I’ve crowdsourced M’s prettiness casually among members of our team’s larger unit under the pretense of trying to decide, as a single heterosexual male, whether or not she is pretty, but in actuality to gauge the breadth and strength of my competition. Of the 81 percent who found M pretty, 64 percent are not competitive, being males or nonbinaries attached to or interested in other people, or else females—of whom the 15 percent who identify as gay or bi are not a threat because M is “straight.” Obviously, I recognize the existence of a spectrum of desire between straight and gay, but placing M on this spectrum would require either an honest reporting of her sexual history, which I am in no position to acquire, or gray grabs of M’s sexual memories and fantasies from the collective—an act of such grotesque personal violation that she would justifiably revile me afterward, thus defeating the point.
Of the remaining 36 percent male or nonbinary respondents who might conceivably compete with me in pursuing a relationship with M, fully half possess at least one possibly-to-likely-disqualifying personal trait: 14 percent = noticeable body odor or other personal hygiene violations （nose picking, ear drilling, etc.）; 11 percent = online warlordry; 9 percent = old （over thirty-five）; 7 percent = radically self-obsessed; 6 percent = obsessed with Bix Bouton; 3 percent = prone to miscellaneous offenses, including engaging in Iraq War reenactments, telling sexist jokes, smoking cigarettes, or wearing bandanas. Okay, that last one is a pet peeve of mine but probably not M’s. I hate bandanas.
Now to the remaining 18 percent of poll respondents who represent possible competing contenders for M’s affection. And here is where the data begin to fail, because how can I calculate whose chances are best? The key to M’s heart may lie in something quirky and impossible to predict without intimate knowledge of her background and memories and psychological state—which, again, I could acquire only invasively. Maybe the person who brings M a blue stuffed hippo will be the one she falls in love with, and which of us will do it? I will do it. I see a blue stuffed hippo at Walmart and think, Maybe this is x: the unknown value required to secure M’s love. And then I have the same thought about a small ballerina music box. And then I have the same thought about some really long tulips that are actually made of silk. And then about a packet of rubber bands all different colors, and then about some things I pick up off the ground and even from the trash, always with the thought, Any one of these may be x—that ineffable, unpredictable detail that makes one person fall in love with another person.
Now, given that I am a counter—or, to put it professionally, a senior empiricist and metrics expert—it is reasonable to ask whether, by taking enough random cracks at assigning a value to x, I will statistically improve my chances of making M fall in love with me. The answer is “yes and no.” Yes, because perfect bone marrow matches can be found between total strangers by sorting through enough random donor data. No, because I would have to devote the rest of my life （assuming an average American male life span） plus eighty-five more years solely to the task of acquiring random objects before I would increase my statistical likelihood of finding the “right object,” at which point M and I would both be dead. And all of this assumes that x is an object, which it may not be!
And acquiring a large box full of random objects, as I now have done, presents hazards of its own. Suppose M is a minimalist who regards acquiring heaps of objects as a disqualifying personal trait the way that, for me, bandana wearing would be? She may react like my sister, Alison, who sees the box containing the hippo, etc., in my living room and says, “What the hell, Lincoln, you’re turning out to be exactly like Mom.” And although we adore our mother, Alison does not intend this observation as a compliment. What she means is that I’m stockpiling random meaningless objects, and she is right, but she is also wrong, because every object has a history and a relationship with other objects and is therefore meaningless only until you have assigned a meaning to it.
Assigning meanings to my heap of objects would require handing each one to M and asking whether it caused her to fall in love with me. But honest reporting is hard to achieve without anonymity, and a person falling spontaneously in love with the lanky （but very fit） bearded empiricist and metrics expert currently handing her objects from a box in his living room might not want to admit it to his face—might not even be able to assign language to the storm of feeling within her when he hands her a blue stuffed hippo （for example）。