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“Walkies?” I asked Bagel. “Time for walks?”
She ran around in circles as I grabbed her leash and harness.
“Come and join us?” I asked Mila.
There was a slight look of fear in her eyes, or was it sadness? It almost looked like defeat.
“Come on,” I said. “Keep us company.”
She nodded and got up.
When we made it outside, I asked her point blank. “So what was that about last night, with the questions?”
“You know what I do for a living?” she asked. And, bizarrely, I didn’t. It wasn’t something that had come up. “I’m the product manager for the Matchmaker Plus dating app.”
She told me about the five questions and how they guarantee compatibility, and I shook my head.
“It sounds like a bunch of engineers trying to hard science a soft science.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“There are hard sciences, like physics and astronomy,” I said. “They’re very good at getting exact mathematical answers. You want to know the mass of an electron? They can figure it out. You want to launch a robot into space and have it land on Mars? They’re your guys. They think they’re so smart that they can solve any problem anyone in any other field has, but the second you give them a question with any ambiguity, their tools fall flat.
“There’s an old joke about a physicist helping a farmer get more milk from his cows. He stays up all night and figures it out. The farmer asks him what it is, and the physicist begins, ‘Assume a spherical cow…’”
Mila didn’t laugh. Nobody ever laughed. It’s not the kind of joke that people laugh at. It didn’t make it any less true.
“A field like mine, there aren’t many hard answers,” I said. “A patient comes in with an issue, and I have a suitcase full of tools to help diagnose and solve whatever’s ailing them. We generally go in a certain order, but to a large extent, we’re trusting our guts and using our experience. It doesn’t always work, and when things do work, we don’t always know why. It’s how the softer sciences work, but patients hate it. They want definite answers.”
Bagel stopped to sniff some flowers, then knelt over them to mark her territory.
“What are you saying?” she asked.
“This algorithm,” I said. “It’s bullshit. Human compatibility isn’t something you can put a number on. It’s something you feel and, even then, you need to give it time and you’ll never know for sure. People change, and interest wanes.”
I could tell that Mila was seriously considering this. “So what are you saying, that you and I have a potential future?”
“We just met,” I said. “I barely know you, and you barely know me. Who knows?”
In saying that, I was trying to be as honest and realistic as possible, but as the words came out, I realized that I hadn’t even considered what things might look like even a few months down the line. Also, I just took her virginity, and most likely sounded like a giant asshole. And, from where I was standing, things didn’t look good. There was something I knew about her that would make any future between us impossible. A genuine incompatibility with no room for compromise or middle ground.
I could keep that secret to myself and wait for it to come out on its own. That might take a week or a few months, depending on how things went with her. Or I could just tell her right now and rip the bandage off. Sure, I’d be sacrificing potentially the best sex of my life at a time when I’d need it the most, but not bringing it up felt dishonest.
“At the same time,” I said, “I just don’t see it happening.”
That took her aback. “Why not?”
“I don’t want kids.”
The words came out with shocking ease. It was a simple enough thought that there was no room for stammering or stuttering. Just four simple words that were impossible to misinterpret.
“You’re not ready for kids?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want them. At all. I have patients who come in who’ll do anything to have babies, but I see what happens. They completely upend their lives. I don’t want that. I’ve got Bagel, and that’s more than enough. I don’t need a tiny version of me crawling around. It’s just too much.”
After that, she was speechless for perhaps a whole minute. We walked down the sidewalk to a stoplight, and I pushed the button.
“So the algorithm was right,” she said. “We’re not compatible.”
