Relationships Talk

A DATING advice chatbot named Lara who promises to find your ideal match now lives inside your Android phone.

You can chat to the AI matchmaker via Google Assistant: the digital helper built into Android handsets, Google Home smart speakers, Android smart watches and laptops.

Lara is dating app Match’s chatbot for Facebook and Google Assistant

The Sun

Aside from dating tips, Lara can also recommend places to go

Initiating a convo with the bot is as simple as saying “Ok Google, talk to Lara from Match”, to which she’ll respond with dating tips, meetup locations, and point you in the direction of fellow love-seekers.

The more you chat to the wing-woman, the smarter she gets.

Over time, she’ll be able to hone in on your preferences, allowing her to dole out more relevant advice.

Lara is the brainchild of dating service Match and has been hanging around on Facebook Messenger for a year now.

But her arrival on Google could lead to even better suggestions.

For example, Match says Lara will dig into Google Maps to offer customised date locations that will be sent to you via text message.

Meanwhile her dating advice spans everything from top date turn-offs to overcoming jitters.

For example, if you’re feeling shy about going a romantic rendezvous, Lara will respond with suggestions on how to combat those first-date nerves.

Match

Lara also sends Match members daily dating recommendations

Though the bot is open to all, her daily match feature (which sees her select a Match member you’ll like) is for members-only.

However, the service isn’t free. The cheapest Match subscription package will set you back £9.99 per month for six months, spiking up to £29.99 on a pay-monthly basis.

“This…puts us at the forefront of innovation in the dating industry,” said Match’s Xavier de Baillenx.

“We are always looking at the role technology can play in improving our member’s experience to offer them new ways of meeting their potential dates that will easily fit in with their busy everyday life.

“Building upon the success of Lara on Facebook, we wanted to enhance and explore the possibilities of AI, which has provided us with a great outcome so far. We look forward to developing Lara further as technology evolves.”

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Global market leader Match has teamed up with Google to launch its dating chatbot Lara across the Google Assistant network, after a successful run in Facebook Messenger.

From today, Match users can speak to Lara through their Google Assistant on their phone, smartwatch, laptop or Google Home smart speaker to ask for dating tips and find new matches.

Every day Lara will send through a unique Daily Match via a text message, based on a search conducted on the user’s Match preferences like age, location and common interests.

Using the phrase “OK Google, talk to Lara from Match”, users can then have a conversation with Lara to get suggestions for potential date locations, hooked up to a pin on Google Maps.

Lara will also proactively encourage further conversation by offering dating advice, including tips like the top turn-offs on a first date or how to overcome nervousness. As the chatbot is powered by artificial intelligence, the more a user chats with Lara, the more detailed and bespoke her responses will become.

The news follows recent innovation in smartphone app-based dating from Badoo, which announced yesterday that it will be trialling a live video streaming feature this summer to replace traditional swiping left and right.

Read more: Dating app Badoo is ditching swiping right in favour of live streaming

“This is a very exciting time for Match and puts us at the forefront of innovation in the dating industry,” said Xavier de Baillenx, an innovation leader at Match.

“We are always looking at the role technology can play in improving our member’s experience to offer them new ways of meeting their potential dates that will easily fit in with their busy everyday life.

“Building upon the success of Lara on Facebook, we wanted to enhance and explore the possibilities of AI, which has provided us with a great outcome so far. We look forward to developing Lara further as technology evolves.”

Those oft spoken “Sex and the City” questions, asked in soothing voice-over by New York Star dating columnist Carrie Bradshaw, have in recent years become the target of hilarious memes and “I-can’t-believe-she-said-that” quips, complete with an eye-roll.

But let’s not pretend Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who wrote about her stalled dating life and the lives of her three best friends, didn’t have some solid dating gems.

“Sex and the City” was a television show for a generation of young women, struggling to talk about sex, dating and what they really wanted from men. Unlike its small screen predecessors before them, like “The Golden Girls” and “Designing Women,” Darren Star’s comedy was a more unsanitized version of what women were really talking about in the ’90s over cosmopolitans.

The three women who linked arm-in-arm with Carrie on those New York streets were power lawyer Miranda Hobbes, portrayed by now-New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, public relations magnate Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, and art gallery dealer turned stay-at-home mom Charlotte York, played by Kristin Davis.

“SATC” was a rare moment in television history where the men in these women’s lives weren’t the heroes. They weren’t waiting on Prince Charming to come and save them from a life of career work. Instead, the foursome, embodying distinct aspects of muliebrity, showed New York City women in control of their careers, but equally importantly, in control of their love lives.

Although the show often gets teased — and for good reason — for asking at times banal dating questions like “When it comes to bags, men, and cities, is it really what’s outside that counts,” it also held solid dating advice and mantras for women without a significant other.

Here are the 20 best pieces of dating advice from “Sex and the City”:

Mantras for single women

1. “Some people are settling down, some people are settling and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies.” — Carrie

2. “Maybe some women aren’t meant to be tamed. Maybe they need to run free. Until they find someone, just as wild to run with.” — Carrie

3. “Being single used to mean that nobody wanted you. Now it means you’re pretty sexy and you’re taking your time deciding how you want your life to be and who you want to spend it with.” — Carrie

4. “The most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you find someone to love the you you love, well, that’s just fabulous.” — Carrie

5. “You shouldn’t have to sacrifice who you are just because somebody else has a problem with it.” — Carrie

6. “Life gives you lots of chances to screw up which means you have just as many chances to get it right.” — Carrie

7. “Anyone who’s single in Manhattan gets a little freaked out from time to time. But we keep trying because you have to figure … somewhere out there is another little freak who will love us, understand us … and kiss our three heads and make it all better.” — Carrie

8. “I will not be judged by you or society.” — Samantha

9. “Take tradition and decorate it your own way. Think of it like the woman in Abu Dhabi, or like the movies in black and white, relationships come in a range of colors and options.” — Carrie

10. “Being a mother just isn’t enough.” — Miranda

Advice for women who are dating

1. “I’m looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.” — Carrie

2. “Don’t play hard to get with a man who’s hard to get.” — Samantha

3. “And, finally, the most important breakup rule: No matter who broke your heart, or how long it takes to heal, you’ll never go through it without your friends.” — Carrie

4. “When men attempt bold gestures, generally it’s considered romantic. When women do it, it’s often considered desperate or psycho.” — Carrie

5. “It wasn’t logic, it was love.” — Carrie

6. “The hard thing about fighting in relationships is that there’s no referee. There’s no one to tell you which comments are below the belt. As a result, someone usually gets hurt.” — Carrie

7. “Some love stories aren’t epic novels, some are short stories… But, that doesn’t make them any less filled with love.” — Carrie

8. “I love you… but I love me more.” — Samantha

9. “I didn’t get married to follow what society wants us to do, we are married, we have the luxury to design our own life.” — Carrie

10. “Maybe the past is like an anchor holding us back. Maybe, you have to let go of who you were to become who you will be.” — Carrie

For the 20th anniversary of Sex and the City—which premiered on HBO on June 6, 1998 and went on to become iconic prestige television—Jezebel is doing a week of posts dedicated to our favorite band of sexual women friends.

When looking to HBO’s Sex and the City for dating advice, a reasonable person’s main takeaway should largely be to watch what these women do and then do the opposite. For example, do NOT marry a man only because you like the idea of him (see: Charlotte and Trey), do NOT have an affair with an ex who’s married, but if you must, do NOT have it in the apartment he shares with his brittle-toothed wife (a mistake made by Carrie and Big), and do NOT set up two incompatible characters because they both happen to be gay (Anthony and Stanford is a sham—MARCUS FOR LIFE).

A true gem of romantic advice, however, comes from an unlikely source: Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), the fearsome, sex-positive PR exec who proudly wears her vagina on her sleeve (or her vagina is her sleeve? It’s a messy metaphor). Not one to be carried away by matters of the heart and reluctant to be corralled into a relationship, it’s rare that we see Samantha lose control of her life with one notable exception: her love affair with hotelier and scumbag Richard Wright (James Remar).

Samantha’s relationship with Richard was one fraught with distrust and dishonesty. Initially scorning his more sentimental advances, she eventually falls hard into a somewhat unrequited love that results in her blackmailing the assistant who buys gifts for Richard’s partners into signing a card with “Love, Richard.” (He only says “I love you” when faced with admitting he didn’t write the card himself.)

Later, she discovers him going down on another woman, they breakup, and after much cajoling, the typically self-possessed Samantha returns to the relationship where she’s constantly wracked with anxiety that he might cheat again. Things come to a head in “Luck Be an Old Lady,” episode 3 in Season 5, when she is drawn to the brink of madness by her paranoia and she realizes she must end things. Richard, trying to get her to reconsider, says, “I love you, Samantha.” Samantha then says one of the wisest things ever uttered on this mostly silly and fantastical show:

“I love you, too, Richard. But I love me more.”

“I love you, too, but I love me more” provides a blueprint for what I consider to be most healthy relationships. What “I love you, too, but I love me more” means is that you will love a person to the best of your ability while still making self care a priority. From Greek myths to Romeo and Juliet to Twilight, we’re told stories of how worth it peril and anguish can be, so long as what you get in return is our very rigid definition of love—heteronormative nonsense that at best results in co-dependence and at worst, outright controlling abuse.

As a childless adult, there is no one I should love and care for more than I do myself—though that doesn’t diminish the intense love I have for my partner, family, and…fine…cats. If anything, taking care of myself allows me to love them better because as RuPaul often says in another iteration of Samantha’s quote: “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?” What most will find is that loving one’s self (the beginning of a lifelong romance, according to Carrie Bradshaw Oscar Wilde) and taking care of your own needs will allow you to care for others in ways that absolute devotion/“stand by your man” shit cannot because it makes you strong enough to support another person and independent enough to walk away when you need to.

Samantha’s “I love you, too, Richard, but I love me more” pops into my mind with strange frequency, considering that the episode it’s featured in aired 16 years ago, probably because it’s one of the most helpful and surprising lessons to be included in media aimed at women. So please forgive me if I do not read the feedback to this piece. I love you all, but I love me more.