Meddling Middlemen (and women)

Many of my coworkers are women in their early or mid-thirties and it so often happens that the subject of our converstations revolves around relationships and the joys and pains of having to live with a man (and bear his babies too!). Aside from those that claim to be bursting with matrimonial bliss and others that pine for a breath of "singledom", there is a good number that is baffled at the scarcity of men--of the potential husband types that is, instead of the ones solely looking to get laid. Today our converstation turned to the virtues of online matchup sites, which pride in being able to help thousands find their corresponding soulmates. These matchup sites, the most famous-at least in our sphere-being eharmony, rely on you becoming a paid member, sometiems requiring you to take a personality quiz, and depending on your responses, finding other people whose responses closely match your own. The match of responses is a correlation of the degree of manners, interests, and temperament you would share with your potential love interest (provided of course, that the relationship is allowed to blossom further). In this way, the matchup sites function as middlemen in relationships, a notch short of the traditional matchmaker in the styles ranging from the meddlesome but good-natured Mrs. Jennings to the officious Lady Russell, whose intentions strive to seperate two people who are otherwise madly in love with each other.

For a younger crowd for whom the marriage arena is only a distant possibility, there are the Facebooks, MySpaces, LiveJournals, and Friendsters. Most young people (for now the Facebook has allowed highschoolers to sign up) visit these sites to "network"--meaning keep track of their friends' whereabouts (in other words, affairs such as which couples have broken up and who is in a relationship), connect to old classmates (more out of curiosity rather than driven by any genuine affection), and potentially find a date to hang out with on an otherwise uneventful Friday night. Though all of these reasons seem removed from the more serious purpose of networking, there are a few people who visit these sites to land a job. It is now possible to find out what a long-lost friend is doing in a wildlife reserve in New Zealand and ask her if her team could use an ecologist who specializes in a rare breed of birds that is only found in and around New Zealand. If you are lucky, you might actually be on the plan to New Zealand sooner than you think while the rest of your friends are struggling to find jobs back home.

However, the virtues of such sites are undercut by their ability to meddle with people's lives. For one, going on the Facebook can lead to a severe bout of procrastination each day, leaving chores undone and rising the levels of agitation. Just as relationships can be fostered, they can also crumble. A friend of mine didn't include her relationship status in her profile, which made her boyfriend very upset to the point of paranoia. He insisted that her not acknowleding their relationship is an indicator of the lack of her feelings for him while she maintained that he is unduly jealous since all he should care is how they feel for each other, regardless of whether the whole world knows of her feelings for him or not. Their relationship was rocky for a long time on account of this until my friend gave in, acknowledged their relationship online, mentioned his name, and managed to finally appease his anger. The said couple, for all the world knows, is now doing well.

How tiresome being a middleman could be didn't strike me until I found myself in such a position a few days ago. When a friend of mine felt unwell, her boyfriend contacted me and asked me to check up on her since he was traveling at the time and was unable to spend a lot of time with her. When I mentioned to her about her boyfriend's contacting me on account of concern for her, I sensed a little edginess in her response to me--as if my communicating with him (which he initiated) was not very welcome. Her boyfriend, unaware of what passed between my friend and I, contined to ask me about how his girlfriend was doing and I could not help but feel a little uneasy for the last thing I needed is any suspicion from my friend, especially when it was unwarranted.

It is ironic that when a middleman exists to connect two parties, it can also do the opposite and tear them apart. I wonder if this is a result of the fragility of human affections: are we just as prone to trust people as we are to mistrust them? If we are walking on a tight-rope of emotions in which extremes exist on either side, is this act one of strengh or weakness?