I'm looking for the title/author of a short story.
"Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful!" by Stuart Friedman, first published in Future Science Fiction Stories, March 1952, available at the Internet Archive.
The story begins with a young man who is living in some sort of computer-controlled utopia, and he is very upset because the computer informed him he [failed to achieve spontaneous love event #17 with female #632] (or something similar to this.)
It was the eve of Progress-Stage Six, and the daily message had prescribed Stage Five Ecstasy Formula. Everyone, from 000 to 999, in Community Home 8051 for Pre-Mating Males in Progress-Stage Five, was experiencing the formula's balanced emotional heightening. Everyone, that is, except G17AZ(q):444,801,735 category male, known familiarly as 735. 735 stood in a small, mirrored, harshly-lighted meditation chamber, cut off from the goodness of the Community Mind. Under the plasti-skin contours of his perfect features he felt a flush of shame on his own imperfect face; he couldn't master the formula.
He becomes so upset at his failure that he flees the Utopian city he lives in and runs out into the wilderness.
Suddenly he was running. The violence of his motion left several of his fellows in a state of near collapse. He got out of the great hall, ran through the city. He reached the edge of the weather cone, paused, then rushed through. He stood in the raging downpour of the storm and shivered. He looked back at the indescribable magnificence of the world he had left, feeling like a pauper peering into a castle of yore. He burst out laughing.
Cold, wet, and hungry, he meets a woman (who happens to be female #632)
The female's scowl had vanished and she got to her feet and came to him.
"Who are you?" she said unpleasantly. She snuffed her nose and sneezed.
"I was once known to my fellows as 735, but—"
"Son and father of the gods!" She screeched offensively with laughter. "I'm 735, category female."
"My mate!" He shut his eyes and groaned. Then he peered narrowly at her. "She was beautiful; you're not she."
She was regarding him thoughtfully. "You're not he either; you look more like an ogre."
and they spend hours trying unsuccessfully to build a fire. The story ends with them cold, wet and dirty in a miserable wilderness, but ecstatically happy to be together.
Sort of. Maybe not quite ecstatically:
And, so saying, they built a house that fell down, a fire that flooded out, and discovered they had both been wrong in not first seeking food. Half-starved, coughing, sneezing, foul-tempered, sour-faced, they set out through the rain.
