Read an excerpt of Data, A Love Story in the Wall Street Journal!

What followed was a series of bad dates worthy of a romantic comedy: stupid sexual remarks, too much alcohol consumed (by them). A surprising number of men high-fived me, for reasons that remain unclear.

My profile was obviously attracting the wrong kind of man. After one particularly disastrous date—he casually dropped the fact that he was actually married—I decided to change my approach. Drawing on my background in data analysis, I set out to reverse engineer my profile. I outlined 10 male archetypes and created profiles for each of them on JDate. There was JewishDoc1000, the private-practice cardiologist who hated cruise-ship travel, and LawMan2346, an attorney who was very close to his family and a former national debate champion………..