How falling in love differs from online dating. 
Falling in love
Love doesn’t arrive like a bus. Love arrives as a slow reveal, an awakening, a dawn. It doesn’t take an assigned seat or speak in plain sentences. Love needs propinquity to confidently find its way. Love needs to bump against the beloved and smell them. Love needs to watch the beloved from the corner of its eye. Love is exited eventually when it has warmed to the subject and faced the facts. Disliking the spotlight, love stirs in shadows telling you with urgent whispers that you have become vulnerable to that person with the extraordinary smile.
You will no longer be able to not notice them. As of now, you will worry over whether they notice you. Their face and words, lovely to you now, host uncertainties that trouble your sleep. Typically, at this point, love must pretend it doesn’t exist, at least for a time. This is as graceful as hiding a cow under a sheet. It makes normal life a self-conscious burden. Flirting with your love is as disorienting as a sudden accident where time distorts and details flicker and swoop.
Mostly, love will die on this vine, either tethered to silence or offered and declined.
But when love and love stand naked face to face, desire is the bridge. From both sides to the middle, they run. And something new is born.
Online dating
An ordinary e-commerce database replaces item color with ethnicity and product description with the story of your heart’s longing to find a home. Each human transforms, upon entry, into a product.
Each product describes itself and the product it hopes to find in turn. In their profiles, each product makes their case to be understood and recognized for their divine spark. Each provides photo evidence. Each provides lists of activities and music and food in hopes of being found and adopted by a stranger they will find it effortless to love.
The product automatically generates a query and when enough data points correlate, results cascade or trickle before the querent in rows of common faces, names, ages, and isolated facts. Carol, 47 Speaks English. Laura, 44 has cats. The querying product wanders through the matrix-like results looking for something that stands out from the vending machine assortment as somehow, more than a product. And it happens, a certain beauty or quirk distinguishes a profile and we browse deeper. We carefully seek evidence both pro and con about the candidate. Are they fresh and funny, does a selfie reveal the honest fat hiding behind the word voluptuous? Is there some terrible band waiting to appear in her favorite music? What do we do with that knowledge? Perhaps we LIKE them, which might be a request for contact or merely a vague seal of approval in passing. All that is left is to either reach out to them or turn and leave.
If we message them and if they reply, and if we survive the labyrinth of failed texting outcomes, each ending like a dead branch, we may achieve a date.
And if we date, two individuals composed of meat and hope find each other on the earth. At this point, we receive a lesson about how little our data points actually count toward the goal we’ve pursued. Our data points felt like investment capital online but here in this restaurant or coffee shop, they are dwarfed to trivia by the God of Chemistry.
Whenever two of us meet, the god of chemistry reveals the truth of our experiment in a court of no appeal. Over that hour or two we take in the truth, adjust expectations, swallow disappointment, and treat each other as we would want to be treated. We sit there at least briefly cast in the role of everything the other person was praying for and to them we look wrong and miscast in that role and the whole thing seems a bit crazy, now, how real this felt while texting.
