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My index finger is longer than my ring finger. I'm pretty good at matching hexagon sizes. I can tell which smiles are sincere and my doodles are repetitive.
Is true love in my future?
More to the point, would the man of my dreams be an adventurous Explorer, a dependable Builder, an intuitive Negotiator or a dynamic Director?
That would depend on who I am, and Dr. Helen Fisher, an evolutionary anthropologist who studies romantic love, thought she had me pegged.
Over the grinding of beans and the cacophony of Seattle coffeehouse chatter, the Rutgers University love researcher shuffled through her data and pronounced happily (and here I paraphrase), "You're a reporter, so you must be an Explorer."
That remained to be seen. I'd know more after taking the 56-point questionnaire Fisher designed for Chemistry.com a year-old spinoff of Match.com, the nation's largest online dating site.
Scientific matching has become big in the online dating world so I tackled the questions -- "Do you ever ignore 'No Trespassing' signs?" "Do you ever make faces at yourself in the mirror?" -- and prepared to meet my match. Five matches, actually.
Moments later, a list of potential suitors hit my inbox. Bachelor No. 1 stopped me cold.
His name?Bubba.
Science can be cruel.
Fortunately, this was just a theoretical exercise -- a peek into the new courtship dance under way between science and online matchmaking.
There are dozens of Internet dating sites, and most operate in a fairly random way. In the past few years, however, several major sites that specialize in long-term relationships have hired scientific advisers to refine the matchmaking process.
In turn, researchers are recognizing that online dating sites, with membership in the millions, offer a vast, new resource for scientific insights into the mating game.
"Online dating provides an ideal and unprecedented opportunity," said Gerald Mendelsohn, a psychology professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
Backed by a three-year National Science Foundation grant, Mendelsohn and several colleagues are working with an online dating service -- he declined to say which one -- to gather data about how couples connect and bond over time.
"We want to do a natural history of relationship formation," he said. "There's been a fair amount of theorizing about how romantic relationships develop, but there's not been a lot of empirical study of it."
The U.S. has 89 million singles. A surprisingly large share -- 37 percent of the ones seeking romance -- use online dating sites, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which explores the Internet's impact on families and communities.
Most rate their online experience as positive, and nearly 1 in 5 said an online service led them to marriage or a long-term relationship.
Still, love remains maddeningly difficult to predict. Even casual seekers of sex and romance kiss a fair share of toads.
One new Web site, weirddatingmail.com, celebrates the campy depths to which online dating can descend. It posts icebreakers that, in hindsight, proved ill-advised.
Lines like, "I can cook dinner for you. Do you like squirrel?"
Or this gambit: "My likes are: I especially LOVE, and I do mean LOVE, firetruck races!!!"
Surely science can do better.
The first site to stake out the empirical high ground was eHarmony.com. Founded in 2000 by silver-haired Dr. Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist and relationship author with a churchy background, the secular site touts its "scientifically proven" compatibility matching system.
Aimed at marriage-minded heterosexuals, it offers a 436-question personality survey and uses "guided communication" to help potential couples become acquainted.
Another service, Perfectmatch.com, gets its academic gloss from Pepper Schwartz, aka "Dr. Pepper." The University of Washington sociologist and longtime relationship author ("Finding Your Perfect Match") co-developed a questionnaire that looks at such traits as "values and ideals" and "life and lovestyle."
The Perfectmatch site says its Duet Total Compatibility System "is the result of over 30 years of scientific research" and "is proven to be more effective than any relationship tool on the Web." Proven how and by whom, it doesn't say.
"So far," said Mendelsohn, the Berkeley psychologist, "there is very little publicly available on how (online) matching is done -- by anybody."
That may change once academic journals begin publishing the fruits of ongoing research. Already, Fisher has submitted one article to a peer-reviewed journal based on "first-meeting" feedback from 2,700 Chemistry.com members.
Meanwhile, she is analyzing questionnaire results from 523,000 members to test her hypothesis that mate selection is driven not just by compatibility but by an unconscious attraction to certain genetic differences that may aid species survival.
Biology, she believes, is the missing link in our understanding of romantic attraction -- an understanding that has proved elusive.
Researchers do know that compatibility in certain key areas such as value systems, socioeconomic status and education helps predict successful pairings. Beyond that, no clear blueprint emerges.
"Boy, we've just begun," said Fisher, author of the 2004 book, "Why We Love." "That's why this is so interesting, so exciting, so new."
Her research suggests people fall into four broad temperamental types based on brain-chemistry variations.
She calls these types the Driver (testosterone-driven men and women), the Builder (estrogen-driven people of either sex), the Negotiator (highly active serotonin) and the Explorer (high dopamine).
She designed the Chemistry.com questionnaire to weigh these traits within an individual to create a matching profile. Daters' feedback, in turn, will help her refine her hypothesis.
"I don't think there's any bad match," Fisher said. "They're just going to have different problems and advantages."
An example: "I get all these calls from women's magazines asking, 'Should you play hard to get?' They want a yes-or-no answer. But if you're going out with a Builder, do not play hard to get -- they want a straight game," Fisher said. "With the Explorer, you probably should. They love novelty, they love the chase."
My own two-page profile pegged me as a Negotiator/Builder -- a trusting, empathic person who is comfortable with "large, ambiguous issues."
I'd probably pair well with a Director or another Negotiator -- maybe even an Explorer, given my secondary Builder traits.
Later I learned that some of the survey's most fascinating questions -- how we doodle, the meaning of finger length and how well we read faces, for example -- don't factor into the scoring. Perhaps someday, but for now they're thrown in mainly for entertainment value.
I was crushed.
Meanwhile, I'm still a little steamed about the Bubba thing.
Fisher commiserated.
"Listen, none of these sites is going to get it right all the time," she said. "Even with the science, personality is very complicated. There will always be magic to love."
On the bright side, I've been in touch with a guy whose biochemical profile looks promising. He's an Explorer/Negotiator and he lives in my geographical area.
In fact, he lives under the same roof.
His name is Jack, and we've been married 28 years.
P-I reporter Cecelia Goodnow can be reached at 206-448-8353
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