A company comes out with a chip you implant on the inside of your wrist, and when your true love gets a chip as well, a clock on both begins ticking down the time until you first meet.

That’s the premise of the movie “Timer” which examines the struggles of people navigating a world in which a computer is basically telling them whom to love.  The results vary widely, from one woman whose clock shows she won’t meet her man until she’s in her 40s to a 14-year-old kid whose chip reports he will meet his future wife almost immediately.

The movie (available on Netflix instant) brought up a lot of questions, mainly would you want to know? How much of that experience is the search, the trials and errors, the hopes and disappointments that make you appreciate someone in a way you wouldn’t without that journey? (Of course speaking entirely hypothetically since as a single guy I can’t actually attest to that.)  Those failures shape us, and make us the person we are when new people come into our lives, and when that “one” person shows up, it seems like we should aspire to have been affected in ways that crystallize that self.  To quote an Adele song, “Regrets and mistakes, they’re memories made.”

If there’s a display on your wrist that says you have four years until you meet your match, you might be inclined to close yourself off and eschew any relationships.  But that’s another question — should you?  Is it “cheating” if you carry on a relationship knowing that your true love has been identified and is not that person?  Does it matter if the clock says four days instead of four years?  The characters in the movie are mixed on this one, but the ones with longer countdowns are more inclined to date other people.

Another issue is that not everyone has a chip.  At $79.99 to install plus a monthly fee, it’s not possible for everyone to get one, but there are also plenty of people who willingly choose to do without one.  They hate the idea of turning over that bit of humanity to a computer, or don’t trust that the system is actually producing the result it claims.  After all, how much of the “success” is that people want to believe it works?  If you get a chip then you are predisposed to buying in, so when the chip says the person you just passed in the grocery store is your future mate, you aren’t going to question whether that should actually be the case.

At best, it’s a comfort knowing that there is in fact someone out there who will love you.  At worst it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that ultimately alters the entire future of the world by pairing together people who would otherwise never be in a relationship. 

For the characters with no reading on their clock, and even some with many years left to wait, the reactions they face are actually much the same as those experienced by people in real life whose friends and family have all gone off and gotten married.  There are the platitudes of “it will happen one day” and “they’re out there somewhere.”  The main character’s mother can’t help but try to set up her daughter with man after man in hopes he’ll be the one.  They are more likely to be the doubters, whether through frustration of seeing no results or not wanting to believe in a system that would make them wait so long to find love.  And yet at the same time, they’re faced every day with people close to them espousing the benefits of the same system and showing how happy they are with their love.

Then there are the couples who got married outside of the system — the old-fashioned way, with no technology telling them which person was right for them.  What if they get chips?  Is it worth the risk of the incredibly low odds that you actually picked the right person, or is it imperative to know whether there’s a more-right person out there?

I guess it just comes down to the original question — would you want to know?