Chapter Text
Before the app, there were call lines. Before the call lines, there were agencies. Before the agencies, there were matchmakers.
It’s always been very much an opt-in sort of system.
Of course, this all depends on where you are. And who you are.
Rolf’s maternal grandparents met through a matchmaker. Someone with the gift (or at least someone who claimed to have the gift). There were already agencies around at that time, of course; it was the sixties, and Israel has pretty much always had agencies for any given thing.
His parents met through one of those agencies. Well, kind of.
His father, as a Jewish young adult from the diaspora, had been eligible for Taglit, or Birthright, and his parents insisted that he participate in that first before fucking off to a kibbutz in the middle of nowhere for a year.
His mother was one of the Israeli students accompanying his father’s group.
The trip included a visit to a matchmaking agency, and, well, when the sentence you said that day included a reference to your parents that you’d really just said, or a line of a conversation you’d held with your soulmate the previous day, it was kind of hard to deny.
Rolf doesn’t know about that. He was ineligible for Birthright, as he’s technically an Israeli citizen. So instead, he spent a gap year in a kibbutz, and that was fine with him. Half his family is Israeli; he was half raised there, and he has an Israeli passport – he’s never really understood the wholly diaspora relationship to Israel.
His sister met her soulmate through a matchmaker at the same kibbutz: a girl from the west coast with shiny blonde hair and an almost alarmingly friendly personality.
The problem is that Rolf moves around so much, it’s hard to imagine anyone finite.
It’s not like he’s never dated anyone. He’s had girlfriends and boyfriends and everything in between, sometimes hook ups or friends with benefits, but sometimes quite serious. But that’s different from a soulmate.
His friend Penny badgers him to get the app. Her parents met through a call line. She hasn’t met her soulmate yet, but it’s not for lack of trying.
“My friend Rowan met their soulmate through the app,” she says. “It’s totally real. Besides, would a Jewish matchmaker tell you if your soulmate isn’t Jewish?”
He knows the answer there. Even the Israeli agencies tend to be a little stubborn in that respect, though he knows people who have been told of a non-Jewish soulmate. (Though those soulmates always seem to convert… maybe they have a file somewhere on that, too). He doesn’t think most schadchanim would match him with a man, either, though he knows the Israeli agencies would (well, the ones that aren’t strictly Orthodox, at least).
“There are progressive Jewish agencies in the diaspora that would. But most progressive Jews don’t use matchmakers anymore.” It’s a relic of a bygone era, with a few exceptions. The fact that his entire family (except his paternal grandparents, though that’s arguable) has met their soulmates through schadchanim is more a fluke than a feature.
“So use the app!” Penny says.
He’s aware she won’t let up, and he doesn’t really trust the app to give him a viable result, so he caves and downloads it. It asks for all kinds of personal information – everything short of his social security number (though it does ask for his passport number, and he has to give them both: Israeli and American). It all makes him very uncomfortable, but he knows the app is legally bound not to sell his information.
Once all the information has been input, he gets a pleasantly neutral screen asking him about his preferences. Does he want to be matched even if his soulmate doesn’t meet certain criteria? (It’s not like he’s never considered the fact that some people might rule out the possibility of having a bisexual, autistic Jew as a soulmate, especially one who holds Israeli citizenship and all that entails — and American citizenship and all that entails, but it’s still an unpleasant reminder).
Rolf taps the option that he wants to meet his soulmate with no caveats, though he’s not quite sure, personally, how he’d cope with a soulmate who’s racist or antisemitic or homophobic or ableist. If he has to worry about that, he’ll do so when the time comes.
The app accepts his input, and informs him that it will update once a “uniquely selected, highly qualified matchmaking professional” analyses his profile. It asks him to set up push notifications. He accepts.
And then there’s nothing to do but wait.
Two weeks later, he’s walking to the Tube station on his way home when his watch vibrates.
He expects it to be a text from his sister, who is eight hours behind and hasn’t seemed to quite understand the time difference yet, but he’s surprised when it’s an alert from the app.
Mumble: update from your soulmate!
He taps on the app, quite honestly surprised to see that there’s any result.
The app’s home screen has changed. The top off the app reads MUMBLE, and below that the tagline, Meet Your Soulmate!, and in the center of the screen, he can see the update:
Yesterday, 16 January 2019, your soulmate said: “God, I fucking hate that song.”
Well. That's rather anticlimactic.
There's an option for more information, so he taps that.
Disclaimer: While we are soulmate experts, there is always room for error. Our deductions, while backed in hard data and superior training, may not always be 100% accurate. Please use the information on this page at your own discretion.
That isn't quite reassuring, but Rolf taps that he understands, and sees a quite impressive set of information.
Soulmate name: unknown
Soulmate sex: unknown
Soulmate gender: unknown
Soulmate sexual orientation: unknown
Height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, religion, and sense of fashion (really?) are also all unknown.
But nationality isn't.
Soulmate nationality: United Kingdom (England)
Primary language spoken: English
Other languages spoken: unknown
Soulmate time zone: GMT
The only other thing in the app that has been filled out is under dislikes; the song “Thrift Store” by Macklemore.
Rolf really can't fault his soulmate that.
Rolf knows the math. He knows that most people meet their soulmates. A lot of the time, they even realise it. It makes sense, when you think about it. If someone is fate-bound to you, why wouldn’t you meet them?
He asks Penny if she knew the app gives so much information when she recommended it to him.
“It’s not that it gives you more information,” she says, “it’s that it takes all the information in the sentences and puts it together. Isn’t that what matchmakers and agencies do?”
“My parents didn’t need an agency to look into it that long. They knew immediately with the first sentence who it was. But… I think you have a point about matchmakers.”
Most days, the sentences are mundane. He can’t imagine how anyone can get enough information from these sentences to be sure of a soulmate match. He gets alerts for an order at Léon (which does, admittedly, significantly narrow down his soulmate’s location on that day, which of course was a day that Rolf doesn’t stop at any of the chain’s locations), for a greeting to a friend, for a comment about a film, for a complaint about a coworker.
There’s nothing Rolf can think of as identifying information.
He slowly stops checking the statistics on the app, though he continues to read the push alerts.
His work takes him to France; it distracts him quickly and thoroughly. Of the push alerts, few sentences stick out. He still wants to meet his soulmate one day, but right now, his job is more important.