What’s a singles activist doing on chemistry.com? Well, what do you think! No, I am not interested in becoming unsingle. I was trying to take the personality test developed by Helen Fisher – despite some misgivings I already had about her. The only way to take that personality test is by signing up for the site.

Clearly, the only goal of the personality test is to couple you up with your “matches.” And the only goal of the site is to make money doing that. I was curious about what matches the site would serve up to me, especially since I made no bones about my not wanting to become unsingle, at least in my longer write-up. Well, it turns out that I could not even take a look at emails I received without paying something. If memory serves me right, it was around $30/month – way too much to find out if the guy who responded actually read my profile. (I cannot find any pricing information on their website without having to sign up again). Snooping around wasn’t worth that to me.

What I did find out where a few things… Aside from the couplemania, which I expected on a dating site. The personality test seems rather flimsily based on a bunch of general questions. How the length of my index finger can tell you anything about my personality is beyond me – unless, of course, one assumes that personality is something innate, which it probably isn’t given the interplay between nature and nurture most scientists agree on these days. It is very similar to the questionable MBTI. I am sure Helen Fisher claims she has the data to back the test up, though I have no idea how that data might stand up to scrutiny (based on the analysis in Sex at Dawn of her work, it’s likely that that data isn’t all that robust).

My primary personality type rated 2 points above my secondary type. Given my doubts about the test, I question whether it can discern the distinction that well, especially since there’s always an error range when things are based on statistics. Did the description resonate? Of course it did – they are so general that it’s hard not to resonate with them. Plus, the Forer effect might be at play: We tend to personalize statements even when they’re general.

While I signed up for the actual site (I had a hard time telling where the test ended and the site registration started), I found out that I cannot be interested in both men and women. Apparently, bisexuality doesn’t exist in the chemistry world. The thing that bugged me the most, though, is the obvious push to make money off me. I cannot even look at the site anymore unless I reinstate my membership (well, or delete the cookies from the site or use a different browser). Except for some brief descriptions, there wasn’t much I could find out about “my” matches, so I had no way of evaluating whether these matches where great or not before paying money. Which reminds me of something else: I kept getting matched with people who fish. I could care less about fishing, so I looked around if there’s a way to mark hobbies as “can’t stand it” but there isn’t something like that… Such a guy wouldn’t be a good match for me. In my book that’s a major flaw in the matching process…

So, I cancelled my membership, except that I cannot really do that. It’s “too expensive for now,” assuming that I’ll be back when I am more desperate. Whenever that happens, I can easily reactivate my membership because all the information I provided was saved. There is no way to say “I will never ever reactivate my membership, delete all my files.” At least, there’s no obvious way to do so. Which makes sense from their couplemanic (and commercialized) perspective: There aren’t any singles by choice who would *gulp* choose to remain single.