My goal is to sum up my views as concisely as possible, which may mean that certain points may appear unsubstantiated; if this happens leave a comment.
This essay frames dating as a search problem best solved by passive discoverability. It’s focusing on locating compatible partners, not on sustaining the relationship. That could be its own essay.
I believe we’re at a crisis point in contemporary dating. A crisis represents a certain paradigm being extended as far as it can go, and being insufficient for a new set of requirements and constraints.
Hearing about and directly observing my grandparents’ marriages, expectations were significantly lower. For both pairs the marriage hinged on each partner following gendered norms. Fulfillment of these gendered norms was sufficient for a successful marriage.
Things have changed. It feels there’s been a process of differentiation where every person has unique interests and needs, and there’s a desire for their partner to fulfill a critical mass of these areas.
The problem is that we still have the social structures of the former paradigm to work with, and these structures are insufficient to meet contemporary dating needs.
These old social structures included: ethnic / religious / familial community, university, work, shared lifestyle (e.g. gym).
The first is fragmented and generic to provide good matches; culture may be shared but not specific personal interests and needs.
The second is too early, personal development and change is continuous and matches at university are outgrown.
The third is too generic.
The fourth allows some degree of alignment, but is also too generic. Gyms allow individuals to match on physicality and shared lifestyle but this is still insufficient.
Existing social structures are simply too generic to provide good matches given contemporary needs.
So what social structure can provide a higher degree of alignment?
Dating apps attempt to solve this problem, but fail for a variety of reasons.
The incentives of the apps are towards usage and churn, not successful pairing. As a result it makes more sense to offer lowest common denominator features (e.g. physicality, height, etc) which get people dating, but do not lead to successful long-term pairing. This leads to “goodharting”, focusing on “metrics” of attraction which are legible, such as physicality.
Dating on apps starts off relatively high stakes, where either partner may ghost at any time, which encourages masking that’s dishonest; it may lead to matches in the short-run but eventually the masks break down and the parties are left feeling dissatisfied and burned.
Dating on apps is socially decontextualized, i.e. it’s not situated within some kind of community. This also means that the masking is tailored to the other person, and it’s possible to keep up false appearances; within a community this would be impossible.
I believe we’re missing a complex ecosystem of communities.
Communities expend effort up front to vet individuals who become members. This means they provide the benefits of filtering.
Intercommunity dependencies exist that enable flow between communities. This allows members to jump between communities to get closer to their interests.
Individuals move through these communities on the basis of self-selection — they have specific interests and needs that these communities fulfill and they vote with their feet into the communities that best satisfy them.
I believe that our personalities are “faceted” in the sense that different contexts express different aspects, “facets”, of our full personality. Every community brings out a different facet, and we are the unity of these facets.
What does dating look like in the context of a complex ecosystem of communities?
Firstly, it offers much more passive consistency. Passive consistency is time with potential partners in a purely platonic way, such that you get to know them in a low stakes and authentic way. It takes time for personality to be revealed, and low stakes environments allow openness and honesty, chemistry is discovered rather than forced. Introductions are socially contextualized; it means the facets are authentic but incomplete.
Secondly, I suspect we’d all be part of many communities. Each community represents our unique needs along certain dimensions. The more a romantic interest has overlapping communities the more certain interests and needs may be shared; by fulfilling our own unique needs we may naturally run into folks who share interests and needs.
There’s also a time component to community overlap. Over time there are different paths between communities, e.g. large generic groups often act as funnels into more specific and narrow communities. Shared paths could also indicate romantic compatibility; we may discover potential romantic partners as “fellow travelers”, people who appear to be on similar journeys through communities. This could be a good signal for long-term compatibility, past trajectory could help indicate aligned future trajectory.
Note that all romantic compatibility through this community-oriented approach would be discovered passively rather than actively pursued. Improved signal at a lower cost.