A modern person is not searching for love. They open a Project.

Every Project arrives with a technical brief. Specifications designed to engineer safety. Height - “from”, weight - “up to” so you can feel protected or showcase your status. Age - “under”, to avoid colliding with somebody else’s fatigue. Financial protocol - “no lower”, to sidestep a cash-flow gap. Sense of humor - mandatory, like a built-in antivirus against domestic monotony.

We can call it “preferences”, yet in essence it is a spec sheet. The input is supposed to be a person who matches it as closely as possible. We sculpt a perfect, risk-free phantom out of these requirements and then walk into the world hunting for whoever resembles it the most.

Our first dates are not about discovery. They are inbound quality control. QA testing. We ask questions not from curiosity but to verify the system against the declared characteristics. “So, do you read?” - that’s not about books, it’s about firmware compatibility. “Where did you vacation last year?” - that’s a request to validate location preferences and financial protocols. We do not look at the person. We tick through the checklist.

If the candidate passes the initial screening, the real fun begins: working with the beta version. We see not a personality but an MVP - a minimum viable product that can and must be “refined”. Here’s an outdated music player in the firmware - push an update. Here the wardrobe interface fails expectations - ship a patch. Friends or girlfriends? That’s legacy code throttling the system; ideally it gets commented out over time.

We stop being partners and become project managers. We fix bugs, roll patches, optimize performance. We do not love. We improve the User Experience - the UX.

The crash is inevitable. Because a person is not software. They are chaos made of “undocumented features”. They have ridiculous habits that cannot be erased with patches. They have past traumas that trigger critical errors in absurd places. They have silly, illogical, irrational needs. They are a living operating system writing its own code.

And sooner or later the system will throw an error. The Project will be closed as unprofitable. The post-mortem begins, and the conclusion we reach is almost always the same: “I miscalculated during design. The source material turned out to be defective.”

So we sit down to write a new spec. More detailed. Stricter. Packed with extra clauses that supposedly eliminate systemic failure. We are not looking for a person. We are chasing the perfect Project that will never break. And we fail to notice that the only broken part is in our own head.