The Vibrant Years(53)

Cullie gave her grandmother a smile that she hoped said I worship your brilliance. “What we find attractive about people says more about us than about them! You called going out with someone a journey of self-discovery. About finding us, not them.”

Binji looked sad again. “That’s how it should be, don’t you think?”

Absolutely. Cullie hadn’t understood what Binji had meant before, but suddenly it made perfect sense. Her brain was racing at full speed now. “The questions apps like Twinge ask are supposed to tell people things about one another, so they can judge if they find those things attractive. But a thing is attractive to you because it appeals to something inside you that’s part of who you are.”

Cullie tapped with some flourish and pulled up some information. “Let’s take Noseless Vet. One of my answers on Twinge’s profile was, ‘I’d rather spend time with animals than humans sometimes.’ Which was a stupid thing to do, in hindsight, but it made him pick me. One of the things he said on his profile was, ‘Obsession with your work is the purest form of self-love,’ which probably made me pick him.”

“And under less gross circumstances, passion for work is something you two might have had in common,” Binji said.

Cullie shuddered, but she wasn’t wrong.

“How can you know that unless you’ve met? What kind of data could have prevented that date from happening?” Therefore saving her from lifelong nightmares. Cullie bounced in her seat. “That’s the million-dollar coding question.”

“When my friends set up their children for arranged marriages, it was based on a deep knowledge of their children,” Binji said. “Just like if Bharat were to set you up with someone. So your code would need to have the kind of deep knowledge a parent or close friend would have to sort through choices.”

Cullie’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “So what I need is to write something that layers over the code of existing dating apps. An add-on functionality that mimics a parent’s or friend’s knowledge and parses the matches based on that.”

“But even better because instead of someone else’s knowledge of us—however deep—we’re relying on our own knowledge of ourselves,” Mom said.

“A question that identified how much you loathe putting yourself in dangerous situations would have eliminated the guy who wanted to take you cliff jumping,” Binji said.

“But not without knowing what I identify as dangerous situations,” Cullie said. That time she’d run as soon as he said the words cliff jumping.

“So, ‘Would you call skydiving exciting or dangerous?’—questions like that?” Cullie adjusted the flowchart. It was a mess, but now it was a mess she might be able to work with.

“Also how much. Like would you rather poke your eyes out than ride a motorcycle, or are there certain circumstances under which you’d do it,” Mom said, her expression jubilant. This did feel like they were getting somewhere.

“So, answers on a sliding scale,” Cullie said.

“The way those Myers-Briggs and other personality tests do it,” Mom added.

Cullie stopped typing, put her keyboard down, leaned over, and threw her arms around her. “Mom! That’s genius. We need a personality test that focuses on relationships.” Cullie’s brain was spinning. “Then I build an overlay app that sits on top of existing dating apps to search the information they collect and have it tie into the personality test. It’s not going to be that straightforward. But—”

“It’s a place to start. A relationship personality test that looks inward,” Mom said. “Relationship ID Personality! RIP for short.”

Cullie laughed. She loved Radha Maushi and Mom’s acronym obsession. “Identifying the questions to pin down your Relationship ID Personality, your RIP, that’s the challenge.”

Suddenly Binji frowned. “There’s something else we haven’t considered. Will people tell the truth about who they are? Do they even know? I’d never thought about how much I hated not being able to make choices until recently. Maybe not even until we had that conversation today.”

For a few moments they were all silent.

Was it possible to be honest about yourself? Also, didn’t you change with time? Cullie had always thought she’d found one kind of man sexy. Now she couldn’t understand why her heart gave little skips every time Rohan’s messages flashed on her screen.

The cursor blinked at her; she was lost again. “Binji, what would you have chosen had you been able to choose?”

That unfamiliar restlessness that had been burning at the edges of Binji’s eyes flared. “No man has ever asked me what I want. Men have always tried to solve my problems for me—solve me.” Her eyes widened with surprise at having verbalized it. “It would be nice to meet a man who simply asks and doesn’t make assumptions because of how I look.”

Cullie’s and Mom’s brows flew up in unison. They stared at her, mouths agape.

“You can’t ask me questions and then react like this when I’m honest.”

Well, the question was: Why had she never been honest about these things before?

Maybe because they hadn’t asked her before.

Mom recovered first. “So you want a man who appreciates a woman’s brains and not just her looks.”