(4) Also, I had (silently) noted as we walked to the table that she had a nice ass. She doesn't wear much makeup, because she's pretty and she doesn't seem to need to, and the more I looked at her, the more I liked looking at her, noticing how her cheeks gently swelled as she smiled. The conversation never stalled, we laughed constantly, and she made fun of my fidgeting with the millions of forks only once (and did so kindly, as a way of relating, since her father does the same thing). So we ate and meandered instead through normal first-date talk-the kind that most people lament but I actually enjoy. Though that was mostly a ploy to schedule after-dinner drinks. Weeks before, the questionnaire had been popularized by a New York Times column-published as Valentine's Day and its chocolate sirens hurtled toward the lonely, under the title ' To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This.' The author falls for someone she knew a little from work and the climbing gym the questions, which they went through on their first date, enabled an 'accelerated intimacy' because they forced people to 'bother to know someone,' which would systematically 'generate trust.' (3) For our first outing, we would sit across from each other and ask and answer a list of 36 increasingly personal questions that had been devised by psychologists to foster closeness between perfect strangers like us. How else are you supposed to say hello to someone who in a few hours will know more about you than you've told most of your friends and blood relatives? That was the plan for the night: Our respective editors set us up on a blind date (or what would come to seem like one very long, three-week blind date) to see just how compatible we might be and to learn what compatibility even means in the age of Tinder and Instant Chemistry genetic testing, and we figured we might as well take the time to get to know each other.

Now: I am not a natural-born hugger, at least not with people I don't know, and so the hug took me by surprise. It's our first real meeting, our first actual date, and before we sit down at a snug two-top in a well-lit restaurant, she greets me at the door with a warm if tentative embrace. Three weeks, two dates, and extensive counseling with a psychologist, a bioanthropologist, and a geneticist later, they found out just what it means to be compatible in the twenty-first century. But would finding a mate be easier if science took away the guesswork? To find out, we sent two eligible writers-one from ELLE, one from Esquire-on what might be the longest blind date in history. There have never been more experts with more theories about what might make two perfect strangers perfect for each other.

Blind date