The Algorithm Found Me a New Best Friend. I Have to Vet Him

The friendship app matched me with someone who shares my interests, my schedule, and my sense of humor. We meet for coffee on Thursday. I have to fill out a compatibility survey about him afterward, or the app withdraws the introduction.

The app works like the dating apps, except the goal is friendship, which is either more noble or more sad, depending on the week. It matches on interests, availability, communication style. It found me someone who also likes old movies, also walks on Sundays, also has strong opinions about bread. It is the best match I have ever been offered, and I have never met him.

We meet Thursday. The app has prepared me: conversation starters, suggested topics, a warning to avoid the subjects that historically tank friendships. It has also prepared him, which I know because the app told me, and I have started to wonder what we will talk about when both of us are following the same script.

After the coffee, I have to rate him. The app calls it a compatibility check-in. The rating determines whether we are matched again, and I have started to feel the pressure of it, the pressure of being graded on a friendship before the friendship has had time to be anything. I have started to rehearse the rating I will give him, and I have started to suspect he is rehearsing his rating of me.

Here is what I miss, and I miss it terribly: the old way. The way you met a person by accident, by proximity, by being in the same room week after week until one of you said something and the other laughed. The way a friendship was not a match but a sediment, building up slowly, without a score. The app has replaced the sediment with a search, and the search is efficient, and the efficiency is the problem.

I am going to the coffee. I am going to talk about old movies and bread, and I am going to try not to think about the survey, and I am going to remember that the app found us, but it cannot be us. If it works, it will work the old way, one laugh at a time, and if it does not, the app will find me someone else, and I will rate him, and the ratings will pile up, and somewhere in the pile I will keep looking for the thing the app cannot match, which is the accident of it.