"Top Matches"

I get this daily email from Match.com with “top matches selected just for me”. Somehow I don’t think there’s too much going into the pulling of these so-called matches. Snapshots of the profiles include the photo, and the following info.

(1) Age / Location. Age, at least, does not appear to line up to my specified range, which I would think is one of the easiest things to match on. Unfortunately there are a zillion people from Chicago on Match, so that's hardly narrowing it down for me.

(2) % Match. So far I haven’t gotten higher than 86% on the email, a B+ if you're grading on the curve.

(3) Height (in Inches and Centimeters). Sometimes it also adds “Slender” after the height. I think the male appropriate term is actually “Slight”, but the odd thing is that’s the only physical attribute that appears on the email, not “average” or “stocky” or whatever the others are. I don’t like slender so maybe they’re warning me?

(4) Age Range of Women He Seeks. I like how some guys have round numbers, like 25-35 and others are really specific, like 23-31. There are the typical huge age ranges, like 24-42 (for a 35-year old), and then the exclusively younger range, like 24-31 for a 33-year old. Of course all men go WAY younger than their own age.

(5) Previous Relationship Status. The most frequent answer is “He has been in committed relationships but was never married”.

I don’t know how I answered this question on my profile, but if I was being honest I should have been looking for the “I haven’t been in a stable, committed relationship in years, but I regularly get over attached to men I’m not in committed relationships with and now feel I’m ready for said stable, committed relationships” option. Doesn’t this option just mean “Never married”? No one will admit to never being committed so this hardly seems like an accurate assessment of anything.

(6) Faith. This is a pretty basic stat, but how could I be an 86% match with someone who is Jewish when I explicitly excluded it from the list of religions I would match up with? I’m pretty open on most comparables but I’m fundamentally not Jewish and won't be a match for anyone identifying himself as such.

(7) Kid Status. “Someday, He will want children”. I love this one, I think because of the way it’s annotated. It seems wistful.

Focusing on the details of the presentation instead of the content is obviously not the purpose of these emails, but since at this point I’m mostly letting men come to me it hardly seems necessary to do anything but critique them. The emails, that is, not the men. I’ll be saving that for when they send me an email, obviously.