Twenty-two-year-old Haliey Welch, who went viral for coining the phrase “Hawk Tuah,” launched the most recent iteration of the dating app this year: Pookie Tools, which coaches individuals on how to interact with each other virtually instead of pairing matches like a regular dating app. The AI-driven program can analyze dating app profiles and rank the flirtiness of text messages on a scale of 0 to 100. Like ChatGPT for singles, the AI chatbot can also suggest conversation topics that keep the proverbial flame lit. A few novel innovations differentiate the app from others: the Bald Predictor, which can analyze a person’s likelihood of future hair loss based on a photo; the Height Detector, which can estimate a person’s height based on a photo; and the Zodiac Compatibility test, which can predict a pair’s astrological affinity for each other. If Pookie Tools is the future of online dating, things don’t look bright. The app does everything but encourage in-person interaction between two humans.
Modern manifestations, such as Pookie Tools, of the once-noble virtual love project put to shame Jeff Tarr’s original conception of online dating. Tarr’s methodology, as described in Patsy Tarr’s Operation Match: Jeff Tarr and the Invention of Computer Dating, used the virtual realm as a tool; a computer’s job was finished as soon as it matched a pair.
Tarr was a social and entrepreneurial junior at Harvard University in the early 1960s when he thought up online dating. “It was a Saturday night and no one would have us but each other, and we were drinking,” Tarr said. “So [classmate Vaughan Morrill and I] got the idea jointly that we’ll start a computer dating business to find dates.” Ivy League schools were men-only at the time, author and Tarr’s wife, Patsy explains, and the only way male students socialized with students at the women’s colleges was through “sanctioned mixers or random blind dates.”
“Meeting people in bars wasn’t even a thing back then—it wasn’t even really considered acceptable. The guys knew there had to be a better way,” Patsy writes.
A math and statistics whiz, Tarr knew that if he bought computer services from IBM, all he would need was “a way to collect data and enter it onto punch cards.” Operation Match was so born with a simple goal: “meet women and make money.” Tarr and his associates, one of whom was Douglas Ginsburg, later appointed to the D.C. Circuit by Ronald Reagan and floated as a Supreme Court pick, sent out personality questionnaires to interested participants. They input the results of the questionnaire into a computer, received for each participant five “ideal” matches, and mailed the contact information of those five individuals back to the original participant—all for the price of $3. It was up to the participant after that to decide whether to ring his matches.
Whereas Tarr’s lengthy questionnaire asked participants a wide range of personality questions, the best today’s dating services do to determine if a match is “ideal” is ask basic questions about religion, politics, substance use, and desired frequency of sexual intimacy. Tarr sought more data than that before making a match. For example, on his questionnaire, Tarr asked participants to rank their interests, such as folk music, jazz, creative writing, agriculture, skiing, and television. He also asked: “How important is it to you that your date share the interests you have indicated?” A section in the questionnaire labeled “Semantic Differentials” asked participants to evaluate themselves on several opposing qualities: Are you talkative or taciturn? Do you read avidly or occasionally? Have you no close family attachments or close family attachments? The questionnaire also asked about height, age, and attractiveness, as well as religious preferences.
With the relative lack of intention found in today’s online dating profiles, apps have beset singles with something called “swiping malaise”—the state of emotional exhaustion brought on by mindlessly swiping through matches, often accepting or rejecting people based on looks alone. The malaise is one of the reasons people are so exhausted by online dating. In the 2010s the apps were hot places to pick up dates or hookups. Matches hardly make it off the apps now. In addition, the dating app market is over-saturated with a slew of options, all of which essentially lead to the same result: a virtual match and little more.
Although “get off the apps” may seem like sound advice to give young people who are hopelessly single and worn-out by the online dating scene, eliminating the medium doesn’t fix the problem: Young people don’t know how to talk to each other without electronic mediators, and, even if they did, they’re too socially stunted to know where to meet strangers. Traditionalists often urge a return to in-person interaction and the eradication of social media. The former will take time and the latter won’t happen. What could happen is a return to Tarr’s system.
Tarr’s innovation was “using a computer to find a date,” Patsy writes. That was the only virtual part of Tarr’s service. The rest was accomplished in-person, face-to-face, or voice-to-voice. Modern online dating geared only toward in-person interaction—no “Pookie Tools” crutch to help your texts sound more flirty—would be more work and would require intentional app developers, databases, and participants, but it also might be more successful than the current apps, which are dwindling in popularity and don’t make viable matches. Tarr’s was also a “dating service not a mating service,” he said, a deviation from the current proliferation of hookup culture on the apps.
The invention made Tarr happy and dateable though not rich or famous. Although Tarr met many women through the dating service, he met his wife, and Operation Match’s author, Patsy, through a blind date—the old-fashioned way. Operation Match is a brief historical account and a sweet homage that was originally a party favor Patsy created for guests at Jeff’s 80th birthday party last year. Laser-focused on Tarr’s system, the book doesn’t venture to explain the progression of, or offer Tarr’s opinion of, modern online dating. If it did, readers might like to know what it was like for Tarr to invent online dating because meeting people in bars was socially unacceptable only to witness the internet make meeting people in bars socially unthinkable.
Operation Match: Jeff Tarr and the Invention of Computer Dating
by Patsy Tarr
2wice Books, 144 pp., $35
Haley Strack is a Buckley fellow at National Review.
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