Courtney Love: Maybe She Should Try eDissonance

Courtney, honey, it's not you, it's them.

Yes, sometimes neither party is at fault when there's a bad fit, but knowing something about each, I'm going to go ahead and blame eHarmony for its inability to find a Love match.

While researching my book I Love You, Let's Meet: Adventures in Online Dating, I joined and "dated" on eHarmony for a month, slogging through steps like "list your dealbreakers," "ask him about his dealbreakers," "ask him 3 questions from this list of boring questions," "see if he picked the same boring questions or different ones! Now answer them." This unfolded at a snail's pace with photos withheld, all parties apparently trusting that eHarmony was digging up the perfect mate for everyone. For this you pay 50 bucks a month, ignoring the successful online dating protocol of searching, via parameters you choose, through profiles with pictures. It's as if, after years of learning how to drive at night, you paid someone who doesn't know your destination to grab the steering wheel and turn the lights off.

And I didn't even need a picture to know the handful of men dropped into my inbox lived miles further away than I'd requested, shared none of my interests, and said nothing intriguing in their profiles.

Everyone seemed dull, and the 436-question test concluded I was dull too. "You may prefer mainstream ideas...stable and traditional activities rather than new trailblazing activities," the test tabulators wrote. A no-gays-allowed, Christian-run site was telling ME I was mainstream? But I transgress, I protested to my computer screen -- I've done naked performance art, civil disobedience (awkward urination on the Pentagon from inside a bush), and a threesome. By spurring me to make that list, eHarmony was pushing me toward Courtney Love and away from satisifed eHarmony customer.

I'm not saying I'd necessarily want to date her. Courtney is famously self- and other-destructive, one of the youngest people the New York Times readied an obituary for in 2003. But I always want to hear what she has to say, about the music industry about dairy; and especially, in her music, about fitting a big, loud, needy, messy self into a version of womanhood that can be loved.

(As with all great works, new layers keep bubbling up. Listening to Live Through This while re-reading the cheese rant suddenly revealed it as the most lactose-intolerant great rock record. Yes, there's that famous dream to be the girl with the most cake, but three songs feature bad milk that's spoiled, thwarted, or "has a dick.")

Furthermore, Love's an appealing actress and she is accessible, even beneficent with her acolytes, as "Court" or "Corkscrew" or "CL" on her blog

Again, I can see not wanting to date her, but I don't want to swim in a pool that won't let in the world's Courtney Loves. eHarmony and other sites that lean on compatibility quizzes and type-matching encourage a bleaching out of all difference and eccentricity, and so the profiles and communications just get more and more mediocre and dispiriting. You see the same fear of variety when you watch TV -- as plastic surgery becomes de rigeur for all women past 45(? 35?), everyone ends up with the same face.

But Courtney can even make plastic surgery into outsider performance art. She's alway been the bard of not-pretty-enough, "the girl who can't look you in the eye." Her surgical safaris are just another case of her reflecting modern womanhood back to us in shards of funhouse mirror. She's playing her face and body like an instrument, a tabloid version of Orlan, and her music is always interesting, even if she's yet to recapture the poetic roar of Hole's second record.

I think I'm going to make it my new litmus test for an online dating site: It has to welcome Courtney Love. I'd assume OKCupid, nerve, and personals.salon.com would qualify. www.iloveyouletsmeet.com