The Epistemology of the “Match”

“It’s a match!” To date, the phones of 91 million persons around the globe have already buzzed with these words – the opening salvos of courtship in the world of online dating. Yet what, precisely, is a “match”? Behind the multi-billion-dollar dating industry stand programmers and statisticians seeking to bring, in the words of OkCupid’s Christian Rudder, “mathematically-minded … analysis and rigor to what had historically been the domain of love ‘experts’ and grinning warlocks like Dr. Phil.” Far from a hot-headed discourse of the passions, the “match” is about cool-headed engineering: the concepts and practices for sorting personal information and targeting individuals from among larger populations. The history of the “match” is a history of knowledge. Elena Serrano examines how early-eighteenth-century theories of the female body taught men to distinguish, from outward traits and gestures, between “physical” and “moral” love. Carla Bittel uncovers the role of phrenologists as experts in the marital marketplace, detailing the creation of cranial “profiles” to aid in selecting partners. Hansun Hsiung explores Charles Fourier’s “calculus of passions,” asking why the mathematization of partnership formed an essential component of utopian socialism. Erika Milam traces how the evolutionary study of same-sex behavior in animals initially naturalized heterosexual courtship norms but transformed into a defense of gay rights. From the eighteenth century through the twentieth, from humoral medicine and phrenology to mathematics and evolutionary biology, this panel explores the shifting sciences that have promised solutions to courtship, guaranteeing the “congeniality” and “harmony” of partners’ bodies and minds.