peel.
the organic banana
Booh-yah!
All right, let's roll.
This week, David Brooks dishes out an argument against the modern conveniences of dating. Ezra Klein disagrees. Who do you side with?
Brooks:
Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.
Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete … People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.
The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization, as people try to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time.
It seems to encourage an attitude of contingency. If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.
Klein:
People date differently, and a world with more options is better for more people than a world with less options. But people worry about this market for the same reason they worry about financial markets, and for the same reason they weren’t satisfied with the old ways. It doesn’t matter how efficient the transactions, how full the information, how robust the competition and how involved the community. The central actors here are still human beings, and they have a tendency to screw up even the best plans.
