This TED Talk features consultant Christina Wallace recorded live at TED-2018.

I first tried online dating my freshman year of college, which was in 2001 in case you can't see my wrinkle.

Now, as you may have noticed, I'm six feet tall, and when I arrived at my chosen university and realized our men's

Division III basketball team averaged five foot eight, I abandoned the on-campus scene and went online.

Now, back then, online dating was pretty close to the plot of You've Got Mail.

You'd write long emails back and forth for weeks before you finally met up in real life,

except in my case, you'd realize you have no chemistry,

and so now you're back to square one.

So while online dating has changed a lot in the last 17 years,

many of the frustrations remain the same,

because here's what it does well.

It broadens your pool of potential dates

beyond your existing social and professional circles.

And here's what it doesn't do well.

Literally everything else.

A few things you should know about me.

I'm an action-oriented overachieving math and theater nerd who ended up with an MBA.

So when things aren't working out,

I tend to take a step back, apply my business toolkit to figure out why, and to fix it. My love life

was no exception. December before I turned 30, I took myself on a relationship offsite, which means

I went camping solo in Maine for a week to do a retro on my track record of mediocre

relationships. Because the thing was, I knew what I wanted in a partner. Kindness, curiosity, empathy,

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