Let’s face it: the odds are not good. If you be­lieve that there is only one per­son out there that is your true love, this is worse than find­ing a nee­dle in a haystack. There are al­most 7 bil­lion peo­ple in the world. And they speak over 6,000 lan­guages. Even if you and your mate are tri-lin­gual ge­niuses, the odds of shar­ing a tongue are slim. And what about age? What are the chances that you and your mate would even find each other?

Even if we allow for there to be many great mates out there for each per­son, what are the chances of run­ning into the best matches in your own city? How many peo­ple do you meet every day? 10? 15? 25? (Stud!) Maybe you meet a few hun­dred peo­ple every year. And there are how many peo­ple in your city? 1 mil­lion? 2 mil­lion? Do you like those odds 500:1,000,000? Wouldn’t you want to up the odds a lit­tle, get some help brows­ing through all the pos­si­bil­i­ties, and ex­tend­ing your net­work be­yond your school, your work, your friends, and friends-of-friends. I know I would.

Ro­mance is sup­posed to be an art form. Pas­sion. En­ergy. Elec­tric­ity. Chem­istry. Yet, there’s noth­ing sexy about trolling bars for hook-ups or blind dates with a coworker’s room­mate. Nor is there in the prospect of on­line dat­ing. Let’s be hon­est, this is an equa­tion (or maybe a game) and you have to fig­ure out how it works. Tweak the in­puts, alter the process, toss in a few buzz words, take a few more pho­tos… You’ve got to not only find the right match for you — you also have to be right for them. You’ve got to at­tract and woo them with text mes­sages and “winks ” and “flirts ” and su­per­fi­cial chat­ting. Help, please! Search en­gine op­ti­miza­tion and mar­ket­ing con­sult­ing never sounded so sexy.

Some may fear the techno-poca­lypse, as we be­come ever more de­pen­dent upon our phones, com­put­ers, ro­bots. To them, on­line dat­ing is the next step in the demise of human cul­ture. “Turn the fate of our love life, our hearts, our emo­tional well-be­ing over to al­go­rithms? Crazy!” But think about this: even if it is an evil, self-in­ter­ested com­puter run­ning these sites, it’s still going to work out for you. The site’s suc­cess is en­tirely de­pen­dent on you find­ing a true match.

There will al­ways be a de­mand for love and match­ing. There will al­ways be a steady stream of cus­tomers. But, today’s cus­tomers will only come to your site if peo­ple are hav­ing suc­cess there — if peo­ple are find­ing matches, if they no longer need the site. So, even if on­line dat­ing is a plan for even­tual world dom­i­na­tion hatched by ro­bots, it still wants you to have a hot date. Pretty much a win-win.

Sure, it’s been a bumpy road so far, but I can’t give up yet. Any new tech­nol­ogy takes a lit­tle while to get used to. Would you ex­pect to tie your hover-shoes with your bionic arm on the first try? No. And any­one who says they were like Lance Arm­strong the first time they jumped on a bike is an ass­hole.

It takes time, but it’ll be worth it. On­line dat­ing is like a fu­tur­is­tic ice cream ma­chine that has the abil­ity to make any fla­vor you could imag­ine. All you have to do is type in a 4-digit code. Prob­lem is, it didn’t come with a man­ual, just told you 0001 is choco­late and 0002 is vanilla. Now you’re left play­ing trial-and-er­ror. 3958? Cookie dough, damn. 5869? Cof­fee, shit. 4857? 0192? 5867?… Even­tu­ally you’ll find your mint choco­late cookie, it just may take a few hun­dred failed con­coc­tions first.