A suitable match?

Micro-macro dating sites.

In an age when virtually everything can be marketed and sold off, making amorous affairs a commodity is perhaps a natural occurrence.

Now, that doesn't mean there isn't a case for all those dating and matrimonial sites that are proliferating by the dozen.

It is, in fact, a mere move onto a better platform, where one can have better insight into a prospective partner's suitability, from the matrimonial columns of newspapers which are of considerable service and utility in our part of the world.

But, at the risk of sounding somewhat politically incorrect, we can't help but feel a twinge of unease at the eruption of specialised sites that seem to cater to, or actually be only open for, specific sections of people.

Thus, we now have dating sites where only millionaires can join as members, presumably to first check out the lucre before moving on to other mundane details needed for a relationship. There is also reportedly a site for only "beautiful" people, or characters who think of themselves as being above the ordinary in the looks department.

And now, we are informed about the dating site that exists only for "larger than life" people, or, to wit, people of greater girth and body weight. Slim ones are apparently a strict no-no for the UK-based site which, reportedly, asks people with "natural curves" to join in for some "big love".

This follows in the footsteps of the earlier dating site for the "aesthetically challenged", which, it seems, deems the relative notion of ugliness an ascertainable fact.

The quibble, however, with such things is that this somehow militates against the idea of both beauty, desirability, and feelings thereof, arising either in the eye of the beholder or being a function of the mind, or both.

That, indeed, we now have a pre-determined idea of what is attractive. As the world globalises, oddly, ghettoised pockets of various sorts seem to attend on the process.

What, indeed, has love got to do with it? Does the noble passion have no place in the binary logic of bits and bytes?