and my story starts six years ago.

I was in not the best relationship

although it started really well

and I thought that the person I was with

was the person I would wind up marrying

and our relationship came to a somewhat abrupt end.

And I was devastated.

But I looked around at my friends

and my family members

and the people that I knew

and the people that I admired

and realized that there were

a lot of people who were divorced

there were a lot of people in pretty bad relationships

and a whole bunch of people

who were generally not happy.

And I thought, "What's wrong with all of us?"

Right? We're all smart people.

There's got to be something wrong.

Maybe there's something wrong with me?

And so I consulted my friends and my family

and my grandmother

who -- in between mahjong games -- said,

"Play the Field!"

"Stop being so picky!"

"You got to go out with everybody!"

And most importantly,

"True love will find you

when you're least expecting it."

Now, we've all heard this before

and you may not come from the same

background that I do but I'm a numbers person.

I'm a data and math person.

And "least expecting" my way in the true love

made no mathematical or scientific sense.

But online dating did.

I had a whole bunch of people suggesting me that I try online dating websites

and to me that seems a lot easier -- going trough that sort of data --

than trying to find somebody in real life.

So i decided to create a couple of profiles

I went to Jdate, which is a site for Jewish people

and I went to match.com.

Now the problem was that I had a very full schedule

and the last thing I wanted to do was to sit down

and start answering a whole bunch of questions

as if I was taking some kind of Cosmo quiz --

this is gonna shock all of you

but I am not a Cosmo quiz kind of woman.

(Laughter)

So I did what any woman in my position would do

I copied and pasted from my resume

(Laughter)

including bullet points!

So I had worked tirelessly to make sure

that my resume was spectacular

and I was quite proud of all of my professional accomplishments

so I listed all of those

along with some other highlights

like the fact that I spoke fluent Japanese

and I was also fluent in CSS and Javascript.

(Laugher)

Now, obviously we all know now

that this was not a good idea

but I want to take you back to 6 years ago.

You see, work was really important to me

and I feel very much that

my professional life defines who I am

also, and perhaps most importantly

this bullet point resume that I copied and pasted

onto my online dating profile

didn't prevent me from finding dates

in fact, these algorithms, at Jdate, Match

had stuck me with plenty of people.

And we went on truly awful dates

For example

there was Steve, the IT guy.

Now, online he seemed spectacular

He said he was 6 feet tall, muscular.

He was a foodie who liked to cook

and an IT manager, who loved gadgets.

The problem, as I soon realized

was that Steve in real life

was a very short 6' tall

and quite stocky

he did like gadgets

and he was an IT manager

but one of the things that I realized when we went out

was that he liked to order lots and lots of food

that was very very expensive.

So he ordered all kinds of dishes

the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu

and when the bill came

he actually pushed it towards me on the table.

Now, I am a modern woman

and I am totally ok with paying the bill sometimes

and splitting the bill sometimes.

But I didn't order all of that

and the bill came up to what at the time,

was an entire month's rent for me

so reluctantly I pulled up my credit card

and I thought, "That's it, you know, we're done. I'm leaving."

Outside the restaurant, he tried to shake my hand

and I said, "This is interesting, thank you."

And I started to walk towards my car

and Steve ambled laboriously behind me

and as he's walking, said, "Do you smoke?"

and I said, "No, I don't".

"So do you mind if I do?"

And I thought, "At this point, am I going to be able to stop him?"

So he pulls out of his pocket this thing

this giant thing that didn't quite look like a cigarette

and didn't quite look like a cigar

it was in fact a giant joint

a roadside flare of weed.

(Laughter)

And out in the middle of everybody

he lit this thing up

and asked me if I wanted to take a puff.

Okay.

So obviously this was a terrible date

but it's one of just many many terrible dates

and after each I would go home

I would call my mom, I would call my sister,

and tell them what an awful time

that I had had, and they said

every single time, "Stop complaining!

You're just being too picky."

And I thought,"That's ridiculous".

Right, I'm gonna start showing them

empirically that these are really terrible dates.

So I'm going to do three things.

I agreed to continue with my grandmother's advice

to date everybody until 'least expect' my way into true love,

but I did that with some parameters.

I would only meet men at bars

that I knew had wi-fi.

I carried a giant bag with me

and my laptop inside

where, once we were at the date

they would invariably go terribly terribly wrong,

I would pull out an email template

that I had created in advance

where I had different data points

that I would track

so that, when the date went bad

I could show with empirical evidence

and quantitatively why

this entire thing was a ridiculous exercise.

So I would send out these email templates

(Laughter)

and I was tracking things like

the number of times the guy tried to high-five me.

If you want to touch me, by all means, touch me,

but don't force me to stick my hand in the air.

And the number of times he abused

the English language and overtime

I had amassed quite a bit of data.

(Applause)

And that allowed me to make some correlations.

For example --

(Laughter)

For example, the number of times I got high fived

the more times that guy was to abuse the English language.

The more shots he ordered,

the more likely he was to lie about his job.

And speaking of alcohol,

for some reason, and I still can't figure out why,

Scotch drinkers were more likely

to immediately talk about kinky sex

right when we sat down, than anybody else.

And this may not be surprising,

but lawyers were 62% more likely

to pull up their mobile phone and stare into it

than me, and compared to some of the other people

that I went out with.

Now listen, these weren't necessarily bad guys

they were just bad for me

but the problem, actually

were the dating algorithms

that we've all come to rely on

those of us who are online.

Now to be sure, algorithms in dating

are actually not a new thing

in history we've had matchmakers

in every culture

and my culture is Jewish

and we had matchmakers, too

and the matchmakers for us would be looking at things like

whether or not the girl and the boy would get along,

what the rabbi would say,

whether the community would agree,

whether or not they'd have kids

and even I, in the process of setting up

my friends and coworkers when asked

had sort of my own formula that I was using.

Would they have the same interests?

Would they get along?

And what was the probability that this entire thing

was gonna become a pain in my ass

for which I'd be paying later on.

So I want to fast forward

to the worst date ever

and I'm gonna spare you the details

but let's summarize by saying I smoked an entire pack of cigarettes

and went through a whole bottle of wine

in a short amount of time.

And then in my drunken state called my sister

and I said, "That's it. I'm done.

"I'm finished with online dating sites."

And she said to me,

"Don't do that. Don't you remember Mary Poppins?"

I said, "What are you talking about? Mary Poppins?"

And she said, "Remember in the movie

how the kids had gone through all of those nannies

and none of them worked and what did they do?"

Does anybody remember?

They made a list.

Right? Those two kids started writing down

every single possible thing

they could want in a nanny

and once they had that list

it wound up going up a chimney and poof!

Mary Poppins appeared.

And I thought, "That's it, Hillary

You've nailed it.

I'm going to stop "least expecting" all of this.

I'm going to create my own Mary Poppins list to find a husband."

And so in my drunken state that's exactly what I did.

I started writing.

(Laughter)

And I wrote down every single possible thing

that I could think of,

from height to the amount of body hair

that I found acceptable

to the kind of musicals

that I would agree to listen to

and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.

And by the end of this exercise

I had come up with 72 attributes --

things that I was going to demand

in any person that I would date from here on out.

Now, 72 seems like a lot

and I had a whole bunch of scrawled notes

and it was really hard to, sort of figure out

you know, who would meet all of those qualifications.

I had to parse that list.

So I thought about all of the people that I'd ever dated

and what things on that list

the good things that they had in common.

I thought about the attributes that were important to my family

because my family and I are very close

and there are lots and lots of them

and the last thing I need is any more complaining.

And attributes that were important to me.

And once I had all of that figured out

I came up with a list of weighted scores

so I had my top tier list

and my secondary list.

And in my top tier list

were points that were pretty high,

I had lots of different things.