The idea of scanning the crowd for your final soulmate is very specific to our culture. I have to ask, if that's the right model, then why doesn't it seem to have been the case that the massive migrations to cities over the past century spawned a never-before-seen blossoming of more perfect love? Surely, if the number of strangers someone meets in a lifetime has been skyrocketing, the number of people who had found perfect partners would have gone up with it. We'd be living in times that'd make us look back on romantic poets as stodgy.
Sometimes, I wonder if the whole "we got lucky," thing was just that they did get lucky, but only for long enough to bootstrap them into having spent enough time around each other to get attached. My experience of human nature is that everyone is actually really, really close to the same once you get to know them.
We'd be living in times that'd make us look back on romantic poets as stodgy.
I don't think that follows, because people adjust to the improved situation[1][2]. To take a case where the gains are pretty undeniable, nobody celebrates regularly that they are much less likely to get polio or some other disease that used to be much more common. We just adjust to the new reality, and keep complaining about the diseases we do get today.
Well we've certainly come a long way from fiddler on the roof, haven't we? Or the best romantic prospect being either your cousin, or the farmer girl that lives a mile away? I think that theory holds.
>But only long enough to bootstrap into having spent enough time around each other to get attached
Yea, in my experience that's how a huge swath of relationships usually work, especially for people who haven't been in many relationships or who have big enough relationship gaps that they feel the need to cling. People getting caught in relationships that aren't all that great but "hey, wtf else are we gonna do, at least we aren't tearing each other's throats out, right? Maybe having a baby will help us love each other." We've all seen it, many of us have lived it.
I'm arguing that the proliferation of dating apps is helping that go away. Either because a highly specialized interests based site like OkCupid lets you zero in on quite nearly the perfect partner, or because you can shotgun across a zero cost app like tinder, you're far more likely to find an actual meaningful relationship.
For the record, I know there's a higher tier of relationship than "familiarity breeds love" due to personal experience.
Sometimes, I wonder if the whole "we got lucky," thing was just that they did get lucky, but only for long enough to bootstrap them into having spent enough time around each other to get attached. My experience of human nature is that everyone is actually really, really close to the same once you get to know them.