Chapter 3
Quinn
Convergence: Hobbies, favorite media, attachment styles
Divergence: Sleep schedule, sex drive, sense of humor
Danny meets Quinn in Central Park for “stargazing.” Frankly, he thinks this is a weird date. What stars? This is Manhattan. It gets weirder when he arrives at the park and finds her standing at the edge of the water with a paddleboat.
“We’ll be able to see the stars better from the water,” she says.
This seems unlikely, and, furthermore, Danny is pretty sure no paddleboat rentals are still open at 8:00 p.m. Maybe this is his own fault for suggesting an 8:00 p.m. date, but in his defense, he had a work dinner and sort of assumed this would just be a drink.
What Danny realizes immediately is that he is super not attracted to Quinn.
There’s not a good reason for it. She’s conventionally attractive in all the normal ways, but she’s wearing a newsboy cap and Danny just doesn’t want to sleep with anyone who might suddenly shout, “Extra, extra!” He feels guilty for not finding her hot and hopes she also finds him physically neutral.
He is of average height and average build.
His eyes are neither light nor dark. His skin is white but tan.
His hair is cut in the usual way. Once, after losing each other at a concert, Julian asked him, “Can you start wearing one of those striped Where’s Waldo shirts? ”
Danny and Quinn get in the paddleboat and push anemically offshore.
“So,” Danny says, “who got you on Pathos?”
“I went to college with Chloe,” Quinn says.
Chloe is Danny’s CMO. Very nice! Completely normal! Danny tells himself that a friend of Chloe’s is probably fine.
“So,” Quinn says. “What’s your Myers-Briggs type?”
Danny laughs. Quinn stares at him. Whoops! Not a joke!
“Oh,” he says, “I’m not actually sure.”
“Really? But you make an app that pairs people up with their most compatible matches.”
“Yeah, but we use, like . . . different metrics.”
“What metrics?”
“Oh,” he says, “you know, kilometers, liters. That sort of thing.”
Quinn stares at him.
“Because those are metric units,” Danny says.
“No,” Quinn says. “I got it.”
On the bright side, the app seems to have correctly predicted that Quinn and Danny do not share a sense of humor.
On the less bright side, it’s unclear to Danny where their ninety out of one hundred compatibility is coming from.
A few weeks back, Danny got in an argument with Julian—Danny’s cofounder—about how to weigh the various compatibility categories.
Danny thinks the current algorithm overvalues similar taste—whether you like the same TV shows and music—and undervalues basic communication goals.
He suspects this is because Julian and his fiancée, Gigi, share a love for critically acclaimed satires about the American elite but have never figured out how to vulnerably communicate with each other.
“So, what do you do in your spare time?” Danny asks.
“I love to journal.”
“Oh, supercool. So you, like . . . write down what happened that day?”
“Mostly my feelings about what happened.”
“That’s great. Seems like a healthy habit. Do you do it every day?”
“For an hour or two.”
“Oh,” Danny says. “No. That’s inconceivable.”
He means this to be a joke. A little playful teasing! Quinn (and Danny probably could have anticipated this) does not seem to find this funny.
“The app said we had similar hobbies,” Quinn says. “What are your hobbies? Since self-reflection is clearly not one of them. That was a joke, to clarify.”
“Right,” he says. “Ha! Um. I like to run?”
“I used to like running. But then I tore my ACL and now I can’t anymore.”
“Oh, but that’ll heal, right?”
“Maybe,” she says. “But I don’t like running anymore.”
At the end of the date, she jokes that this was fun and they should do it again. He laughs. It turns out that was not a joke.