Data: A Love Story - Review

So, it’s a very quick read, very entertaining, and has a lot of good insight. It also features a writer who decides to get a Hermione level glow up for perfect pictures at great expense. So it’s a mixed bag. Actually, the glow up goes well beyond Hermione’s teeth shrinking—more like teen rom com featuring the slightly unfortunate girl who has no style and bad hair, but magically turns into a fairy princess with a haircut and new dress. I’ll say more on this later.

The author, Amy Webb, makes a lot of good points about dating websites, algorithms, and human nature. I definitely cringed when I thought of my own dating profile faux pas that never occurred to me (until now of course). However, it’s also based on online dating in 2005. Yes. 14 years ago. Of course, they don’t mention that until the appendix. She then makes sure to clarify that the websites have all made updates to their algorithms so we couldn’t rely on her data too much right now. Um…what?? So you just gave us a great amount of data and theories and then announced they’re outdated and might not even be relevant…after I bought your book. A bit of a bait and switch?

All that being said, she is correct about the pictures we post, the amount of crap we put in a profile, and how it needs to be kind of short and vague because, just as we all know, it takes too long to read long profiles. We should be talking about the things we want to do with this new partner, not our long list of accolades and accomplishments. Also, she’s right that most people don’t want to talk about work so saying your profession is fine, but don’t overdo it and don’t get into the details.

The best part of the book, in my opinion, comes where she talks about how she made a list of the attributes of her perfect man, then distilled it down to what was necessary, and gave numerical scores to each element based on importance. Sitting down and doing that, then evaluating what my exes had of those traits is eye-opening. I see merit in her strategy and I’m going to try it, minus the expensive glow up (which included a $300/3 hour haircut, a whole new wardrobe, a friend of hers taking perfect pics, a personal trainer 3x/week, and a weight loss diet). It’s worth a read, and it’s not a long book, but beware the message it sends about getting skinner, buying new clothes, and essentially altering what you look like to get the perfect man.