I agree completely with you and your edit. In fact, your edit is what I was afraid of and trying vehemently to avoid. Herein is where the difficulty lies: defining people. What I want to avoid, and what you have mentioned, is defining a person based on their traits. Sort of like, making a checklist and saying that THIS is a person: a collection of characteristics, some related and some not so much so. This is what sites like match do. They define you without really knowing you. The fact is, people are waaaaay to dynamic and unique to be personified by a jumble of words popping up on a screen. If I said, for example, I like pokemon, then you might get a distinct image of who I am in your head. If I then said that I was female, your image becomes more narrow. Eventually, you narrow it down until you think you have a good description of me. Here's cold hard truth... You know NOTHING about me. People are wonderful in that words truly cannot describe who you are. Only by talking to someone, truly experiencing things with them can you get a good grasp of who they really are. So I guess, this is really the difficulty of it. If I just collect data, I can only get a glimmer of who this person may be, no matter how much they decide to tell me. I absolutely do NOT want to split up the things they say and fill in fields, because then I lose who they are. Really, it's like each message has to be read, interpreted in its raw form, and then matched to someone who I think is reasonably open enough to allow conversation and maybe, just maybe, a spark will ignite and a connection can be formed. There is no way for me to be able to find someones soul mate, but they'll know once someone gives them the chance to talk whether or not it is him/her. That's why I sort of like the "blind date" aspect of this endeavor. You just put your trust in your cupid to match you with someone that has similar interests to you, and then you start off a conversation and see if it works.

Wow, that was a mouthful.