The Car­mena Waltz, com­posed in 1902, fea­tures a smit­ten girl caught up in deliri­ous in­fat­u­a­tion. The song is staged at a soiree where music and moon beams in­tox­i­cate.

Amid the throng,
many, many are fair.
Bright flow­erets twined in raven hair!
Dark eyes sparkle and gleam,
soft lips breath ten­der sighs…

We imag­ine our­selves swoon­ing in cho­rus amid the lush pageantry; the plot thick­ens.

Ah! Now rings a voice I know from every voice apart!
Through the or­ange grove he has­tens, he is com­ing…
O, my heart!

I have a friend who’s been seek­ing a lover. She uti­lizes dat­ing sites and does a cer­tain amount of Face­book stalk­ing. Often our con­ver­sa­tions me­an­der to the next step in her mis­sion to re­trieve a lover. True to our cul­ture of im­me­di­ate sat­is­fac­tion, she wants the dirt tout suite. Even be­fore the first date, when she’s merely ex­am­in­ing prospects, she seeks the rich­est caches of in­for­ma­tion. Who are they? What are their goals? How much in­vest­ment are they will­ing to put into a re­la­tion­ship? What are their in­se­cu­ri­ties?

One can so quickly dis­cern mul­ti­ple lay­ers of a per­son’s per­son­al­ity in today’s dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of so­ci­etal net­works. The weeks, months, or even years-long work of ask­ing around with the bar­keep, your mother’s cousin, your neigh­bors, or the town gos­sip has taken a back seat to the dig­i­tal gos­sip reel. When my friend signs in, she re­acts to these po­ten­tial lovers’ im­ages, sta­tis­tics, gen­eral out­look, sense of humor. At once you can see sev­eral styles of a per­son’s two di­men­sional fac­sim­ile, their body and ges­tural stance in photo. You can see the in­ter­twined streams of their his­to­ries: em­ploy­ment, fam­ily ties, un­named re­la­tion­ships. You’ll see towns they visit, hob­bies they pur­sue. Some list pock­ets of in­for­ma­tion as teases, while oth­ers still in­flate their pos­i­tive traits with bias. Some chose to re­veal the very crux of their per­son­al­i­ties: their hubris, their deep­est de­sires.

It’s not that the ma­jor­ity of hu­man­ity now starts the great ro­mances of their lives dig­i­tally, but the in­ter­net is a tool we now use for love among so many other in­ter­ac­tions. We talk, plan, and scope each other out via the in­ter­net. We have the op­tion to see our so­cial net­work through a fil­tered view un­avail­able to our lady in Car­mena. If she did fil­ter out peo­ple in her com­mu­nity (he should love the smell of or­ange blos­soms, adore my sparkling eyes, be be­tween the ages of 23 and 35, iden­tify as a ‘ca­sual so­cial drinker’ and non-smoker, have no chil­dren, and live within 100 — no, no — 150 miles of zip code 98501) would she have had any­body left? How many peo­ple did she have to look through to find love? How many dif­fer­ent part­ners and cities did she live in as a sin­gle in­de­pen­dent woman? Could her choices have in­cluded four hun­dred new “friends” she made after at­tend­ing a year at a uni­ver­sity?

When I sing the waltz, my senses vol­un­teer them­selves to in­ter­pret the lyrics. I am ex­cited by the sen­sual fra­grance of the or­ange grove, my eyes de­light in think­ing of or­nately styled black locks. I imag­ine the moon’s beams seem­ing to high­light the el­e­gant de­signs of human faces. When I am using all of my senses to be pre­sent in a mo­ment, my emo­tions swell and it seems nat­ural that love would fol­low, or so we are told in songs like Car­mena. But through the ad­vent of dat­ing web­sites and dig­i­tal so­ci­ety I have to won­der: is it an­ti­quated to have to be phys­i­cally pre­sent with some­one to have the bio­chem­i­cal in­ter­change of falling in love? Will we even will judge our next mates with the phys­i­cal world as pri­mary cri­te­ria?

Ul­ti­mately it takes a mix of every sen­sual and log­i­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion mech­a­nism work­ing in a mad frenzy to fall in love as hu­mans. We know that soft lips breath­ing ten­der sighs are in­fi­nitely more sway­ing than a poke, an email, or a sext. But the dig­i­tal so­ci­ety and our dig­i­tal pres­ence al­lows us to flirt and show­case our charms like no other species or gen­er­a­tion of human has ever been able to.