Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index Introduction Villager and Outsourcer You might say this book began on those August mornings when I was a child picking pigweed from the corn rows in my grandmother's vegetable garden on a gently sloping hill in Turner, Maine. My widowed grandmother would point her crutch at the tall corn, "Aa-lee"—she always dropped the r from my name—that "corn looks just tine. But now, look how the weeds have gotten ahead of the broccoli over there. . . ." Afternoons, my brother and 1 and a gaggle of cousins husked corn, shelled peas, peeled apples, knocking off around four to swim in a nearby pond. As a plate of steaming corn was later passed hand to hand among a dozen family members seated at a large kitchen table for supper, I would hear my name praised as a "good weeder and husker." I didn't love farmwork. But I remember it vividly, partly because it conveyed a lesson that I came to understand only much later. My ancestors, thread lipped and grim in sepia photographs hung on the farmhouse parlor walls, had tilled the soil of this farm since the first one chopped and plowed it out of the stony wilderness in the 17^0s. By the late nineteenth century, when my grandmother was a child, it had grown to medium size: sixteen milking cows, 2 THE OUTSOURCED SELF a dozen chickens, some pigs, sheep, and a retired milk truck horse named Frank, credited with great empathy for small children. My grandmother married in 1904 and moved with her husband to Boston. When her parents died, the farm passed to her. Now based in Boston, my grandparents sold off the sheep, hogs, and most of the cows, but otherwise maintained the Maine farm year-round. In the winter, two hired hands, and in the summer, my father, his brother, and two sisters tilled, planted, and hayed the fields, milked the cows, and fed the chickens. My grandparents had left for the city but kept the idea of a farm alive. One photograph from 1933 shows my father beaming in a white hat and glasses, atop an enormous haystack, pitchfork paused in the hay. My mother, his new bride, leans over the hay, face to the camera. The pitchforks of two hired men in overalls on the ground below create a photographic swirl of motion. Shown this photo a few years ago, my then ninety-four-year-old aunt Elizabeth, born in Boston but returning in her twenties to settle in Turner year-round, quipped subversively, "City folk. A real farmer could do the job single-handed in half the time." She was onto something. To some extent, we were playing at farming. By the time I was weeding the pigweed out of the corn—three weeks every summer in the 1950s—there was no hay to reap, cows to milk, pigs to slop, or eggs to gather. But that didn't mean there wasn't a barn to paint, path to clip, or peas to shell. "Aa-lee," my grandmother would call, "now be a good girl and dust the paa-laah." I would aimlessly whirl a feather duster over a seashell collection and small tintype photos set on lace doilies atop spindly legged wooden tables in a formal and seldom-visited front room. "This is silly work," I'd whisper to my older brother. "You have it lucky," he'd whisper back. "Grandma has me stacking shingles in the barn with the edges even." Such tedious tasks seemed like empty rituals. They weren't necessary or fun or educational in any way we could see. So what was the point? we wondered. Still, my grandmother—with nodding approval from parents and aunts and uncles—gave us task Introduction: Villager and Outsourcer after task with such serious, kindly intent that we sensed the presence of some larger purpose. No one outright said what it was, but we sensed it nonetheless. Our farm was indeed different from the real farms up and down the road, but it was not a gentleman's farm that simply consumed the freshly picked results of someone else's labor. We were a gentleman's farm without gentlemen. For us, the point of pride was the labor itself That was the lesson: the near-sacred value of working together to grow our own food and put it on the table. When 1 was twelve, my father was posted as charge d'affaires to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, and I was transported to an utterly different world. We moved into an enormous white stucco mansion protected by a uniformed guard with a military-type hat who stood to salute my father each time he walked from house to car or car to house. If I tiptoed into the kitchen looking for some melon in the refrigerator, the white-coated cook, Josef, politely shooed me out. I snuck back during his off-hours, though, leaving serial, anonymous scallops in open-cut melons. Maisel, in black uniform with a white lace collar, daily mopped the stairs, laundered our clothes, and answered the door. To my great embarrassment, a liveried chauffeur named Shalom drove me to school in a long, black limousine, letting me off at the entrance in front of a sidewalk cluster of whispering schoolmates, pointing, some hesitantly touching the metal rod on each side of the hood where small American flags fluttered whenever my father rode in the car. I made a deal with Shalom to drop me off a block early, but there, too, a few children would bend forward to peer through the darkened glass, hands cupped around wide, curious eyes. My life was unbelievable to them, as it was to me as well. At the embassy residence everything we normally did for ourselves was now done for us by someone else, conspicuously so. On the farm in the summers, we children sensed ourselves on a stage subtly designed to teach the value of self-reliance and communal work. Now 1 discovered myself on another stage created to display American wealth 4 THE OUTSOURCED SELF to our poorer hosts and to diplomats from around the world. On the farm, I had wondered why we had to do everything from scratch. Now I wondered why we couldn't do the slightest thing for ourselves. I did nothing. I didn't set the table. I didn't clear the dishes. I didn't fold laundry or tend our beautiful flower garden. What made an impression on me was not simply the contrast between hoeing the pigweed in Turner and being waited on at our embassy dining table. It was the feeling I had about myself in each place. In Turner, through doing my jobs, I felt a part of a larger whole. To my ten-year-old self, the farm tasks were not just tasks; they joined me to my playful cousins, to stories of family pranks, to rippling laughter around the dinner table. Those three weeks in August, which stretched in my imagination to half a year, offered a taste of a village style of life. As a minor contributor to this village, I was less free in one way (the chores were a bore), but more free in another (it gave me a reassuring sense of belonging to something larger than myself). This childhood experience became a prototype for later experiences—of being part of a circle of friends, a neighborhood, an academic department, a social movement. Our embassy life offered a different way of relating to the world Household tasks were outsourced to Maisel, Josef, Shalom, and others with whom I was not expected to have meaningful or lasting bonds. And while I lost the feeling of belonging to a community, freshly ironed clothes and favorite meals appeared as if by magic, the final product of someone else's work. As in the best market arrangements, the pay was fair, the household atmosphere pleasant. But after five months, Maisel and Josef left for England to be replaced by a jolly Greek Cypriot couple, Sharley and Jorge. A new cook, Victor, presided in the kitchen. Sharley, Jorge, Victor, and Shalom came, as it were, with the house. If household relations in Turner were as in a village, relations in our embassy home were as those in the marketplace. Embassy life—ours and that of all the top officers in other embassies—was a project in status display, as I came to understand Introduction: Villager and Outsourcer 5 later. The farther away my father, and by association, his family, seemed from hoeing corn or doing any necessary work, the greater the respect and honor accorded him—a dynamic that Thorstein Veblen observed in his Theory of the Leisure Class. Our "help" embodied our detachment from the essential tasks of life and, since it was my father's job to represent the United States, such display bestowed honor on it as well.1 As a young sidekick to this status display, I felt pampered and oddly important myself, but vaguely wondered why. Since those days of weeding corn and riding in the limousine, a great deal has changed. After my grandmother died, the warm summer gatherings around the Turner dinner table came to an end. The farm burned down in an accidental fire in the 1960s and the family built two clapboard houses on the land, one for my aunt and one for us to visit in the summers. Meanwhile, my parents moved from post to post, replaced, in each residence, by new come-and-go diplomats. By the time I was twenty, my parents were living in New Zealand, and my brother and I in different cities in America. We corresponded by loving weekly letters and each of us had long-distance friends. But we didn't share, in my grandmother's sense, a community. And we missed it. Long after my father died, my aunt told me that he had mailed from New Zealand, Ghana, Tunisia, year after faithful year, annual dues to the Turner Grange, an organization of local farmers who met over paper plates of baked beans and hot dogs to talk over seed prices, soil depletion, and rain. Today, my grandmother pointing her crutch, my father beaming atop a hay pile, my brother straightening shingles— all of them have gone. Pigweed and chauffeur—each life highly privileged in its own way—have passed into private memory. In my child's mind, these two ways of life seemed like irreconcilable opposites. But of course in reality they were never absolutes. The farm—our farm but also the real farms—had hired help, and there was plenty of teamwork and generosity at the embassy. 6 THE OUTSOURCED SELF Nonetheless, the two do correspond to very different sets of social arrangements, and in the intervening years, one has fared significantly better than the other. So much of what we used to do for one another as neighbors, friends, and family—what I experienced as village life—we now secure by turning to the market. My aunt Elizabeth had a phrase for the relations of the village: "Just do" she called it. "When a need arises," she explained, "neighbors and friends don't ask themselves, 'Do I want to help?' They don't think about it. It's in their bones. They just do." "Just do" meant neighbors in town keeping a casual eye out, carrying on— through exchanges of baked goods, borrowed tools, know-how, babysitting, and spur-of-the-moment drop-ins—"the spirit of the gift," in the words of French anthropologist Marcel Mauss.2 Neighbors who had bumper crops of tomatoes or more venison than they could freeze for the winter would expect to share and it would be a measure of a neighbor's character if he or she did not. Less money changed hands than in the city but more gifts were exchanged. When money did change hands, it did so differently. Along the edge of lawns, signs would appear—fresh corn, gladiolas, Christmas wreaths—with the promised goods set on small stands by a change jar. By exchanging goods and services in this way, people were affirming a basic tenet of small-town life—"around here we trust one another." In this modern expression of a pre-market way of life, gift and repayment came in the form of promise and gratitude, and underlying these was a faith in memory. If a friend did you a favor, you weren't obliged to repay it right away, as when we pay for a service. In fact, that might have seemed rude. It would have defeated the purpose of the gift exchange, which ensured long-term bonds. People didn't give practical help just to get things done; they got things done, in part, to affirm their bonds. Part of such bonds expressed love of one another's company, but they also represented an unspoken pact: "I'm on call for you in your hour of need and you are for me." Villagers might quarrel, gossip, get bored, and Introduction: Villager and Outsourcer leave. But living there, they paid a moral tax to the community in this readiness to "just do." As time went by, many supports for village life disappeared. For one thing, Americans left farming—38 percent of all workers were farmers in 1900, and less than 2 percent were in 2000.3 In Turner, local apple and dairy farmers were hard hit by national and global competition, for sale signs went up at the small farms first, then the midsized ones, then a few of the biggest. Developers bought the land. The hills filled with modest, well-tended homes, red tricycles in the driveway, chalk drawings on the sidewalk, freshly mown front lawns. Here and there an apple tree remained where an orchard once stood. Young working couples and single parents moved in, commuting to jobs in the schools, colleges, hospitals, grocery stores, lumber yards, nurseries, and call centers in nearby towns or to a miscellany of older, dilapidated malls and roadside diners. The shoe mills that had once nourished in the nearby towns of Auburn and Lewiston, a dozen or so miles from the family farm, closed or relocated, in search of cheaper labor, to southern states in the 1970s and then to central America, Mexico, and China.4 A Walmart regional supercenter moved into a thirty-seven-acre lot next to a row of other big box stores, with dreary stretches of used car lots lining the highways leading to it. Over time, many people moved to cities in search of better jobs and more services. In 1910, a quarter of Americans lived in metropolitan areas and, by 2000, 80 percent did.5 Now more urban, Americans continued to express some village ethic of "just do" with neighbors, friends, and coworkers. But for an increasing number, family became their village/' At the same time, that family was not immune to the broader transformations taking place. The two most significant—the rise of the working woman, and the increase in divorce—greatly undermined the family's ability to care for itself. Steadily from 1900 on—and dramatically after the 1970s—the homemakers of yesteryear became the working women of today. Women made up 18 percent of the American 8 I S11. OUTSOURCIil) SI 1 I workforce in 1900, 28 percent in 1970, and a stunning near-50 percent by 2010. Today, 70 percent of all American children live in households where all the adults work.7 So who now would care for the children, the sick, the elderly? And who would provide, as nineteenth-century middle-class homemakers were said to do, "the sunshine of the home?" Mothers were trying hard but they were also out billing customers, stocking shelves, teaching classes, and treating patients. And so were the once-available maiden aunts, grandmothers, friends, and "give-you-a-hand" neighbors. Meanwhile, marriage in America became less secure. In 1900, about 10 percent of marriages ultimately ended in divorce, while today, for first marriages, chances stand at 40 to 50 percent. Those who marry a second or third time are yet more likely to divorce and do so more quickly. Moreover, the percentage of babies born to single mothers reached 40 percent by 2011, and studies revealed that half of American children spent at least part of their lives in single-parent households.H There were simply fewer people to shoulder the tasks at home. During the same period, for both men and women, the workplace became more demanding and insecure. As Robert Kuttner noted in Everything for Sale, from the 1970s on, many people lost confidence that they could hold on to their jobs.9 "Relentless layoffs are not merely a temporary response to business cycles," he wrote, "but a way of life.""1 The long-term contracts once enjoyed by white-collar and union-backed blue-collar workers all but dis-appeared as companies downsized, merged, am) restructured. Stable careers, along with pensions and benefits, were increasingly limited to the privileged, with other workers treated as casual labor. Manpower Temporary Services—a Milwaukee-based company with 4,400 offices employing over 30,000—became one of the biggest employers in the United States." With women in the job force and all Americans working longer hours and having less secure jobs, modern families became ever more hard pressed. Where were they to turn for help? The government? Europeans have long been shocked at the basic pub- Introduction: Villager and Outsourcer 9 lie services we lack: paid parental leave, high-quality paid child care and paid family and medical leave that would permit a worker to tend to an ill child or elderly parent. At least on paper, 186 countries offer government-supported maternity leave, and the United States has never been among them.12 If anything, over the last five decades, public services have dwindled. As child-care expert Edward Zigler noted, during the 1980s "the government's role in child care did not expand in proportion to the growing need but in fact declined."13 In the wake of recent events—the great recession of 2008, expensive foreign wars, and a looming budget deficit— the prospect of government help has grown dimmer still. Nor could nonprofit organizations fill the gap. Parent-initiated cooperative nurseries, the YMCA, the Jewish Homes for the Aged, nursing homes, community recreation centers based in schools and privately funded—all these have been a worthy but minor sideshow. With no community of yesteryear to lean back on, and no European-style government supports ahead, people looked increasingly to the one remaining option—the market. Families who could afford it have always made use of paid services, of course; at the turn of the century, they hired servants, matchmakers, governesses, chauffeurs, wet nurses, and more. But over time, Americans in ever greater numbers have turned to more market solutions. To give just a few examples: In 1900, over 95 percent of American food dollars went to food prepared and consumed at home. Today, nearly half such dollars go to food prepared behind take-out counters or eaten in diners and restaurants. Dressmaking has moved from home to factory, hair care from home to beauty salon.14 The trend has accelerated particularly in the last forty years, a period when the market came to dominate American life as never before. Voices calling for larger market control—for deregulation, privatization, cuts to government services—grew louder.1 s Accordingly, many aspects of post-1970s American life slipped from the realms of community, commons, and government into the market. Prisons, parks, libraries, sectors of the armed forces, security services, schools, universities—these have moved, in full or part, to THE OUTSOURCED SELF into for-profit hands. The market, it is said, can do things better-even in the home. Today, the market offers families an extraordinary array of possibilities. Americans now live within a cycle of market takeaway and give-back. While market forces have eroded stability and fostered anxiety at work and at home, it is, ironically, mainly the market that now provides support and relief. Along with the more familiar resources of child care and home help, Americans can now readily employ personal trainers, event planners, life coaches, and dog walkers, to name a few. Once reserved for the elite, personal services have been increasingly extended to the middle class, with more Americans living or being hired to provide them than ever before. Outsourcing of work once done at home is most highly developed in big cities, of course. But even in small towns like Auburn and Lewiston, Maine, shop bulletin boards and local papers might display a notice for Rent-a-Husband, a handyman service, that cleans out your garage and hangs your pictures. If in 2011 you called 1.877.99.HUBBY, you would be contacting a nationwide chain with five offices in Maine, one half hour's drive from my aunt Elizabeth's home. A local event planner will organize your daughter's Sweet Sixteen party. One June morning I heard a radio announcer advertise a Fourth of July service that pats together your hamburger patties for the grill "so you can sit back and enjoy the holiday." But we have not just democratized the old services. We've made them more specialized, as the hamburger patties suggest, more professional, and more technology-based than in the past. A household with small children might employ a van driver from Kids in Motion to escort children to and from soccer games and music lessons, a potty trainer who graduates a child from diapers to pull-ups, and a doula for a sleepless child if the sound track of "Sleeping Baby," available for download from eMusic, doesn't work. Introduction: Villager and Outsourcer II There are specially tailored options for every category. For those on their own, a pluckily titled Rent-a-Friend service provides a paid "pal" with whom to eat dinner, see movies, work out at the gym, sort photos, or go on trips—no sex included. For those who yearn for the feel of a "traditional" family dinner, Rent-a-Grandma will let you shop, cook, talk, and share a family dinner with an older woman of your ethnicity—choices include Italian, African American, Mexican—who can, in the course of this, teach you about your "traditional" cuisine. Personal services are increasingly using new technologies. eHarmony and Match.com, for example, attract millions of fee-paying clients to a keyboard search for love. Through new reproductive technology, artificially inseminated commercial surrogates carry the babies of infertile couples, gay men, or even women who fear pregnancy. The revolution in technology has also allowed the market to go global. A young man late for an interview with me in San Francisco couldn't locate his car so he e-mailed Misha from "Your Man in India," a Bangalore-based concierge service, to check all the municipal tow lots in the Bay Area. Students in America can turn to the India-based TutorVista, which at twenty dollars an hour offers help for less money than many tutors closer at hand. But the greatest innovation of the contemporary scene are those services that reach into the heart of our emotional lives, a realm previously more shielded from the market. A love coach guides his shy client on what to do and how to feel at each step of online dating. A wedding planner helps select a suitable "memory" to set the theme of the ceremony, the inscription on place cards, and the subject of a heartfelt speech. A marriage counselor helps couples learn to shut their BlackBerries in a drawer to enjoy a romantic evening together. A paid carer offers to visit and love an elderly parent. A wantologist helps a woman figure out if she really wants a bigger home. A dog walker offers to "relate" to a dog. Attached to each practical step of dating, wedding, and divorcing are the subtle issues of what, how much, and when to feel. 12 the outsourced self The proliferation of such intimate services suggests that the market has made inroads into our very understanding of the self. In the marketization of personal life, acts that were once intuitive or ordinary—deciding whom to marry, choosing a name for your newborn, even figuring out what to want—now require the help of paid experts. In some ways, market services are very welcome news. But they raise, at every turn, the specter of a profound shift in American culture: the commodification of intimate life, which may be the great unnoticed trend of our time. To explore this shift, I immersed myself in the world of the outsourced self, discovering in the process that every stage of life has its corresponding market service. I interviewed love coaches and wedding planners, birth surrogates and parenting counselors, paid friends and mourners-for-hire. I spoke to the people who engage them and saw how they struggled with the desire to rely on family, friends, neighbors, on the one hand, and the need for professional assurances, on the other. I wanted to understand the meaning of what it is that we're doing when we outsource a personal act to someone who will know part of our knowledge, do part of our work, feel some of our feelings for us. One thing, I discovered, was that people drew lines between what seemed to them "too village" and "too market." Some things were obvious. A sidewalk vendor wearing an apron with dot eyes stands before a customer, in a New Yorker cartoon, a printed sign above his stand: "eye contact, $1.00." Everyone I showed this cartoon to laughed. That's "going too far," they said. But other cases were not so clear-cut. One man was happy to pay someone to walk his dog Monday through Friday, for example, "but not on Saturday. Why have a dog if you don't walk him on Saturdays?" It was fine, one woman told me, to hire a friendly visitor to drop in on her elderly mother because she lived three hundred miles away. But the woman's sister lived only ten miles from her mother. Why hire a visitor, she asked, when my sister lives ten miles away? Another man drew a line regarding commercial surrogate mothers: "One or two babies, that's fine. But if the surrogate has Introduction: Villager and Outsourcer t3 three or more, then she's turning into a baby factory. Then it's just about money." On issue after issue, people sought to protect the personal from the purchased, the village from the market, the self from a strange new emotional capitalism."' The challenge is immense. We are bombarded with language that urges us to think in market terms. "You're the CEO of your love life," one coach advised a lovelorn client. "You need to brand yourself better," another advised. "You're a 4 on a 10-point scale in the partner search market," another client was told. "Isn't it time to outsource your dating life?" read an ad for a dating service in United Airline's Hemispheres magazine: "My clients look to me as their personal dating headhunter." People scrambled to decipher such market metaphors, to try them on, to take them orf, to figure out what stance to take in relation to their own selves.17 Service providers also came bearing the opposite message. "Remember, you're not a number, you're unique," one coach reassured his client. But of course "unique" is one of the most valuable marketable traits of all. We have shifted, the philosopher Jerald Wallulis has noted, from being a society based on marriage and employment to one based on "marriageability" and "employability." And in light of our new insecurities, the more the market becomes our main source of help, the more powerful its aura of inevitability. This in turn makes it more acceptable to hire someone to do such things as pat hamburgers for the Fourth of July grill, if not yet pass a plate of them to a Rent-a-Friend.IH Those who are most insecure are America's poor, who also, ot course, can least arford the tempting offerings of the market. In their ever-increasing insecurity and isolation, the poor need and yearn for personal services. But one message of this book is that the answer to the dilemma posed by the market may not be found in universal access to private outsourcing. The real answer may lie in a greater commitment to public life and community. In this case, the proverbial canary in the coal mine may actually live in a gilded cage. 14 the outsourced self Americans are used to faulting themselves for being too materialistic.'9 In a 1995 survey commissioned by the Merck Family Fund, 82 percent of Americans agreed that "most of us buy and consume far more than we need."20 We often contrast a materialistic focus on the external aspect of life—the stuff we buy—with a noncommercial internal self that we protect. We either overstock at the mall or sit straight-backed in a yoga position, thumb to forefinger, focusing on nature, God, or our inner essence. But the deeper truth is that the two are no longer so distinct. Despite everyone's best intentions, personal experience can become a thing we purchase—the "perfect" date, birthday, wedding—detached from our part in creating it. This book, then, is about the market's pressure to commercialize the self, and the ways in which we accept, resist, and grapple with that challenge. It was through my aunt Elizabeth, my last living connection to those summers at the farm, that I came face-to-face with the dilemma that drives this book. At ninety-four, she became too sick to care for herself. She had spent most of her life in Turner. In her younger years, she had taught grade school. Generations of townspeople learned from her how to hold a pencil, sing in unison, and line up at the door of a small, wooden, one-room schoolhouse that her mother before her had once attended and where she, too, had taught. Late in life, Elizabeth married a man who lived "down the ro'd a piece," as they used to say in rural Maine, and was widowed after five years. Later in life, she inherited the family farm and moved into the white house she had built after the farm burned down. This she let go to pot. Shingles dropped from the roof. Chipmunks hopped through a tear in the screen of the open front door, scampering toward a large, open bag of seed by her chair. Fleas multiplied. Mice rustled in the corners of back rooms. Peanut butter jars held up the living-room windows. Retired, alone, lame, and half deaf, she sat for years looking out the window onto Introduction: Villager and Outsourcer 15 the gently sloping pastures her ancestors had plowed over two hundred years ago. When my parents were still alive, they would look in on her, and tried to help as much as she would allow. That wasn't much. My father would walk down the hill from our house, a window-pane under his arm, tool kit in hand, prepared to replace a broken garage window he'd noticed. "1 don't need help!" She'd crack her schoolteacherly voice like a whip. My father would patiently return, set aside pane and tools and wait for the next chance. But the frailer my aunt became, the more fiercely independent she wished to be. Then, one after the other, my parents died, and it fell to me to keep an eye out for Elizabeth. And that's all I did at the beginning—keep an eye out. From the safe distance of San Francisco, I followed my aunt's quirky life with affectionate interest and listened with great admiration to lively accounts of the help her neighbors gave her. During summer vacations, we flew to Turner, Maine, to stay in my parents' old house up the hill. A day or so after we arrived, I would walk down to Elizabeth's house, knock on the front door, and wait. Silence. I would knock on a window and call, "Elizabeth?" Silence. I would call out again. "Elizabeth? It's Arlie." Silence. Then a slight stir. A shuffle. After five minutes she would press open a stuck door, limp out in frayed slippers, holding two worn lawn chairs. These we ceremoniously set up in the knee-high grass outside her front door. In those years she almost never invited anyone into her house and always refused my offers to mow her lawn or plant flowers, the first step in a ritual of slowly conceded consent. "No, no, thank you," she'd say, then ask with genuine interest how my year had gone. After a certain number of offers to help and refusals, she could be coaxed to dinners with my family up the hill. During winters when 16 the outsourced self we were gone, kindly elderly relatives and neighbors visited, recycled her bottles, and eventually took on feeding her Lean Cuisine dinners, paying her bills, and washing her hair. Despite the plethora of services that had begun to appear in rural Maine, the spirit of "just do" had not vanished. In February 1998, a fierce ice storm hit Turner. It buried cars, felled trees, froze water pipes, knocked out the power, and so chilled the air in my aunt's small living room that, sitting in her wingback chair, Elizabeth could see her own breath. As the temperature dropped, my aunt donned a sweater, a coat, three pairs of socks, two caps, and in a paradoxical expression of independence and helplessness, went to her bed in the living room, pulled up two blankets, and waited. Help came. A parade of kindly neighbors in touching acts of small-town kindness stocked her refrigerator, brought extra blankets, set up an electric generator, and placed flowers by her chair. Other elderly or disabled residents more mobile or less stubborn than she were moved, with pets, to cots set up in the town fire station. Volunteers served three hot meals a day until the crisis passed. It didn't occur to my aunt to calculate her neighbors' time, add in gas, and write out checks to her rescuers any more than it would have occurred to them. In truth, Elizabeth was loath to pay anyone for anything. But even so, it sat right with both her and them that her rescuers were kindly, civic-minded townspeople and not professionals delivering skillful, friendly service. 1 hen one summer morning, when fortunately we were still close by, Elizabeth awoke to discover she could not swallow. After a day of no food or drink, she could not rise from bed. A neighbor called Turner Rescue, the town ambulance service. A soft-spoken EMT named Ross emerged from the van, sat on a stool beside my aunt's bed in her living room, as he had from time to time for years, and asked: "So how d'ya feel?" "Fine," came her reply. "Fine really?" "Fine enough." "Fine enough how?" Introduction: Villager and Outsourcer 17 "Fine enough so that I don't have to leave here." After a half an hour of gentle, steady banter, Ross coaxed my aunt into the ambulance and drove her to a local hospital where a doctor discovered a hernia blocking her colon. If he didn't operate, he explained, she would die. He operated and from this—she was now ninety-four—she miraculously recovered. She was transferred to a convalescent home where she was helped to stand, lean on her walker, and haltingly walk. A month later, the doctor declared her well. She could not stay in the convalescent home indefinitely, but, given the doctor's assessment of her condition, she could not legally be released without around-the-clock care in place. As Elizabeth's nearest of kin, it fell to me to figure out what came next. My Berkeley classes started in a week. The two couples who had previously pitched in with shopping, paying hills, and washing hair, could do no more. But Elizabeth—childless, lame, nearly blind, unable to drive—only wanted to sit in her wingback chair on her beloved hill and be, as she imagined, "independent." Would she move to San Francisco? I asked. "I could find you a place. We could visit." "No," she said, "just take me homey But at home, she had no thought of bringing in a person to care for her. "Strangers in my house? No need for that." And as for paying such a person? "No need for that either." My aunt Elizabeth had in mind an older world of "just do." But 1 couldn't quit my family and job in California to care for her in Maine myself. I couldn't "just do." I now faced a care crisis of my own, so I ventured, alongside the people in this book, out onto the market frontier. small could st donned a . paradoxical ^ her bed in the b Help came. A [ small-town kindness s kets, set up an electric gt. Other elderly or disabled res. than she were moved, with pets, station. Volunteers served three hoi passed. It didn't occur to my aunt to calcu add in gas, and write out checks to her rescue would have occurred to them. In truth, Elizabeth anyone for anything. But even so, it sat right with bot| them that her rescuers were kindly, civic-minded towr^ and not professionals delivering skillful, friendly service. Then one summer morning, when fortunately we were close by, Elizabeth awoke to discover she could not swallow. Alter a day of no food or drink, she could not rise from bed. A neiglwot called Turner Rescue, the town ambulance service. A soft-spoken ENVT named Ross emerged from the van, sat on a stool beside taty aunt's bed in her living room, as he had from time to time for years, and asked: "So how d'ya feel?" "Fine," came \\er Yeip\\f. still Chapter 1 You Have Three Seconds A affa entury ago in America, courtship was mostly a community affair \X/^ we can imagine my grandfather James Porter Russell, age tnty-three in the summer of 1900. He is riding his penny-farthing tvv^ C' *ts ^ar8e tmn front wheel and smaller back one, over ty-nine miles of dusty, washboard road from his home in ttftington to the farm m jurner pive hours coining, five hours |aC ' a^ 'n one day. Once there, he courts Edith, and her younger Bster A i ' A1Jce, local schoolteachers. One of the two will become my a«dmother, the other the wife of a ne'er-do-well farmer. While i niatchmakers plied their trade in the ethnic enclaves of the at cities, they seldom entered the parlors of small-town New and1 where courtship tended to be a do-it-yourself thing. jsters and their visitor might well have been seated on the of thdt j^/isc facing the dirt road. A neighbor's son, aiscd .1 palm to wave. I !■<• gifii' father, a 116th Maine Regiment in the Cavil milking cows in the barn with his rr, chronically ill, was probably resting ine of the girls called for her. This was Chapter 1 You Have Three Seconds i\ century ago in America, courtship was mostly a community affair. We can imagine my grandfather James Porter Russell, age twenty-three in the summer of 1900. He is riding his penny-farthing bicycle, with its large thin front wheel and smaller back one, over twenty-nine miles of dusty, washboard road from his home in Farmington to the farm in Turner. Five hours coming, five hours back, all in one day. Once there, he courts Edith, and her younger sister, Alice, local schoolteachers. One of the two will become my grandmother, the other the wife of a ne'er-do-well farmer. While paid matchmakers plied their trade in the ethnic enclaves of the great cities, they seldom entered the parlors of small-town New England1 where courtship tended to be a do-it-yourself thing. The sisters and their visitor might well have been seated on the front porch of the farmhouse facing the dirt road. A neighbor's son, passing by, might have raised a palm to wave. The girls' father, a shy man who fought with the 16th Maine Regiment in the Civil War, would likely have been milking cows in the barn with his two hired hands. Their mother, chronically ill, was probably resting but would have come out if one of the girls called for her. This was 22 THE OUTSOUKCEI) SELF me up with perfectly nice friends of friends, but no one special. Once you exhaust those possibilities, what do you do? Then one morning as she rode her bedroom exercise bicycle, the thought came to her: Finding love is like an engineering project. I need a consultant. So Grace Googled Evan Katz, whose online name was e-Cyrano—named after the secret wooer who fed lines to his handsome, lovelorn but clueless friend—and whose Web site read: "I am a PERSONAL TRAINER for women who want to FALL IN LOVE." (Evan actually had male clients, too.) She signed up for his medium-level $1,500 Premium Package and simultaneously enrolled at Match.com for $17.99 per month. (In 2009 Match.com was charging its 1,438,000 paid subscribers $34.99 for one month or $17.99 a month for a six-month contract.) Grace declined Match.com's further offer (and fee) to advise on the next step—getting a prospective date to exchange phone numbers. She also declined "First Impressions," a service that, for yet another fee, moved messages to the top of the inbox of all new Match.com subscribers. Wondering how a love coach went about his work, I Hew to Burbank, California, to interview Evan Katz. He answered the doorbell and, with a friendly nod, welcomed me in, head tilted into his cell phone, alternating silence with soothing words to a client. Thirty-five years old, Evan was a tall, lean, wide-stepping man with a halo of curly brown hair and alert, curious, slightly worried blue eyes. Over tea, he described with disarming modesty his initial venture into coaching, "I had a BA from Duke in English literature, and I wanted to write romantic comedy screenplays for television. That didn't work out but I thought I'd hold on to the romance part and try this." With the help of a business coach, Evan launched what became a highly successful company. He was featured at the International Internet Dating Convention in San Francisco, and has been a panelist on the Flirt-A-Thon Expert Panel in Los Angeles. He-appeared on NBC, ABC, and CBS. He was the author of Why You Haw Three Seconds 2.< You're Still Single: Things Your Friends Would Tell You If You Promised Not to Get Mad.'' He maintains a nionthlv newsletter, and has produced audio CDs based on a tele-class (an interactive workshop via telephone) on "How to Write a Profile that Attracts People You Want to Meet." When I met him, in May of2009, he had written more than five hundred personal profiles for his clients, most of them heterosexual women. Recalling Grace's hesitation, I asked Evan if his clients felt ashamed to hire him. "Oh, I'm their dirty little secret! They think they're supposed to be able to do this on their own," he answered. A lot of them believe that "when you're ready, love finds you." But actually, he said, "finding love takes skill and work." And to learn that skill, you need to pay an expert. Evan offers three coaching packages for online daters—Basic, Premium, and VIP. for the Basic package, he helps clients write a profile for the online dating Web site of their choice; pick a headshot from LookBetterOnline, a photo service for online daters; create an alluring username; and write a catchy subject line. He also gives tips on how to correspond with an interested party—that is, date online, and how to date IRL, that is, In Real Life, afterward. The Premium package included a month of private coaching sessions. The VIP package adds sixteen hour-long coaching sessions over four months. Like other love coaches, Evan also offered to read all the responses sent to Grace's online profile and help pick out the most promising. But that felt "over the line" to Grace. "I'm the only one who can tell who is and isn't promising. Plus, I want to be able to tell my partner, once we're together, I chose you myself." Unlike Evan Katz's service, eHarmony, another Internet dating service, sets out guidelines for what to talk about after a couple has decided they are seriously interested in each other. But Grace found that unacceptable, too: "If one coach is feeding lines to the guy and another is feeding lines to the woman, isn't that one coach courting the other?" A Double-Cyrano, for Grace, was just "too much." In all of these decisions, Grace had to consider the extent to 24 THE OUTSOURCED SELE which she should adopt Evan's businesslike approach to finding love. To begin with, he told her that looking for love was like finding a job. That made a certain sense to her: I'm an engineer. So it was easy for me to think of dating as a work project. Just get it done. 1 know that sounds unroman-tic, but that's okay, so long as I get to my goal. Evan kept my nose to the grindstone. Other online daters writing on Evan's blog also seemed determined to stoically embrace courtship as work. One woman said she was "working at" meeting men online and even on "putting in face time." Another who identified herself as ojfthemarket4now described her schedule: "I kept plugging away, TableForSix [a service that sets up dinners with other singles), poetry readings, volunteering, and it's hard work." One playful poster remarked, "If dating is work, you may want to avoid people who have too many dates, like employers avoid job-hoppers." Another wrote defiantly, "Looking for love is not like work." According to Evan, however, looking was work: When you're unemployed, what do you do to find work? When you are single, what do you do to find love? I'm not telling clients to spend forty hours a week looking for love, but I tell them, "You can give it three. Do the numbers—and don't resent it." More than not resenting this work, Evan believed a person should enjoy it. In fact, trying to enjoy the work was part of the work. Evan advised Grace to relax and to "put her real self out there." As Grace recalled: Evan told me: "Okay, Gracey, you can't hide behind generalities—fun-loving, athletic, musical. You have to show the real you through real stories." You Have Three Seconds 25 So Grace proposed a real story: 1 once paid good money to go to a Zen monastery where 1 was guided to get on my hands and knees and scrub the men's bathroom, to teach humility. And 1 didn't mind. I'd cleaned Trudy's [her daughter's] bottom many times. "That might be a little too out there," Evan cautioned. "Why don't you save that for when you're actually on a date?" In other words, he urged her to be "real" but not "too real," distinguishing between off-putting and enticing real stories. The best real self, Evan assured Grace, was an "average" one. The Internet was not, as he saw it, a brilliant new medium for like-minded oddballs to find each other. It was a place for one wide-appeal average to meet another. "Everyone needs to aim for the middle so they can widen their market," he counseled. "Don't appeal to a small ruche." It was a common mist.ike clients made, Evan said: I had this MIT brainy double-helix guy who worked for a suicide hotline, but I told him, "You can't lay that out on the first date. It's too much. You have to learn to talk about the weather." So part of getting the "real you" out there required the suppression of the too-real you. In your local community, Evan reasoned, a simple "this-is-me" approach would work, since people have had years to inquire of others and observe who you are. But the Internet, Evan said with awe, has revolutionized courtship: The Internet is the world's biggest love mail. And to go there, you have to brand yourself well because you only have three seconds. When I help a client brand herself, I'm helping her put herself forward to catch that all-important glimpse. A profile could say, "I talk about myself a lot. I go through bouts of depression and Zoloft usually works." That might be the truth, but it's not going into her brand. 26 the outsourced self Nor would excessive reticence do the trick: One client told me, "I'm really good with my nieces and nephews." But I told him, "Look, man, this is your job interview. Bring on the A-game. You don't want a woman to ditch you because you bored her. The burden's on you to reach out, not for her to see through your shy mask." It's a bitter pill to swallow. Evan urged clients to use humor to persuade others that the edited sliver of their "real" self was them. He told me proudly of a success story. Tony was bald and short, five foot two. I didn't deny he was short, but I also didn't focus on the height he didn't have. 1 focused on the sense of humor he did have. We put "Are you afraid of spilling things on me? Don't answer my e-mail. Worried about falling objects? Look for a taller person. A man you can look up to." Before the new profile, he was hardly getting any e-mail response. Now he gets fifty or sixty page views and ten to twelve e-mails a week. I made the guy larger than life. Applying Evan's approach, one inspired online dater wrote: "Putting the 'rarin' back into 'librarian.'" Pressing the Button Grace was ready. She had paid her fees and, with Evan's help, had written her profile, posed for her photograph, collected additional shots of herself gardening, skiing, and hiking. She had prepared an e-mail subject line: "Nature Girl Looking for Serious Relationship." Now all she had to do was click "submit." Her voice trembled slightly as she recalled the moment: You Have Three Seconds 27 I froze. It was hard to push the button. That was my photo, and there are twenty million viewers who are going to see it. What if some creep downloads my photo? 1 work in a state office building. What if someone walks in and recognizes me? It made me squirm, lint Evan kept telling me, "You can do it." So I pushed the button. The next day, Grace's profile went online, and, given her beautiful smile and artful description, e-mail responses flooded in. Wow! People deluged me. Look at all these men interested in me. I felt so good about myself. A few hundred page views every few days—e-mails and winks [a Match.com option by which a viewer can express interest in a post]. I was like a kid in a candy store. Grace felt she had to cull these responses on her own, without Evan's help. Going through the messages gave her a sense of who was genuinely looking for love, and who was out for sport. I discarded men who seemed to want a fling, or serial monogamy or pretend-monogamy. I wanted someone to grow old with, someone as morally upstanding as my dad, a sex god, and crazy about me, physically active and emotionally and spiritually mature. With this much choice I felt 1 didn't have to settle for someone who wasn't really exceptional. "You're getting good ROI," Evan told Grace—Return on Investment, a term widely used on Internet dating blogs. Having now invested money and time, Grace focused on results; if dating was a job, you measured success by the quantity of high-quality responses. Grace corresponded with many men. Some were sweet but implausible—like an Alaskan musher with forty dogs who'd noted that she owned a Labrador retriever and thought they might share a 28 I Ilk OUTSOURCED SEL^ love of dogs. Others were unnerving, like the man who, when she met him in person at a bar, turned out to be twenty-five years olde* than he'd claimed to be online—a fact he tried to remedy by applying a great deal of face cream and powder. As a friend put it x.0 Grace, "You have to kiss a lot of frogs." But Evan didn't talk about frogs and princes; he talked about numbers. As he explained, "Even if daters don't think in numbers, numbers apply to them and they should know it." His rating systeni went from 1 to 10. "I see a lot of 5 men looking for 10 women, and that leaves the 4 and 5 women in the dust," Evan observed. A "10" woman, as he explained it, was twenty-four, never married, had a sexy 36-24-36 figure, a face like Nicole Kidman's, a warm personality, a successful but flexible career, and a love of gourmet cooking. Grace was very pretty and sexy but older, divorced, and low on time for gourmet cooking. So maybe she was a "6." How volatile such numbers were, Grace realized when she updated her profile the day after turning fifty. "Like stock prices, overnight, my ratings fell by half. I asked myself, 'What happened? I'm the same person I was a day ago—but not the same number. Now I'm a 3 and a half" Complaints sprinkled through Evan's Internet blog were often couched in numerical terms. A woman who described herself as "nice, average looking, intellectually fun and creative" wrote, "I am SO SICK of these men who are fives (or lower) who think they're going to wind up with supermodels." Before she met Marcel, Grace had had two half-year-long relationships. In each case the relationship ended because the man couldn't get along with her preteen daughter. But what shocked Grace was how casually these men treated the breakups and how confident they were about their future prospects. "It was eerie," she told me. The first guy said, "I'm getting back on Match.com. It was so easy to find you; there must he others out there like you." I said, "Are you kidding me?" He came hack months later, "Oh, my God! What did I do? There are no other you's out there." You Have 'Three Seconds 29 I said, "It's too late." Pm not dealing with someone who thinks people come in facsimiles. It's very weird, but the second guy said exactly the same thing. "It was so easy to find you." Ten months later, he tells me, "There's nobody out here like you." In his mind, 1 was a box of cereal on the shelf with dozens of others. I was replaceable. Both suitors had taken the idea of a "6" to heart. One 6 seemed equal to another. So if you lose one, you can get another just like it. In Grace's eyes, they had taken market logic "too far." Grace might be using the market to find a man but she didn't want to end up with a man who saw her in a marketlike way. One day, in a moment of great loneliness, Grace's second boyfriend paid her a late-evening visit. Despite her strong reservations, she was tempted by his profuse apologies and entreaties. But Evan counseled her, "Gracey, has anything changed? Does he get along with Trudy any better? Has he grown more flexible? No? So don't take him back. Mr. Right is out there. Keep going." Here Evan was more than her guide to self-marketing. He was a friend, or at least friendlike. Maybe the suitor didn't see who she really was, but her coach evidently did. A few months later, Grace met Marcel, a twice-married musician and teacher. "The first thing that impressed me was that he put himself out for me. We live an hour and a half's drive apart. But he told me, Tm happy to drive to you.' From the start, he was generous-hearted." Something else also struck her. Many ot Marcel's attributes did not match the list of desirable traits she had given Evan earlier in the process: tall, good looking, possibly an accountant or engineer. Evan hadn't put much stock in her list, and now she saw he was right. The first time Marcel came to my house, he serenaded my Labrador retriever and me with his tenor saxophone. As I was watching him, 1 realized Marcel didn't have many checks on my list. I wasn't looking for a musician. I wasn't looking for a 30 THE OUTSOURCED SELF bald man. And he's tattooed! But he's gone out of his way to introduce me to his friends and family, and they all smile knowingly and say they've heard all about me and they're thrilled for him. After he'd known me for less than a month, he invited me to his high school reunion that was to take place four months later. We've been dating for just five months now, but already it feels deep. Part of Marcel's appeal, never considered on Grace's list, may have been his own readiness to weave her into his life in nonmarket ways. When I talked to Marcel by phone, he explained that his decision to put his money down for Match.com evoked little of the anxiety Grace had felt, even though he was, as he put it, "an Internet dating virgin": I just sat at my computer one summer day, punched in my Visa number, attached my photo and—zip—I was online. I didn't hire a coach and didn't have a shopping list. But I was excited to try it out. I'd gone on a bunch of ordinary dates but it was the sweetness in Grace's eyes and smile in that photo that caught my attention. After Marcel and Grace had exchanged messages, he visited her. "On the second date," he recalled, "Grace packed a sushi lunch and a bottle of wine, and she asked to kidnap me to drive to a place very special to her—an organic herb farm. She was as sweet inside as out. She's a giving person." Marcel had never heard of 1 to 10 ratings, brands, or ROIs. After meeting him, Grace, too, began brushing them aside. "I never would have gone out with him if I'd stuck to my checklist!" The old language of romance crept back into her dating life. "It seemed to happen organically," she said. "We feel natural with each other." At one point, she even mused, "The way I think about it now, I wonder if meeting Marcel wasn't fated. It's like he was sent to You Have Three Seconds 31 trie." In the realm of love, Grace had entered the market, exposed herself to its ratings of investment and gain, encountered men who saw her strictly as a commodity, and recoiled. The market could take you only so far. It might make the introduction, but for the rest what was required was the spirit of the gift. Others Not So Lucky Grace was one of Evans success stories. She had achieved her goal and felt happy to have hired Evan and gone on Match.com. Other Internet love-seekers, though, were not so lucky and ultimately felt hurt by their experiences online. As a woman who posted on Evan's blog remarked: There probably isn't a single guy I wouldn't have given a second chance to, but out of the many, many men 1 met, only two ever gave me n second date. You may read this and think I'm a terrible date. But I'm not. And I'm not looking for a movie star. 1 don't care if he has money, career, or a car. Em just looking for a guy who's nice to me, makes me laugh, and uses his brain. Personally I don't feel the need to subject myself to this kind of rejection anymore. You know what I'm doing? I'm having a rich and active LIFE. . . . A chorus of sympathetic online nods followed: "I know what you mean. . . . I'm in the same boat." Men overrate themselves, women complained, leaving more women—especially older women—forced to lower their standards and demean themselves to elicit interest. One woman sadly admitted that in order to attract a man, she had falsely claimed she wasn't interested in marriage. Another proposed mobilizing a voluntary nationwide women's cartel against callous men in order to raise the general standard of respect for women. "We should all refuse to go out with men who treat other women poorly," she suggested. But this idea fell 32 THE OUTSOURCED SELF by the wayside in the unregulated, nonunionized market of love. Evan countered with a simple "Sorry, darlin'." Internet dating could be hard on men, too, Marcel explained: I didn't anticipate some of the anger you can run into out there on the Internet and in person. I remember I asked a woman out. And when she got out of her car, I saw she was thirty pounds heavier than her photo showed. We had drinks. Then when I was walking her to her car, she excoriated men who cared about a woman's weight. When I later e-mailed her to say that I didn't think we were a match, she wrote a venomous reply. It was hands down the worst date I ever had. Thinking of Marcel's experience, I asked Evan Katz why he thought Internet dating was so unrewarding for so many. For one thing, he felt, some people were simply too old, too fat, too unattractive in person or personality; their "numbers" were low. What about the fact that so many divorced men remarried much younger women, leaving attractive older women with fewer options? Nothing to be done about that. Work hard. Tough it out, he advised. More to the point, he felt, was a general lack of clarity about just how close a bond really was: People get very confused. They want to know when a relationship is serious. Here's how it is: A relationship isn't real until you've committed to being boyfriend/girlfriend. Everything prior to that—phoning, e-mailing, dating, preliminary sex— all that isn't real until you have each committed. I've had clients devastated to realize that they've fallen in love with someone who is still looking online. Another reason Evan gave for failure was—paradoxically—that his clients acted too much like shoppers: You Have Three Seconds People think they are shopping, and they are. But they want to quickly comb through the racks and snap their fingers, next . . . next . . . next. . . . They make low-investment dates, so they can quickly move on to the next appointment, and they set up a short meeting at Starbucks where all they have time to say is, "Oh, is that a soy latte?" You need to slow down. Hold out for high-investment dates —a nice dinner, a play afterward. You can be too efficient, too focused on your list of desired characteristics, so intent on getting the best deal that you pass ewer the right one. Many clients clicked through dates—next, next, next—out of anxiety, Evan surmised. Fart of his job, he said, was to tell them, "Relax. You have time." And even as shoppers, he pointed out, his clients often misunderstood the market. Many held the illusion, for example, that highly desirable partners were there for the picking. Imagine you talk one-to-one to a beautiful woman at a party. She seems available. You feel lucky. Maybe a guy comes up; you see your competition. But what if, after you talk with her, you notice a line of five hundred men behind you. It's like that on the Internet. If the supply of competitors goes up, your rating goes down. You just can't see it. On the farmhouse front porch in 1900, my grandmother was, lore has it, sitting next to her competition, her sister. It was a village courtship, and surely for her sister, all the more painful for that. To Grace, Marcel, and millions of other American online daters, however, the competition was anonymous; so for disappointments, there seemed no one to blame but oneself. Evan also cautioned against looking for just what many love coaches professed to sell—a soul mate. Clients, he was convinced, were often scanning the listings for the wrong thing. As he observed ironically: Till-: OUTSOURCED SELF Online daters listen to coaching ads. "Find your soul mate. Find perfect chemistry. Fall in love." And so they come into my office with long lists of characteristics they want: The man should be successful, tall, handsome, funny, kind, and family oriented. The checklist goes on. Does he like to dance? Is he a film aficionado? A real reader? They want a charismatic guy who doesn't flirt, a CEO who's home by 5:00 p.m. Some women are so touchy about not wanting to settle for less than their complete list that they price themselves out of the market. Then they get discouraged and conclude it's impossible to rind real love. "Soul mate," as Evan saw it, was a retrospective category. "It's only when you look back after twenty years together that you can say, 'We've been soul mates,'" he observed. The term implied, even created, a certain chemistry. So Evan didn't use it. Still, many people do. Eighty-five percent of online daters in a 2004 study by Dr. Courtney Johnson said they believed "everyone has a soul mate." Over three-quarters believed in "love at first sight."4 How might all this have looked to J. Porter? I wondered. For one thing, the search for a soul mate with great sexual chemistry would probably have startled him, given his era's greater focus on a woman's steadiness of character and motherliness. He would have been astonished, too, at the modern celebration of—and expansion of—choice in the world's "biggest candy store." After all, as far as we know, his choice was between Edith and Alice seated together on the same farmhouse porch. Grace Weaver's Match .com profile, on the other hand, went out to many millions of viewers, 1.3 million of whom paid for the right to reply to her or other paying clients. In 2009, Match.com reported 56 million introductory e-mails sent, and 132 million "winks."5 J. Porter might also have been nonplussed by the very idea of a hired e-Cyrano, self-branding, 1-10 ratings, and ROI. He would have been harried by the paradox of the love mall: if everyone is invited to shop for ready-made, off-the-shelf love, the opportunity You Have Three Seconds 35 gained in numbers may be lost in the brusque efficiency with which seekers treat prospective partners. "Isn't it strange," Evan later mused, "how we forget the biggest thing—kindness?" There were other problems in Internet dating that Evan did not mention. Some daters lied about their age, drug habits, and marital status. In the absence of a watchful community, some felt free to brand themselves in deceptive ways. Some were rude, mean, or worse. One Internet dater I interviewed contracted a venereal disease from a man who lied about having it. This woman confided her revenge fantasy: "I wanted my brother to go over to that guy's house and spray-paint 'clap' on the front of his garage. I wanted people to know." Another woman had a similar revenge fantasy about a man who, she later discovered, was married. "When he told me not to call him at home because he was visiting his sister, I got suspicious. And he wouldn't give me his cell phone number. The clues added up. That was the one thing I specified in my post: no married men. I felt like calling his wife to warn her—but I didn't have her number." And that was not the worst.(> Marcel related a disturbing story he heard through a close friend. A woman, a divorcee with two children, met a man on Match.com and agreed to go to his apartment for a drink. He drugged her, raped her, and stole all her money. Stunned and drowsy, she managed to dress herself and begged for money to get a taxi home. The rapist threw her twenty dollars and she staggered out the door. Wanting to shield her children, she didn't prosecute the man. Nor did she report it to Match.com. As far as Marcel knew, that man was still on the dating Web site.7 A Booming Love Business In one out of six new marriages, the couple met through an Internet dating site." Of those I spoke to who were looking for love, all were intrigued by Internet dating but kept it as a backup in case friends' parties and office meet-ups—more "natural" ways of the outsourced self meeting—didn't work out. But within the Internet dating industry, Gian Gonzaga, senior director of research and development at eHarmony explained, such person-to-person meetings are called "off-line dates." Others m the industry call them "dating in the wild." Match.com is only one of many Internet sites, and estimates vary on how many people click in. A 2005 Pew Center survey of online dating found that 16 million people—"11 percent of all American Internet-using adults"—had visited an online dating Web site at some point. During the September to December period of the survey, 10 million single Internet users said they were currently searching for romantic partners, and over a third—3.7 million— were doing so through dating Web sites. A third of all Americans at that time said they knew of someone who'd visited a dating Web site. A quarter said they knew someone who had gone on a date with someone they met through such a site, and 15 percent—or 30 million people—said they knew someone who had been in a long-term relationship or married someone he or she had met online. Estimates of online daters vary wildly—from 20 million unique users now visiting online dating sites in the United States to 40 million—or about half of .,1] single adults in the United Statcs.'J A 2007 survey of a random sample of nearly one thousand Cali-tormans of every age tends to confirm the estimate of 20 million. I asked people to "Imagine that you're looking for a serious romantic partner, haven't been able to find one, and you had enough money to pay for what you needed. Where would you go lor help first? Family and friends? Religious leaders? TV or radio figures? Free Internet dating service? A for-pay dating service that finds you a partner and leaves it at that? A for-pay dating service that finds you a partner and sets up a meeting with him or her? Or a for-pay service that finds you a partner and provides monthly checkups to keep the relationship in good order?" Extrapolating from the survey, of all Californians, more than two million of the state's twenty-eight million residents would opt for one of the for-pay services. Extrapolating to the United States, that would add up to some twenty-three million for-pay potential daters.1" You Have Three Seconds 37 The second largest online dating company, eHarmony, administers a 458-item questionnaire. It matches new members' answers with those of other paid clients, thereby preselecting a few theoretically suitable applicants. eHarmony's goal, according to its publicist, is to "capture the M market"—marriage market—by applying science to love. In 2011 the dating site claimed nearly one hundred thousand marriages a year.11 Perhaps to improve its marriage numbers, eHarmony does not admit physically ill, thrice-married, or— until a 2009 policy change—gay clients. eHarmony also for a while offered a marital tune-up service to help its marriages last. The company is searching for other ways to improve its numbers, too. Gian Gonzaga, the psychologist who directs eHarmony s research and development lab, told me in a telephone interview: We'd love to move into "sparking" or what I call interpersonal attraction. Evidence shows that people are attracted to those with different DNA-based immunity profiles. Those are probably communicated through smell at close contact and are related to sexual responsivity. But we'd need to collect cheek swabs and that would be hard to do. eHarmony's technique for predicting long term compatibility involves proprietary information, which Gonzaga calls a "product." If the company ever happened to perfect a method to test for sparking, presumably that would become a product, too. In a recent expression of the spirit of capitalism, eHarmony, Match.com, and other for-profit dating services now post competitive research bulletins on company blogs, each claiming to lead to more, happier, and longer-lasting marriages. At one point Match .com claimed that twice as many recently married U.S. couples met on its site than on its closest competitor's site. eHarmony countered that its clients enjoyed longer and happier marriages than those of all other companies.12 The eHarmony survey used pie charts and graphs, rates of statistical significance, and a Couples Satisfaction Index (CSI), and claims to duplicate the sample size and selection 38 THE OUTSOURCED SELF criteria of a recent study by Match.com. It also boasts clients who suffer less "loss of spark"—a state they refer to as LOS. eHarmony also claims that its clients are less likely to suffer LOS or divorce than do married couples who meet at bars and clubs, work or school—and even through family and friends.13 Company-sponsored research on both sides is often based on Internet-recruited samples14 and doesn't say whether the service attracts people who for well-documented reasons (such as higher education, higher income, and professional status) tend to stay together, regardless of how they met. Behind the spirited contest between different company-funded researchers is, of course, the great profit to be made. In 2011 American fee-based dating sites grossed over a billion dollars.ls In 2008, Match.com was grossing $365,500,000—a million dollars a day. That amounted to $83,000 in subscription revenue for every marriage it claimed. When the stock market dipped that year, traffic on Match.com rose. The more insecure jobs become, some speculate, the more people seek security elsewhere. (The sale of pets went up, too.) And now such Web sites are looking abroad. As JeffTitterton, the president of PlanetOut—a for-profit Web site featuring personals for gay clients—observed, "The money is in the international markets. . . . The next big wave is to go overseas. Let's see what happens there."16 eHarmony's Gian Gonzaga spoke excitedly about the company's future: Our compatibility matching systems is a good product; we're already in fifteen countries, including Brazil, Japan, the UK, Australia, and Canada. And we have a partnership with eDar-ling which services Eastern and Western Europe. I'd love to set up labs in Sao Paulo and Tokyo. The company is also expanding its business into other kinds of relationships—the selection of college roommates and company You Have Three Seconds 3