Dating by Numbers

by Jennifer Lohmann

  “Hmm,” she said, pretending to think about it. “No. I already have someone helping me with my profile, and you know what they say.”

  “Never look a gift horse in a mouth?” he said with a raised brow.

  “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”

  He shrugged. For a moment she thought she saw hurt flicker across his face, but she dismissed that as improbable as winning the lottery. “Well, it was worth an ask. Let me know if you change your mind.”

  “Sure,” she said, not meaning it. And judging by his raised eyebrow as he lifted himself out of her chair, he believed it as much as she did. Though he still said “Later” with a smile as he walked through her door.

  He has a nice butt, Marsie thought as she spun her chair back to face her computer. She opened the document she and Beck had worked on for hours. The short profile put a lighter spin on her personality, as did the carefully crafted answers to the shorter questions like, “Favorite movies.” For example, they decided not to include Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty as the last book she’d read, even though it was. And a reread at that. Beck had told her to pick a novel, so she’d included the latest Jonathan Franzen, even though she’d hated it.

  * * *

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, Beck’s hand holding a glass of red wine was the first thing Marsie saw when her friend opened her front door. Marsie shifted her purse higher onto her shoulder, grabbed the glass and had taken a sip before Beck had the door fully open.

  “Hey, that was my glass,” her best friend said once the door was fully open.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Marsie said as she stepped inside and slipped off her shoes. “You’re still wearing lipstick. If this had been your glass, there would be lipstick on the rim.” She set her bag on the console table by Beck’s front door and dug out her laptop. It was a Lenovo laptop, because they came in orange and she liked orange. Maybe she should have a reason for this preference, like that it represented processing power or battery life. But she allowed herself one bit of silliness in her life, and her laptop color was it. Once her laptop was safely tucked under her arm, she took a long sip of the wine, then stopped to take a deep breath and let the alcohol warm her throat on the way down.

  When she looked up, her friend raised an eyebrow and nodded to the glass, which had a near perfect kiss of Beck’s pink lipstick staining the crystal. “You must have a lot on your mind,” Beck said.

  “I do.” Marsie took another drink. She needed the wine more than Beck did. “Do you need help with dinner?”

  Beck laughed softly and shook her head. “No. But you can pour me another glass of wine.”

  “In charge of booze. I can handle that tonight,” Marsie replied, taking another sip before following her friend into the kitchen.

  The kitchen smelled like a dream of garlic and tomatoes and pork as a pot burbled away on the stove. “You make the best food,” she said, sliding onto a bar stool. She minded her responsibilities though, pouring a glass of wine for her friend before adding more to the purloined glass. She was the checklist queen and knew that checklists worked best when you took care of the important stuff first.

  Beck filled up a big pot of water, put it on the stove and turned on the gas. She chuckled when she turned around to grab her wineglass. “You don’t want to wait until after dinner?” she asked, nodding toward Marsie’s open laptop and the printouts of her Excel spreadsheet on the counter.

  “As of five tonight, thirty men have looked at my profile, five have winked at me—whatever that means—and two have said, ‘Hey.’ Action is required.”

  “You could have written something in return.” Beck’s fingers trailed along her granite countertop as she came around the island and looked over Marsie’s shoulder. “You’re smart. You don’t need me every step of the way.”

  “Ha. You weren’t at the bar for the disastrous date I had the last time I tried this all by myself. Clearly, I can’t be trusted.”

  “That’s an n of one,” Beck said, mimicking one of Marsie’s favorite phrases, the thing she said whenever anyone tried to generalize to the entire population based on a small sample size.

  “Yeah, I know. But I don’t want to waste any more time kissing frogs. There has to be a prince for me out there somewhere.”

  “What’s this?” Beck pressed a finger on the printouts and glided the papers across the counter.

  “It’s my rubric,” Marsie replied, not glancing up from her laptop as she signed into her profile. “So I can score profiles and know who to reply to.”

  “Height, possible five points,” Beck read. “Education, possible ten points. Compatibility of television shows, possible two points. Attractiveness of profile picture—I like how you spelled out picture instead of writing ‘pic’—two points. Only two points?”

  Marsie looked up. “I either think the profile picture is attractive, has the possibility to be attractive, or isn’t at all attractive. So three options, zero, one and two.”

  “But isn’t attractiveness at least as important as height, which has five possible points.”

  “Oh—” Marsie waved her hand in the air, then went back to her computer “—the final grade is basically a weighted average. Height and attractiveness of profile picture equal out in the equation, though education stays more important.”

  “Right. How silly of me,” Beck said in that tone of voice she had when she thought Marsie had taken something too seriously.

  “Here.” Marsie turned her computer around with the spreadsheet pulled up. “I put desired traits across the top and names along the side. I was just going to total the scores, which is this cell,” she said, pointing the mouse at the correct spot on the screen. “I was planning on basing all my decisions on that total score, but I’m worried that someone could skew their results by getting full points in all the minor desirables and zero points on the major ones. Like all cute and good taste in television, but not the kind of education I want my life partner to have.”

  Marsie looked up to see if Beck was following her. Beck’s lips were pursed, so she was paying attention, but that was also a sign that she thought Marsie was being ridiculous. Which Marsie ignored. She’d spent a lot of time thinking about what she wanted out of a partner and creating an equation to match. Plus, the math was the interesting part. Filling out the profile, going on the dates...drudgery.

  “I created this equation here,” she said, moving the mouse to another cell, “to give me a better understanding of how someone scores, assuming they are high in the desirables that really matter to me, like education, and low in the desirables that don’t, like where they’ve traveled to in the past. If someone scores 70 or higher in either the total score or 7 or higher in the weighted average, I’ll wink at them or respond to an email. If they score 80 or 8, I’ll message them. Before I’ll agree to a date, their total score through all forms of interaction has to have reached 90 or 9.”

  “Your total scores are either 100 or 10? How’d you make that work?”

  Marsie felt the sheepish look that crossed her face. “I massaged the equations a little. I like the round numbers.” Then she shook off her embarrassment as if it were a light dusting of snow. She’d had fun creating the equations. Sitting at her desk in her favorite chair, her lamp making a spotlight on the pages spread out over the wood, and a cup of tea that had already cooled because she’d been too diverted by the math to stop to drink it. Flow, that feeling of being so involved in something that the rest of the world fell away.

  At the time, she hadn’t cared about how massaging the equation to force the round numbers would affect the validity of her system. It was her system, and she was going to be applying the equations equally to all of the men. Plus, she wasn’t handing her system into a professor to be graded. Beck was the only person who would see it. Sure, Beck made faces at Marsie’s silliness, but that’
s what her friend called it: silliness. Like Marsie was just one of the girls.

  When the flow had stopped and Marsie had looked up from her scribbles, what she had wanted was someone to share her equations with.

  More silliness. Because if she’d had someone with whom to share her fun with spreadsheets, she wouldn’t need them in the first place.

  But she’d kept the pages because the man she fell in the love would want to see them. He’d be amused by them, maybe even offer suggestions on how to improve them. Comment on the way she’d labeled the charts. Laugh about how much she liked round numbers. It would be a romantic moment they would share over a bottle of Chianti and spaghetti with a spicy marinara sauce.

  No, maybe a grapefruity sauvignon blanc with fish tacos.

  Beck pointed her glass of wine at the laptop, bringing Marsie back to the task at hand. “So, if you’ve got all this math to figure out who to talk to, why and how, what do you need me for?”

  “The math will help me find the man, but you’re going to help me talk to him. I need help writing emails.” Not that Marsie couldn’t write. She could write persuasive articles full of graphs and charts and numbers, but writing a chatty, easygoing, get-to-know-you email would take her an hour a sentence.

  She didn’t have that kind of time.

  Beck laughed and pulled the computer toward her. “Okay, what’ve we got?”

  “Well, I figure we can look at the first ten men on the site and see what we get. That will be enough for the night.” Maybe enough for the week. Online dating was, in theory, fine. Everyone was doing it, and it’s not like Marsie was meeting people at work or at bars or at the gym. Though, to be fair, she ended the bar experiment a while ago, and she was at the gym to work out not to talk, and she was at work to work. But she’d rather continue trying online dating than change her routine.

  But fine in theory didn’t remove the squicky feeling that she would be looking at pictures of real people, reading what they had written about themselves, and then she was going to grade them. As if they were objects, not human beings.

  She reached for the bottle of wine and poured herself another big glass. The spreadsheet helped with her uneasiness. It made the judgments of who to interact with and why less personal. What she didn’t know was if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  Maybe it was just a thing, she thought, taking a long sip out of her glass. “Who’s first?” she chirped, picking up her pen and readying herself over her printouts.

  Judging by the expression on Beck’s face, she wasn’t fooled by Marsie’s fake cheer, but she clicked on the first picture anyway. “He’s cute,” she said, turning the computer so that Marsie could see the screen.

  “I’ll give him one point for attractiveness,” Marsie said, scratching a one into the appropriate cell. She’d always liked doing the work on paper before entering anything into a spreadsheet. It wasn’t always possible, but writing things out by hand helped her think.

  “Only one? From what you said about your rating system, I would think a two.”

  “His smile in the picture looks fake. But I’ll bet it’s nice in person,” she allowed.

  “Whoever you award a two will have to be a paragon of attractive masculinity,” Beck replied. “And I can’t imagine that man will be any fun to be around.”

  “That’s why attractiveness of the photo doesn’t have much weight in my equation,” Marsie replied tartly. “Ultimately, it’s just not that important to me.”

  “By why... Never mind. I’m sure you have a reason for being picky about the scores you assign even when it’s not an important factor to you, but I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

  “Because accuracy is important,” Marsie said, even though Beck had specifically said she didn’t care.

  “Accuracy and yet you massaged the numbers to get grades of 100 and 10,” Beck pointed out with raised brows.

  The wine in her glass sloshed as she waved her hand over the papers and laptop. “This is an art, not a science.” They both laughed at the ridiculousness of that statement.

  The pot on the stove burbled as it started to boil, and Beck slid out of her seat. “You rate the next one while I get the pasta in. But don’t move from the profile. I want a chance to see all of them.”

  “You’re happily married,” Marsie said, pitching her voice loud enough to be heard over the cascade of pasta into the pot.

  “Window-shopping,” her friend called over her shoulder.

  Marsie laughed as she jotted down her notes on Waterski25. He was fine, she guessed. Got a 75, so she winked at him.

  They kept going through the men as they poured more wine and slurped pasta. The more they sipped, the longer each evaluation took and the more they laughed, about the men, about dating, about the ridiculousness of rating people on a spreadsheet. And, as Marsie moved on to the last man, the splotches of tomato on the printouts had gotten extra funny.

  She wobbled as she stood and had to brace herself on the counter.

  “You didn’t plan on driving home tonight?” Beck asked.

  “Not any longer.” The ground moved a lot more while she was standing than it had when she’d been sitting down. “Can I sleep here?”

  “Sure. The sheets on the guest bed are clean. Do you need me to get out the aspirin?”

  “No, I know where it is by now.” She didn’t indulge in this much alcohol often, but when she did it happened at Beck’s house. Though not often was still often enough to have a routine. She shook her head, regretting that action immediately.

  “Thanks, Beck. For doing this with me. I’m not sure I could have done this on my own.”

  “I don’t know what took you so long. It seems like everyone is doing online dating these days. Hell, my younger sister has three apps on her phone for it.”

  “I liked the idea that I could do it on my own. Meet someone like they do in the movies.”

  “You know, signing up for online dating doesn’t mean you can’t still meet someone while in line at the grocery store. Though that would probably be easier if you didn’t have your groceries delivered.”

  “Only when I have a deadline at work,” she said defensively.

  “Oh, get upstairs,” Beck said with a wave. “This won’t be so bad, you’ll see. You might meet some nice people.”

  “That’s what Jason said.”

  “Who’s Jason?”

  “He does maintenance around the office. Caught me working on my profile. I think he’s one of those people with three dating apps on their phone.” Her lips had slurred over the word “think,” so she muttered the word under her breath several times until she felt like it came out correctly.

  “Oh, well, I don’t know this Jason fellow, but it sounds like he has the right idea. Have fun.”

  “I—” she paused, giving herself extra time to concentrate on the next word “—think my spreadsheets are fun.”

  “They’re fun for you,” Beck said, placing a heavy hand on Marsie’s shoulder. “Just don’t let them get in your way. Math and statistics can’t solve all the world’s problems.”

  “The hell you say,” Marsie said with a laugh as she grabbed her purse and stumbled down the hall to crawl up the stairs. “I’ll clean up in the morning.”

  “Maybe we’ll be lucky and Neil will beat us both to it.”

  “Ha!” Marsie looked up the long set of stairs that seemed steeper than usual. Which was probably the alcohol. Then she sighed, lifted her foot and began her climb. Like dating and finding a mate, one step at a time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IF A DATE was going well, Jason usually ordered another drink. Not enough to get him light-headed, but something to hold on to while he and the lovely lady across the table talked and laughed. If a date was going south, he had, on occasion, ordered enough to
drink that he had to Uber his way home after seeing the woman to her car.

  Tonight was one of those other nights. Those nights when he was two hours and one drink in, and Allison hadn’t caught any of his polite overtures about the night being over. The waitress had disappeared into a black hole on the other side of the restaurant.

  Not a black hole. The customer whose table she’d attached herself to was very cute. Even Jason could see that and men weren’t his type. However, he wasn’t the only non-cute-dude customer who wanted her attention and wasn’t getting it. Someone was going to complain to the manager soon. It might be Jason, if he could figure out how to get Allison to stop telling a story about her childhood cat and get out of this chair.

  “My mom had said I shouldn’t name him Muffin, but it went with our breakfast animals. My brother had his dog Bacon and my dad had Pancake and...” She paused to drink from her water glass.

  Good enough. “Allison, please excuse me. I’ve really got to use the bathroom.”

  Her water glass was resting on her bottom lip as she looked up at him. “Okay. Sure. The best part of the story will be here for you when you get back.”

  “I can’t wait,” he said, then kicked himself. He liked his job because he liked people. He got to work with his hands, improve the way the world worked one small repair at a time, and chat with all the interesting people who worked at the research firm. He also knew how to flatter people and make them feel good. Most of the time, he was sincere about it. But then there were nights like tonight when habit kicked in and Allison was smiling up at him, pleased that he was going to listen to some boring story about Muffin, and he wished he could be a dick, toss money on the table and leave.

  As soon as he rounded the corner of the bathroom, he pulled a random waiter aside and asked him to get their waitress and their check. He needed to be done with this date. He and Allison had met for coffee earlier in the week and that had gone well. But the more she drank, the more she talked, and the more she talked, the less well everything went.