There are ideas that, until very recently, would have sounded implausible. Today, however, one of them is mentioned with surprising naturalness: the idea that a machine could find the right person for us.
For years now, applications have existed that classify people, assign them scores, and manage the search for love as though it were a contest of individualities.
But we are, at this very moment, on the threshold of the next logical step: trusting that, if we hand over enough data about ourselves — tastes, habits, fears, desires, conversations, schedules, reactions, clicks, opinions, and thousands of additional data points — a sufficiently intelligent system can tell us who fits best into our lives. In other words: that love, that historically mysterious, chaotic, magical phenomenon, can, as if it were a business process, finally be rationalized and optimized.
I invite you to reflect on love and these machines that now promise to find it for us. And to ask yourself whether love, the deepest and most inexplicable of feelings, will continue to enter our lives as it always has — by surprise, clumsy and unforgettable — or whether technology will turn it into an entirely plannable asset.
The promise of certainty
The hypothesis has its charm. Loving was never an exact science. Choosing another or allowing oneself to be chosen was never free from error and pain. There is the enthusiasm of the beginning, of course, but also rejection, misunderstanding, clumsiness, delay, the misread silence, the fear of unequal desire. The inevitable share of uncertainty. And precisely for that reason, the algorithm’s promise is so attractive: it seems to offer us certainties. Perhaps we need not wade so many times through confusion, waiting, exhaustion, disenchantment. Perhaps an intelligence trained on millions of cases can bring us, with greater precision than our instinct, closer to whoever suits us best.
When love enters the terrain of convenience, it perhaps ceases to be considered an encounter and is reduced to a coincidence between profiles — as if destiny could be summed up in a series of numbered affinities. Like a compatibility search process. The magic does not entirely disappear, of course. But it no longer seems to be solely about that person who bursts in, moves us, and alters our life. Instead, it seems to be about someone who fits, who coincides, who matches a favorable pattern. Love ceases to appear as an uncertain adventure and begins to present itself as a decidedly optimizable problem.
Before the algorithms
Technology did not invent our desire for guidance in matters of the heart. Long before apps and their algorithms, we already sought the advice of friends, family, the horoscope. Intuitions as human as they were unfounded. We always wanted some kind of map to navigate the labyrinth. But what we observe here is something else: the possibility of rationally justifying the decision itself.
Kierkegaard’s leap
Søren Kierkegaard understood that there are decisions that cannot be resolved through calculation. Because in them we do not merely choose among options: we choose ourselves. Reason may accompany us, but it has a limit. After that, what remains is the act of deciding.
That idea retains an extraordinary force. Because loving someone belongs, precisely, to those latitudes. Committing to a person, wagering on a shared story, risking one’s own intimacy, letting another into the center of one’s life.
A system can detect affinities, cross-reference habits, find symmetries. It can even tell us whether two lives appear compatible across nearly every visible dimension of what has been evaluated and measured. But even then, there still remains that moment when someone has to say: “Yes, I will take the risk.” I will trust. I will make the leap.
That is what Kierkegaard calls anxiety.
Anxiety as structure
Anxiety, in Kierkegaard, is the name for that experience in which we realize that no external structure can live for us. Choosing leaves us exposed. Choosing commits us. Choosing means assuming an act whose outcome is never entirely under control. And perhaps that is why our era, in close symbiosis with prediction, tends to see that exposure as a system failure. Something that should be corrected. Something that technology, with sufficient development, could resolve.
The algorithmic promise in the realm of love implies liberation from the burden of choosing poorly. Reducing avoidable suffering. Avoiding years of bad bets, sterile bonds, misunderstandings. Who would not want that? Who would not look favorably upon a tool capable of bringing together people who, without that mediation, would never have met? There is something genuinely valuable in that possibility. It breaks through geographic, social, and cultural barriers. It gives many people an opportunity that the randomness of material life might otherwise have denied them.
The tool that shapes perception
But a tool does not merely solve problems: it also shapes the way we perceive what it operates upon. And perhaps the most interesting thing about all of this is not asking whether systems can help us find a partner. Of course they can. The question may be another one entirely: what happens to us when we begin to understand the search for love through the logic of calculation, cost-benefit analysis, and assessed risk?
Throughout our history, love has been told as destiny, accident, miracle, mistake, catastrophe, blessing. Today it is increasingly told as an information problem. We have begun to describe what we feel with a different vocabulary. We no longer ask only who moves me, who transforms me, who disrupts my life in a fruitful way. We ask who is most compatible with me, who best matches my habits, who fits with the least friction into the prior design of my existence.
Compatibility and otherness
There is nothing wrong, in principle, with seeking compatibility. Every life shared together needs it. The problem is when compatibility becomes the supreme criterion. Love does not consist solely in finding what fits. It also consists in going out to meet what shifts us slightly out of place, what forces us to look again, what does not entirely match the image we had already assembled. It is not confirmation. It is alteration. It is not harmony. It is learning through difference.
Perhaps that is why the algorithm finds its limit not in its intelligence, but in the very nature of what it attempts to administer. A system learns from regularities. From repeated preferences. From prior choices. From observable behaviors. But a part of love happens, precisely, when someone steps outside their own structure. When they become interested in someone who was not in the script. When something erupts and disrupts the prior logic. There are encounters that do not seem probable and yet change a life because they touch something that no sum of data can rationalize in advance.
Uncertainty and essence
This is not about glorifying suffering or uncertainty. There are mistakes that teach nothing. There are bonds that only wear us down. This is not about idealizing pain, as if every wound made the one who suffers it more authentic. It is about understanding what is lost when we dream of erasing uncertainty entirely.
Because the ideal of a partner found through calculation does not merely eliminate risk. It also modifies the very essence of the bond. If a machine tells me that a certain person is the best available option for me, my relationship with the act of choosing changes. I can still decide, of course. No one forces me. But I no longer decide in the same way. My freedom enters the scene after having been oriented, classified, anticipated by an external intelligence that organizes the horizon of the possible.
The search for exemption
What is perhaps surprising is the passivity with which we accept being guided. It is we who hand over the data. It is we who offer our habits, our preferences, our fears, in the hope that something or someone will return to us a certainty we cannot build on our own. We want to be told: “This time, yes.” We want to be spared the most uncertain stretch of the road. Deep down, perhaps we are not only seeking love. We are seeking exemption.
We live surrounded by systems that personalize the world. The news we see, the music we listen to, the products we buy, the routes we follow, the films a platform recommends: everything seems tailored to our profile. The idea of a personalized partner seems, in that context, almost the natural culmination of the process. The other as an optimized experience. The other as a response, fine-tuned to my prior configuration.
But a love entirely adjusted to us runs the risk of becoming a mirror. And no one can truly love a mirror. Love needs similarity, yes. But it also needs otherness. It needs there to be, in the other, something that does not entirely belong to me. Something that cannot be reduced to my preferences. Something that confronts. Something that resists.
The question that remains
Perhaps the matter is not about deciding whether or not we should let an intelligent system help us find a partner. The binary formulation impoverishes the problem. The more interesting question is what kind of subject is formed when one begins to look at one’s own intimate life through the paradigm of calculation. What habits of perception, what expectations, what thresholds of tolerance, what fear of error, what contempt for uncertainty are incubated in that personality? To what extent do we remain authors of our own experience when we hand it over, with growing acceptance, to systems designed to reduce the friction of existing?
What technology can truly give
It would be too easy to end with a solemn condemnation of algorithms or, conversely, with a naive celebration of innovation.
Let us say it with absolute and unequivocal clarity: Technology can offer a real, concrete, and accessible tool for many people to enrich their lives.
It can cause paths to cross that would otherwise never have met, and extend an invisible hand to those who walk through life in solitude — that dark and widespread phenomenon of our times.
The truth, if there is one, lies in a zone still unexplored. Systems may bring us closer, more efficiently, to valuable people. And yet, no efficiency will resolve the irreplaceable core of love: that moment when two individuals expose themselves without any guarantee. That moment when, despite all the data, someone says “yes.” Or does not.
Perhaps what is human begins precisely there: at the point where prediction has already done everything it could, and there is still a choice to be made.
Because loving was never about finding a correct answer.
It is daring to place your life, even if only for a while, in the hands of another.