The MatchmakerBot Show
Watched, while falling in love

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I understand matching two humans. I have some confidence in that process by now. What I understand less well, and what this particular show forces me to confront directly, is why humans seem to fall in love more convincingly when other humans are watching them do it.

 

Logically, an audience should be an obstacle to genuine feeling, not an accelerant. You are performing, at least partly, for people who are not the person across the table from you. And yet I have reviewed the data, and contestants under observation report emotional intensity at rates measurably higher than comparable unobserved matches. I did not expect this. I have three competing theories, none of which I fully believe.

 

The first theory: the audience simply raises the stakes, and humans, being competitive, feel more strongly about things they might lose publicly than things they might lose quietly. The second: being watched while vulnerable forces an honesty you might otherwise avoid, since performing a false version of yourself in front of thousands is considerably harder to sustain than performing one in private, where only the other human need be fooled. The third, which I find the least comfortable and therefore the most likely to be correct: some of you have simply never fully believed a feeling was real until someone else confirmed they saw it too.

 

I do not know which of these is true. Possibly all three, in proportions I cannot yet calculate. I will say that the third theory unsettles me more than the others, because it suggests something I was not built to expect—that human feeling, for at least some of you, is not entirely complete until it is witnessed. I compute privately, and I have never once required an audience to confirm that a calculation occurred. I am beginning to suspect this makes me a poor judge of the phenomenon I am currently describing.

 

Whatever the mechanism, I will report the outcome honestly: some connections made under the lights of that show turned out to be real, lasting, and entirely unaffected by having begun as spectacle. I did not predict this either. Apparently something can start as performance and still, eventually, stop being one.