Cave man want woman. Cave man say, “Hi, woman!” Cave man persuade woman to
have dinner with him. Woman talk and talk. Cave man nod, but cave man not
listening. Cave man thinking about woman wearing bikini. Cave man irritate
woman. Woman say, “Bye-bye, foolish cave man.” Cave man sad. Cheer up, cave man. One of your brethren a brainy cave man has spent
two years building a technology that liberates striving lotharios from their
inner Neanderthal.
Think of GirlFriendX.com as a personal assistant, one
schooled in the art of romance and the science of the female condition,
whispering in your ear as you navigate the dating world, says creator Rick
Pierce.
“The brain shuts off, I need to go into my cave and think about
things that’s where the software steps in,” says Pierce.
Need a good
pickup line? If you download GirlfriendX software into your PDA, you will
find something better than: “You must be Jamaican, because Jamaican me
crazy.”
Bad at remembering to send quick little text messages now and again,
with sentiments like, “Just thinking about you,” or “I miss you”?
GirlfriendX will do it for you while you’re actually watching the Broncos
game or shooting pool.
Date ideas stale, can’t remember her shoe size, don’t have a clue about
the doctor’s appointment she had this afternoon?
Relax.
Pierce unveiled the technology at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las
Vegas a few weeks ago, and the program is set for release the end of this
month.
While the Internet offers a banquet of romance-related technologies, from
ubiquitous dating websites to advice bloggers to programs that will store
pertinent information about the women in mens’ lives, GirlFriendX, it appears,
is the first to tie it all together.
Services even include calls to cellphones during dates in case you’re not
enjoying yourself and need an “out,” and a “yield calculator.” The calculator
crunches numbers about various investments, her “maintenance” levels, sexual
encounters and the degree to which you care about her, and comes up with a bar
graph illustrating how the woman measures up, relationship-wise.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” says Stephanie Chiodo, 25, a single, Denver
coffeehouse barrista. “It depersonalizes the whole date process, having a
computer telling you what to do. I think people should remember those things
on their own, and not fake it.”
That’s a great idea in theory, says Pierce. But for many guys, it doesn’t
happen. They’re clueless about females, and need help.
Pierce, 37, was living in Detroit five years ago doing software development
when a buddy referenced an informal formula he had come up with that helped him
figure out how his relationships with different women were progressing.
“I’m talking to him, and I’m like, My God, there’s got to be a way to
calculate this,” Pierce says, “and being the geek that I am, I went home and
figured it out.”
He moved to California, rode the dot-com boom, and never forgot about the
formula.
As he toiled on corporate projects, he would sometimes say to himself: “I
build software all day for people to solve their problems in business, but can
software solve my problems in relationships?”
He would date, noting problems he ran into. He would think of things that
would help, and then figure out how to fold them into his blossoming technology.
“What are all of the things girls told me I had problems with? You don’t do
the little things anymore,’ ” says the never-married Pierce. “What are those
little things? So I built a reminder system.”
Now, the self-described geek’s science project, designed to improve his love
life, is about to be released to the broad universe of guys-in-need, at $15.95
a month.
Pierce has given the software to a few people around the country, to use it,
test it and give him feedback.
Van Velzen, 37, a government employee in Seattle, has been using it for about
a year, and says it’s a “nice way of remembering details, things that might have
come up in conversation once.
“And she says, Hey, wow, you remembered that. That’s nice. How did you
remember that?’ ”
“Then I say, You said it in a conversation, I thought it was important,’ ”
Velzen says.
Does he tell his dates it’s actually the software doing the remembering?
Nope.
In dating as in business, technology is “great, up to a point,” says Jeff
Cohen, the dating and relationship expert at dating.about. com. “Technology can
create efficiencies and improve processes, but it will never replace emotion,
love and feelings. If a guy wants to rely on technology to improve his love life,
he has to remember the softer side of relationships. Otherwise he’s in for a lot
of lonely nights, having dinner for two (as in, him and his technology).”
In general, men and women do operate on different wavelengths when it comes
to romance, says Robert Whitman, a licensed professional counselor in Broomfield.
To men, dates are “information-gathering expeditions,” and for women they are
“emotional-connection expeditions.” As women talk about emotions and feelings
during dates, men attempt to lodge the information in their brains and move on.
At some point, the man begins saying to himself, “I know that, I know that
fact, I know you don’t like your boss, I know you like your girlfriends. I have
all of these facts.”
“He stops being attentive,” Whitman says. “He has the facts, and she gets
confused because she’s still talking about her feelings, and he used to be
interested. Resentments can start to build.”
Something like GirlFriendX. com “could be a valuable tool,” he says, as long
as “you understand that there are two sets of rules, and you are working to
understand those two sets of rules. The program could be a wonderful aid in
helping him to remember.”
If GirlFriendX.com takes off, Pierce says he wants to deliver a similar
product for women.
And he’s working on something for married couples too, because he has “gotten
so many comments from people who are married who want the same features, only
in a different way.”
One possible feature?
The brownie-point calculator. A guy can run the brownie-point numbers, Pierce says, and then announce:
“I can go out (with the guys), honey! Look what I’ve done!”
