The peculiar nature of love

I hate eHarmony. It isn't just because they use the same people over and over again--I have a strong desire to throw my TV out the window every time Tanyalee comes on my screen--or that they charge a ridiculous amount for something that one can do for free on Facebook. It isn't even the fact that their absurdly long questionnaire's do nothing but waste one's time.

However, none of what I listed above are why I loath websites like eHarmony so.

I hate them because they are trying to bring logic to something as illogical as relationships. Who a person ends with or if they end up with anyone at all, depends much more on circumstance as it does on anything that can be quantified.

My grandfather met my grandmother as teenagers in a Detroit movie theater when both were there to meet other people. That chance meeting lead to a 30 year marriage that ended only with my grandmother's passing from cancer.

My father met my step-mother while working at Federal Express. It wasn't an instant match. She was married and he was burdened with a troublesome lad.But over the years--through the berth of a child and the dissolution of her marriage-they became the best of friends and eventually husband and wife.

On the surface, those two circumstances are dramatically different. One was the rarest of all romantic encounters--instant match. The other took a significant passage of time for love to blossom.

But at deeper level, both relationships happened because of chance. Who could predict that two people who came to the same place to meet other people would fall in love? What personality test could see the match of two co-workers with very different personalities?

Love is indefinable. You cannot subject it to a battery of psychoanalytical or physiological tests and expect to determine what exactly causes a "match". It is a unpredictable thing that most times results from a casual meeting.It can at a bar, through the machinations of friends, or the result of some mundane activity such as riding a bicycle or walking through a store. It just happens.

That is why I see dating websites as nothing more as gathering places for the lonely to arrange booty calls or to meet new friends. The occasional couple can result from the use of such sites, but most of those relationships fade to black. The rare ones that do last do so out of chance. As stated before, love can be found anywhere--on land, sea, air, or on the internet. It knows no boundaries.

Sitting here in a cafeteria, I glance around at woman sitting by themselves and think "Is she the one?Will this be the day?" More than likely they are not.But Love like Life, is unpredictable. You never know when that casual meeting will occur or even know at the time that it has, until later on. That is what makes the game of love so utterly nerve wracking and exhilarating.