When you sign up for online dating one of the features that most sites offer is that they will periodically send you suggestions via email of people they believe most closely fit who you are looking for. Some sites might have you answer a long list of questions and then, using a complicated algorithm, send you the people they think you might be interested in. But others have methods that are much less scientific and more random.

Like everything else with dating I think that this process, no matter who scientific a given site might try to make it seem, is very hit or miss since I have been sent matches who I’ve ended up contacting and others I wasn’t interested in at all. However, regardless of the success rate, sending people matches is a tool that sites employ to help users be exposed to more people and hopefully help foster more relationships.

I am currently in the process of looking for an apartment with two other friends of mine (one male and one female) and recently, after spending some time together looking for places, I called my female friend when I got home to ask her a question I had forgotten to ask while we were together. While we were generally chatting I opened up my laptop and began checking my email only to discover a dating website had sent me a fresh set of matches.

Since I am always very interested to see who the website thinks I will be compatible with I logged on, while we were still talking, in order to check. After briefly skimming through the profiles of the first two matches I determined I wasn’t really interested in them so I moved onto the third who, from the small profile picture, looked cute. The page took a little longer than normal to load since the Internet connection in my room is sometimes spotty. But once the page came up I immediately recognized my third match as the friend, and soon to be roommate, I was on the phone with.

Rudely I interrupted her mid-sentence; =I felt like this was a story worth changing subjects in order to tell her. After telling her the story we both had a laugh at how the site had selected us as being a “good match.” In the end I am not going to date my friend, no matter how compatible any dating website says that we are. However, after learning how suited the site thought we were for each other, I did feel even more confident that we are going to be excellent roommates.