10th of March, 2026
It is baked in. Every thing that crawls on the earth feels it. Everybody feels—the fascination with inherent traits of prospective partners. It would be crude to go into details, but yes, when we fall in love, we do measure, calculate, compare, and all suddenly become studious statisticians and geneticists. We leverage increasingly advanced technology to pass others' tests. This game, dozens of millions of years old, can crush or elate its players, but it certainly hasn't seemed that it would stop any time soon, so far.
We romantics, you and I, we understand that love need not be a game played with set rules, that in fact the most beautiful kind of love is contingent. We know that those lower instincts are just one of many aspects of love. We don't look to love as a problem to be solved, much less by technology. We can't accept that the way to find our life's joy should be an algorithm predicting matches from simple things like looks or hobbies. We even reject that there is an algorithm in the first place, because we know what we want springs from circumstances that come together only once in history. Comparing two manifestations of it, we know, is drawing a likeness of the face of God.
The annoying thing is that though we know all of that to be true, not only can't we prove it, but always get proven wrong. If we think about it in a quiet hour, we almost admit that lower instincts do explain most of what's commonly called love. That, sure, if the matching algorithm idea is worth $7B, it must have helped a few people find the right partner. That our own love isn't as unique after all, and worse than everything taken together, that we have just been following some biological program ourselves when choosing a partner.
Finally though, after a long history of assaults, I can see coming one specific technological change bringing victory to the romantic ideal. And of all things, it's a scary technology that I mean, namely I am talking here about genetic engineering. It appears likely that parents can and will increasingly decide the genetic code of their children. Concretely, I wouldn't be surprised if in 2 generations, more than 1% of parents worldwide can make 500 bits' worth of choices per child if they want to, and that this will over time increase towards 100% of the population and genome (<6.4GB).
If that ends up being true, it doesn't matter much over the long term what genes you pass on now. Whatever traits you go through the trouble of selecting by guessing them from your partner's phenotype, they are going to be so few and so easy to engineer (worse still, they are going to be the traits that are engineered first) that your grandchildren's mere whims will override them. What then is left for you to pass on?
The answer is the romantic answer. You and your partner, if you meet in unique circumstances and love each other for reasons that only make sense to you, and create a home full of that love, passing this feeling on to your children, this will continue to affect the future for as long as your descendants are around, probably longer. This I find is a reason for great joy. Next time any variety of fatalist crosses your path, you can be defiant and know that their era is waning, while your era has begun.