One of the few good things about a breakup is that you very suddenly find yourself with lots of free time. In the aftermath of my most recent split, I put this time to use by watching all of the Lord of the Rings: Extended Editions, continuing my project of purging the lingering low bitrate MP3s from my iTunes library, and playing many, many games of iPhone Carcassonne.

And, more out of boredom than anything else, I joined OkCupid.

My relationship with OkCupid actually began about a year ago, when I subscribed to the endlessly fascinating OkTrends blog in Google Reader. Rather than pretend that they don’t mine data from the actions of thousands of users, the people behind OkCupid make all their findings public: on issues like how your race affects your likelihood to get a message from another user, or how to write an optimal first message. This is exactly the kind of data overload that I get off on, and I couldn’t help but admire OkCupid for systematically answering some of the questions that have been haunting everyone since the advent of online dating.

Anyway, despite my mother’s urgings not to seek out a new relationship too hastily, I joined OkCupid to try to at least get a better handle on the population of web-enabled homosexuals in the Philadelphia area. Plus, the site has an iPhone application, which endears it to me almost automatically.

A month later, the site has failed in its primary objective of finding me someone to date, but has succeeded admirably in my primary objective of finding something to occupy my time. Admittedly, I haven’t been looking particularly hard for someone on the dating front, so that’s probably not wholly OkCupid’s fault, but I have to hand it to them: the scientific approach to dating is endlessly amusing.

Beyond the preliminary stage of writing snarkily about myself (for anyone curious, here are my various self-descriptions), the site encouraged me to answer questions about my personality, my feelings towards relationships, and my opinions on certain subjects so as to form a more complete description of my dateable self — and then asked me to give the answer of my ideal match and how important their answer would be to me. For instance, recent questions I’ve answered include:

“Do you believe that men should be the heads of their households?” (No / Very important)
“Is it wrong to spank a child who’s been bad?” (Yes / A little important)
“If you were in a committed monogamous relationship, but had the opportunity for a one-night stand with the most attractive celebrity in the world, would you take it?” (No / Mandatory)
“‘Wherefore art thou Romeo!’ What does ‘wherefore’ mean in this context?” (‘Why’ / Very important)

As a result, OkCupid has concluded that I’m 11.7 percent more organized than average, 14.8 percent less adventurous than average, and 43.4 percent more scientific than average. It also informed me that my “dating persona” is The Slow Dancer, which apparently means that,

Your focus is love, not sex, and for your age, you have average experience. But you’re a great, thoughtful guy, and your love life improves every year. There’s also a powerful elimination process working in your favor: most Playboy types get stuck raising unwanted kids before you even begin settling down. The men left over will be hot and yours. Your ideal man is someone intimate, intelligent, and very supportive.

While you’re not exactly the life of the party, you do thrive in small groups of smart people. Your circle of friends is extra tight and it’s HIGHLY likely they’re just like you. You appreciate symmetry in relationships.

I’m not convinced that questions, quizzes, or the inferences about my personality that the site draws from them, are necessarily indicative of the type of relationship I’m likely to do best in. But, that said, I’m not ready to rule out the possibility that statistical analysis can lead to meaningful generalizations from the 200 or so arbitrary questions I’ve answered. I am indeed more organized and scientific than most people I’ve encountered, and I very much appreciate symmetry in relationships (and in everything else). If OkCupid is able to figure these things out about me by asking whether I’d rather be caught masturbating by my mother or my father (my mother, but I’m still not sure why), all power to them. I just don’t know that all this information, whatever its validity, can translate into a system for matchmaking.

The bit of the site I ultimately found the most interesting was the My Best Face tool, which crowdsources the eternal social networking question of what picture of you is the most appealing to your target demographic. The data it returned about my three selected pictures was fascinating:

In the end, I’m not any more positive about the prospects of meeting someone on OkCupid than I would be about meeting someone on JDate, Thingbox, Gaydar, or a Craigslist personals ad. But, if nothing else, it’s amusing to see what a computer is able to tell me about myself that I didn’t already know, and how many Swarthmore students have clicked on my profile without saying a word.

(The answer, for anyone who’s curious, is: four so far.)