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New age love Today, true love can be found in many ways

Moving it out of the domain of astrological charts, Linda Goodman’s sun signs and Mr. Murthy’s palmistry, are today’s digital wunderkinds. If one online company asks you to answer 258 questions to find the right one, another asks you to type in yours and your partner’s name, and a third has an algorithm to find the perfect choice, another lets you search for true love like a Google search after you provide the cues (of course for a fee).

Try this on one website with Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, the result is a poor 30 per cent, another gives 95 per cent. How come their love story ended in such a tragedy?

Perhaps the perfection of an algorithm similar to the one operating in Google would do the trick? “I would rather trust my instincts rather than something external. I know of couples whose jatakams matched perfectly but their marriage didn’t work out; so many couples lead loveless lives though they were married at a time deemed auspicious with perfect occultation of the stars. At the end of the day, I would rather choose myself and blame myself rather than someone else later,” says B. Ankita, an engineering student.

“Answer 258 questions? I would rather go with the chemistry thing where at least I get to meet the person and hopefully the biological cue readers get it right,” laughs Madhuri. If finding love and matchmaking looks like a market, the economists can be trusted to not leave the subject alone. Economists Michèle Belot and Marco Francesconi have done just that. Taking information from a British speed-dating agency which tracked couples over a period of time, they arrived at a startling (or not-so-startling) conclusion: Love is not chasing what’s perfect, it is choosing what’s available. Shocked? Don’t be.

“Years ago, while doing my post-graduation, I met a man and never thought that I would be going around with him. He was as short as me. Wasn’t very sophisticated, but something clicked and we started going around, now I think that there are more things about love which we don’t know that what we know,” says Namita Gupta who’s now married to her pal from college.

Trying to discover what we don’t know seems to be becoming a multi-disciplinary task with psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and economists all getting into the act to find a formula for love. When they find it, it may well be as simple as A + B = love, but going by experience, anything to do with love is seldom that simple.

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