Marriage by the numbers

YOU CAN HAVE your chocolate cards and back-massage coupons and hug-o-grams. For me, Valentine’s Day is a reminder that a marriage -- like your job, your house and your child’s college -- is a competition. What matters isn’t that Cassandra and I have a healthy, growing marriage. What matters is that no one else have a better marriage.

So when eHarmony, the Pasadena-based online dating service, last week started a Marriage Wellness Service that rates you on a “Marriage Index” between 1 and 100, I immediately laid down my $50. More than 45 minutes into the 310-item questionnaire, I seriously questioned how much I cared about my marriage.

I also worried, from past experience, if finishing the entire form was going to make me a Scientologist. The site asked me if I “dislike some people,” if I “sometimes drive faster than the posted speed limit” and if I “sometimes waste time when I should be working.” That last one was particularly easy, considering that I was filling out a 310-item questionnaire instead of writing a column.

I was also surprised that the site asked if I was dissatisfied with my partner’s personal hygiene. This is something I assumed you sussed out early, say, in the first few minutes of the first date. Are people really so oblivious that they’re coming home from work one day 12 years into their marriage, sniffing around and noticing that their spouses smell like Dom DeLuise in a heat wave?

After I finished, I was asked to invite Cassandra by e-mail to take part in our Marriage Wellness program. If e-mail is the way you choose to inform your spouse that you’re seeking marriage help, you’ve got problems that eHarmony can’t solve.

Cassandra got three e-mails before she responded. After she finally filled out the survey the next day, we sat down together and checked out our score. I expected it to say, “Take your $50 back. In fact, we’d like to pay you to teach us about marriage.”

Instead, Cassandra got an 81. I got an 80.

This meant that our marriage was a B-minus. I had a mediocre marriage. I was, at best, a few grades above the marriage of Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards. Worse yet, Cassandra was enjoying our marriage one point more than I was.

In a panic, I clicked on all the diagnostic tools. The eHarmony service broke our marriage down into a series of bar graphs, which are, of course, the most valuable tool of the marriage counselor.

There were reams of information to wade through, which depressed both of us. We were more than willing to have a 79 marriage if it meant we could watch two episodes of “Lost.”

The first thing our “Key Marriage Components” told us was that we had decision-making and commitment issues. Cassandra firmly disagreed, asking me what I thought. “I want to know if 81 is better than other people,” I said.

The site did help me find out that I’m bad at expressing myself, have an inflated sense of self, am emotionally distant, can be too rigid, carry on inappropriately flirtatious relationships and have “ridiculously outlandish expectations for our sex life.” None of this came from eHarmony, mind you, but Cassandra just kind of took the ball and ran with it.

Just talking about our relationship for a few hours was helpful, if a little painful. I realized I have to make Cassandra feel more secure, because she gave me 20 fewer trust points than I gave her. This is particularly impressive considering that, for reasons I don’t fully comprehend, she’s on myspace.com and invited a guy she met there to our next party. What have I done to undermine her trust? I must have forgotten the time I had sex with other people in front of her.

And thanks to eHarmony, which suggested I find out Cassandra’s favorite joke, I now know that my wife of four years does not have a favorite joke. That’s the kind of intimacy only a computer-generated marriage evaluation can get you.

I needed something bigger than knowing Cassandra doesn’t like jokes if I wanted to get up into the 90s by Valentine’s Day. I considered a secret trip, or a roomful of flowers. Then I realized that marriage isn’t a big gesture but a thousand tiny acts of bravery. I’m thinking that we’re already up to an 82. And, if you think about it, that’s got to be an A if you live in Los Angeles.