There's a fascinating, and sad, anthropology of lawyers looking for love in the WP today. The article profiles Friendswap, a dating event that caters to people for whom everything is an exchange value -- so much so that the "dates" arranged at the meetings are called "swaps". Naturally, everything is analyzed with state-of-the-art two-dimensional grids of informational abundance:
Dan Prieto ... has designed an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the 15 women who've been selected for him as possible love matches. The spreadsheet lists the women's jobs, hobbies and physical characteristics, and ranks them on a scale he devised of 1 to 3. Prieto, 35, uses it as a crib sheet for his conversations tonight with the women, whom he has scheduled at regular intervals.
The system is designed to be of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite:
Even when a single doesn't know her swap, she probably knows someone similar to that swap, which is to say similar to herself. The insularity of FriendSwap comes from the fact that it's invite-only.
God forbid any cross-class matchups should happen. Worst of all is being alone at such an event:
Worst of all are the guys who stand alone, looking into the middle distance, spots of conspicuous motionlessness in the moving crowd.
But if you ask the organizer of Friendswap why she's doing it, of course she has an economist's tautological justification for it:
The marginal cost to us ... is much less than the marginal benefit to everyone else.Posted by Chris at March 30, 2004 09:20 AM