Often, the highest indicators of relationship longevity are the small, almost forgettable habits. The way we handle silence. Whether we rewatch the same show. How quickly we reply to a message. The shape of our routine. The tolerance for chaos... are tall he things that hold us together.

Really Real Arbitrary Dating begins with the suspicion that endurance of love may be less romantic and more patterned than we like to admit.

The work asks art-goers to complete a questionnaire before entering the exhibition. The questions appear incidental. They are about movie nights, dishwashers, coffee orders, jeans, and texting habits. None of them ask about attraction directly. All of them correspond to documented behavioral correlations drawn from relationship science, attachment theory, and large-scale data studies. In this art piece, the ordinary becomes diagnostic.

The first section of the questionnaire produces a compatibility profile. A color-coded indication of how a person tends to move through stimulation, proximity, routine, and time. The second section measures something less flattering... date-ability. Not desire-ability. Not attractiveness. Not charisma. But the capacity to sustain a long-term primary attachment figure. Can you repair? Can you remain present? Do you run from contrast, or face it head on?

Upon arrival, participants receive illegible markers encoding both their compatibility type and their date-ability status. As they move through the gallery, wall texts and diagrams reveal not only the markers for oneself, but who aligns with whom. By the end of the exhibition, participants find what kind of partner they are most likely to match with and whether that person (or themselves!) is structurally prepared to sustain that match.

Really Real Arbitrary Dating, compresses what often takes years to discover organically. It removes story, chemistry, fantasy, courtship and most controversially... hope. It replaces them with correlation, with data and with cold reality. It flattens romance in the same way algorithmic dating platforms already have. But does so transparently, and inside the space of art. It is a performance and an inspection. It is a literal excavation. A hard revealing. The piece represents the eyes of an algorithm, that already sees us. That sees more of us, than we see ourselves.

The piece is satirical. But it is also sincere. Every distinction is rooted in existing research. What feels arbitrary is, statistically speaking, not.

The discomfort comes at the end.
Not: Who is right or able of me?
But: Am I even capable or able of them?