computer program virtually assembles a graph in which there are two sets of nodes. In one scenario, if we assume the people on a particular site are all heterosexual, one set of nodes would be female and the other would be male and no node would be paired together with a node in its set.
A unique aspect of dating sites that we need to take into consideration is that one person can definitely be linked to many other people. With this possibility comes the high likelihood of a subset unfortunately turning into a constricted set. This subset’s lucky matches now have more people to choose from. And so in any online dating system, it is just about impossible to have perfect matching simply because some people are compatible with more people. It’s just a fact of nature.
Additionally, once two matches finally meet each other and perhaps begin to date, logically these two people remove themselves from the system completely. There are no rules for the timing of this removal, so these people may remove themselves from the system before meeting other probable matches. On the other end of the spectrum, one may remove himself or herself from the system if they have given up on that particular website or dating sites in general. Either way if someone removes himself from the system, they also remove every link that their node had with any person.
Many people beg to ask the question, why should someone use an online dating site? And of course, there is no clear answer despite what any commercial may tell you or what your grandmother may preach. Dating sites link people based on similarities, interests, looks, and sometimes even on the length of your forefingers and then after two nodes are linked they can then meet each other. In the offline dating world, we meet people before we find if we are compatible. The factors of compatibility can be the same factors that these dating sites take in. The difference is that initial meeting. We tend to meet people through a mutual friend (perhaps through the triadic closure principle) or perhaps at that church mission trip, author book signing, routine coffee shop visit, the college bar, or any other place that requires a mutual interest. And even after two people meet, there is still a potential set of matches for every person. The only difference between the two methods of dating is how you meet people. What’s better or worse – online or offline? No one can say for sure. I suppose in the spirit of network theory, we can ask who do you trust more to introduce you to new people? The Triadic closure principle or matching graph theory?