Finding Love

A friend of mine is juggling emerging relationships with several women. He’s proceeding as just a friend to each of them, but hopes to approach something more with someone. It’s a difficult time, whether one has a single prospect or several.

We almost have the technology for the perfect solution.

Virtual dating will answer all relationship questions without exposing real people to the inconvenience, disappointment or actual pain of a relationship that goes nowhere.

Every participant in virtual dating will undergo complete personality and behavioral profiling. The virtual dater will be programmed to act exactly as the real specimen acts at any given time. Do you have bad breath in the morning? Crazy hair? Do you start the day with a fart?

If you’re looking for a life partner, you want to expose as much of your life as possible. The virtual relationship will test the limits.

You can sign up for a bail-out option if your virtual date proves too disappointing. At no penalty, and only slight extra charge, a fantasy cheating partner will come in and separate you from the original object of your curiosity. That way you can at least score.

Unlike in reality, virtual sexual relations have no repercussions. You can do it as many times as you like, in as many ways, to see if what excites you initially bores or disgusts you later.

With a virtual date you are free to be yourself, because it won’t lead to gossip. The virtual date may respond negatively to something you do, if the real original would do so, but it won’t compromise your real relationship, for instance at work or in some other ordinary social context.

There are flaws. If you each have a virtual date with each other’s duplicate, you know each other’s secrets and can love or hate each other just as easily as in a real relationship. Maybe even more easily, because the virtual image has to be more candid.

The honesty of the presentation would make most people look bad. People would have to get used to that before they could make full use of the information. But you could rip through a lot of virtual dates in a hurry, learning that all people have flaws. Then you’d be free to move on to more rational consideration of which flaws you can tolerate.

Of course people might give up on relationships entirely, because no one measures up. Or they might just specialize in facsimile sex and never get around to reality. As Scott Adams wrote in Dilbert, “When virtual reality becomes cheaper than dating, the human race is doomed.”