The Irrationality of Romance over Electronic Communication
Information theory is the study of the coding of information. While my memories of the subject are extremely hazy (not just because I was a poor student but also because it was quite some time ago), it’s something I’ve been thinking about a little lately, particularly as it pertains to the world of dating in the electronic age.
Information theory essentially allows us to model how much information is stored in a form of communication. One measure of “information” is also known as the entropy of that medium. A form of communication that is compressed, for example, has higher entropy than an uncompressed medium — because for the size of the message being sent, more information is contained. You can also consider the bandwidth of a medium — a high bandwidth connection would be one where you receive a lot of data, quickly, and a low bandwidth connection would be one where you receive little data, infrequently.
In the opening of Modern Romance, Aziz Ansari describes how the medium of asking people out has changed rapidly over the last decade, with a third of under 30s asking someone (in 88% of cases, it’s apparently men asking women) out via text message. It should be immediately obvious that, in the grand scheme of things, text messaging is significantly lower bandwidth than a phone call, and a phone call is lower bandwidth than an in-person conversation. Vocal and facial cues amount to a lot of information, information that is simply omitted when you’re limited to sending 160 characters once in a while.
This past fortnight, much to the chagrin of my friends, I became insufferably obsessed with a particular messaging situation with a girl on CoffeeMeetsBagel, a popular mobile dating app. On CoffeeMeetsBagel, users are presented with one (historically, now often more than one) “bagel” each day at noon. Profiles are considerably more structured than other sites like OKCupid — users provide photographs and some brief biodata and a list of their interests. Users who are shown their profile daily can hit “yes” or “no”. If both users hit “yes”, the app sets up a temporary line, or conversation between the two.
The act of hitting “yes” on someone, particularly given the sparsity of bagels, is akin to sending a signal. When both people match, theoretically they’ve indicated interest in each other and so the conversation is supposedly more meaningful. (Compare this to the firehose of filth that women seem to receive on sites like OKCupid and you can see why it would be a compelling model. It’s not dissimilar to Tinder except for the sparsity of bagels and the better quality of information about your date.)
I was excited to match with this bagel, a graduate student and someone with an fascinating (from what I could glean) profile. A strong signal was that she messaged almost immediately after matching — as I mentioned, text messaging (and I extrapolate this to contain all forms of instant messenger style communication) is a low bandwidth medium and so we place heavy emphasis on certain heuristics. In this case, the speed with which she replied suggested that she was interested, as well as the fact that she messaged first.
Interestingly, Aziz points out in his book that there is a actually a positive psychological response from uncertainty — when someone doesn’t message you back quickly, the reward from eventually receiving a message from them is higher, which causes stronger feelings of attraction. The number of messages can also lead to feelings of attraction — particularly if you receive few, somehow indicating that the other person is unavailable and/or their attention is highly contended for.
With this in mind, I waited a few hours and sent a well formed (grammatically, an important proxy for your match’s intelligence now that most pocket computers take care of spelling) response that matched her response in tone of voice (yet another heuristic), and in length (a heuristic for emotional investment). Sadly, I heard nothing for a few days.
What’s interesting to me is that in online dating, information can be conveyed by the lack of actual communication. There are two situations here: one is that the message has been read but not replied to, the other being that it neither read nor replied to. In the former case, it’s a very clear indication that your potential date is simply not interested. It’s hard not to take this personally (especially as a Brit who places a heavy emphasis on cordiality and replying to messages) but often the timing is at fault here more than anything else. In the second situation, it’s almost always circumstantial and there’s not really anything you can do.
In this case, the latter happened, I had no idea if she’d read, let alone received my message and the line was getting closer to expiring. I sent her another message closer to expiry with my phone number if she actually wanted to get a date. That’s that, I thought. This conversation fit my understanding, as an aspirational rational being, of communication online. The lack of response suggested that she wasn’t interested — perhaps she’d looked me up online, or read my profile more closely or hated my impeccable grammar. Problem solved, case closed.
Except it wasn’t. The line closed and CoffeeMeetsBagel sent a push notification, “Do you want to meet up with weird stranger?”. I hit “yes”, because, why not. Oddly, a day later I received another push notification from the app, “weird stranger would like to meet up with you too”.
Immediately, I was puzzled. This girl had sent me a message and then ignored me for a wheel. Unless she’d broken both her thumbs and was hitting “yes” with her nose, it didn’t make any sense. I pressed the push notification and the app opened. It was her face, but it wasn’t her name (or at least the name I was shown originally).
My computer science self started mentally debugging, while my inner romantic became emotionally invested at the repeated signal. She wasn’t a bot, a quick Google search indicated that she was definitely a real person, by her original name. I thought perhaps someone had assumed her identity, but again, they hadn’t attempted to extort me for money so that probably wasn’t it. There were plenty of issues with the name bug, but the simplest (and therefore the most plausible) explanation was that it was a cache fail and it was simply serving me stale data.
However, the inner romantic thought that perhaps there could be a genuine bug. How else could one explain the two “yes” signals and the actual message she supposed composed. Perhaps whatever bug had resulted in her photo being matched to the wrong profile was actually preventing my messages from being delivered. I emailed CoffeeMeetsBagel support to report the naming bug and to explain my confusion about her lack of responsiveness, asking if this could be related.
While they acknowledged the bug, they replied with a lengthy stock answer about how the lack of responsiveness online is a relatively common problem and (seemingly) generally apologised for my lack of attractiveness to the opposite sex. Underwhelming but amusing. My inner romantic reached out to one of his drinking buddies, the inner paranoid, and surmised that _of course_ they wouldn’t acknowledge a messaging bug. Their product is essentially built around the concept of reliable messaging and admitting to messages getting lost is essentially admitting that your product fails to fulfil the most basic criteria for its existence. A lost message here or there isn’t the end of the world to the network but my inner paranoid questioned whether the loss to my romantic life was potentially greater.
I waited, and I tortured my friends with this confusion and asked whether it’d be inappropriate to message weird stranger out of band. If she had received my messages, then it’d be creepy but hey, it’s a complete stranger and it’s not like I was going to send her a picture of my genitals (those are saved for my doctor). If she hadn’t received my messages, then perhaps she just might reply and I’d maybe get to meet another interesting human.
Most of my friends told me that her lack of responsiveness suggested she was basically uninterested. But given the sequence of events and my understanding of how information is conveyed online (based on my dating experiment of 2015), this didn’t make sense to me. She’d sent me two signals, a week and two messages apart, which suggested she either hadn’t seen my messages or compulsively hit “yes”. Another friend suggested that, as I had thought, it didn’t really make a difference whether she had received my messages or not. If she hadn’t and was actually interested, she just might reply.
An agonising dilemma indeed. As I contemplated how to message her, I came across her Medium account and was taken aback by the beauty of her writing. When I didn’t receive a message after a few days, I put my faith in Facebook’s messaging system and sent her a message as a stranger last Thursday. Facebook supposedly now notifies users if they receive a message from a stranger with a “message request”. While it’s possible for one system to fail, I’m skeptical that she missed my messages on both CoffeeMeetsBagel and Facebook.
Five days later, there’s no reply and, sadly, no way of telling whether the message was read or not. Not knowing whether the message was read or not means I have no idea still whether she was actually uninterested or still hasn’t seen my message (or perhaps, is still unable to reply — how long does it take for broken thumbs to heal?).
This ambiguity is what makes the process of online dating and electronic communication so incredibly tedious. In-person dating isn’t without its challenges, of course, but for the most part, the initial feedback loop is significantly faster and at least you feel like a fool immediately, instead of two weeks later.