Cullie shuddered, but she wasn’t wrong.
“How can you know that unless you’ve met? What kind of data could have prevented that date from happening?” Therefore saving her from lifelong nightmares. Cullie bounced in her seat. “That’s the million-dollar coding question.”
“When my friends set up their children for arranged marriages, it was based on a deep knowledge of their children,” Binji said. “Just like if Bharat were to set you up with someone. So your code would need to have the kind of deep knowledge a parent or close friend would have to sort through choices.”
Cullie’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “So what I need is to write something that layers over the code of existing dating apps. An add-on functionality that mimics a parent’s or friend’s knowledge and parses the matches based on that.”
“But even better because instead of someone else’s knowledge of us—however deep—we’re relying on our own knowledge of ourselves,” Mom said.
“A question that identified how much you loathe putting yourself in dangerous situations would have eliminated the guy who wanted to take you cliff jumping,” Binji said.
“But not without knowing what I identify as dangerous situations,” Cullie said. That time she’d run as soon as he said the words cliff jumping.
“So, ‘Would you call skydiving exciting or dangerous?’—questions like that?” Cullie adjusted the flowchart. It was a mess, but now it was a mess she might be able to work with.
“Also how much. Like would you rather poke your eyes out than ride a motorcycle, or are there certain circumstances under which you’d do it,” Mom said, her expression jubilant. This did feel like they were getting somewhere.
“So, answers on a sliding scale,” Cullie said.
“The way those Myers-Briggs and other personality tests do it,” Mom added.
Cullie stopped typing, put her keyboard down, leaned over, and threw her arms around her. “Mom! That’s genius. We need a personality test that focuses on relationships.” Cullie’s brain was spinning. “Then I build an overlay app that sits on top of existing dating apps to search the information they collect and have it tie into the personality test. It’s not going to be that straightforward. But—”
“It’s a place to start. A relationship personality test that looks inward,” Mom said. “Relationship ID Personality! RIP for short.”
Cullie laughed. She loved Radha Maushi and Mom’s acronym obsession. “Identifying the questions to pin down your Relationship ID Personality, your RIP, that’s the challenge.”
Suddenly Binji frowned. “There’s something else we haven’t considered. Will people tell the truth about who they are? Do they even know? I’d never thought about how much I hated not being able to make choices until recently. Maybe not even until we had that conversation today.”
For a few moments they were all silent.
Was it possible to be honest about yourself? Also, didn’t you change with time? Cullie had always thought she’d found one kind of man sexy. Now she couldn’t understand why her heart gave little skips every time Rohan’s messages flashed on her screen.
The cursor blinked at her; she was lost again. “Binji, what would you have chosen had you been able to choose?”
That unfamiliar restlessness that had been burning at the edges of Binji’s eyes flared. “No man has ever asked me what I want. Men have always tried to solve my problems for me—solve me.” Her eyes widened with surprise at having verbalized it. “It would be nice to meet a man who simply asks and doesn’t make assumptions because of how I look.”
Cullie’s and Mom’s brows flew up in unison. They stared at her, mouths agape.
“You can’t ask me questions and then react like this when I’m honest.”
Well, the question was: Why had she never been honest about these things before?
Maybe because they hadn’t asked her before.
Mom recovered first. “So you want a man who appreciates a woman’s brains and not just her looks.”
“Well, I want them to appreciate my looks too, and it’s not just my brain but who I am. The things I like to do, the way I feel about things, the way I treat people, what makes me laugh. So my looks, my brain, and who my particular combination of those things makes me.”
“Okay, so then a man who . . .” Cullie trailed off.
Complete silence. There was no possible way to quantify any of that.
Again Mom broke the silence. “We’re going to have to start with something a little more tangible to come up with this RIP thing.”
“Let’s break it down,” Cullie said, and turned to Binji. “What are the things that you’re happiest doing? What are the things you’d rather die than do?”
Binji nodded. “When am I happiest? Well, this, now, being with you two. Being able to tell you both how I feel but also knowing how you feel. Talking. Really talking. But also shooting the breeze and saying nothing of importance.”
Cullie typed furiously as Binji talked. “What else? Hobbies? Why do you love your films so much?”
“Because I can lie on my couch and escape. Become other people, travel to other places, other times. But also lose myself in the art of it. Especially in old films. Films from simpler times, when less happened in a scene but it pushed harder. Where you had no escape from it. Where everything wasn’t moving, and you could focus on the characters, fall into them—what they were thinking, what their eyes and bodies were trying to tell you.” Her gaze went fuzzy; she was inside those films, lost. “I like to cook but not when someone asks me to,” she went on. “I like to dress but not when there are expectations attached to how I should look.”
Cullie had the urge to apologize: for not knowing these things, for all the countless times Binji had cooked for them.
“So, having your opinion valued. Being taken care of,” Mom recapped.
Binji seemed to be unable to stop, as though a dam had broken. “A man who cooks for me and listens to what I have to say instead of writing sonnets to what he sees when he looks at me. Maybe?”
Cullie’s fingers went wild typing. When Mom opened her mouth to say something, she made a grunting sound to stop her.
“I think I might have a list,” Cullie said after a few minutes of running a search across the hidden data in the top three apps. “I used a sliding scale for some of the things you said. It’s very, very nascent and minimal, but look at these matches now.”
They studied the matches. Mostly men who wanted to take care of others but also seemed to value independence in others. The expected stereotypes: nurses, doctors, chefs. But also men in construction and technology.
Finally, Binji settled on a fifty-seven-year-old chef who proclaimed himself busy and looking for someone who valued her own time and liked being pampered as much as she liked to do the pampering. Also someone who valued the planet and was passionate about reversing the damage humans had done to it. Someone who wished for a simpler time.
Binji grinned, back in her element. “I think I might be in love with him just based on his profile.”