Dating Service: Small-Town vs. Big-City Dating

JERUSALEM — If you move to a large city in the hopes of find­ing a future hus­band or wife, the search may actu­ally become harder (the article’s text is an imper­fect Google trans­la­tion, but read­ers will get the gen­eral point — the orig­i­nal Hebrew is here):

If you live in one of the swamps of Jerusalem, Givat Shmuel, Tel Aviv or look­ing for the love you want, you should know that maybe great selec­tion, it will con­sti­tute an obsta­cle to the coast…

…the young reli­gious daily encoun­ters many young, and find­ing it dif­fi­cult to decide who will choose about a pair of track life. This phe­nom­e­non is rem­i­nis­cent of a term that was coined — by Prof. sleep Iyen­gar: “para­dox of choice.”

The same dif­fi­culty occurs every­where. I have always won­dered why peo­ple in rural or small-town areas tend to marry younger than their urban coun­ter­parts, and the so-called “para­dox of choice” seems likely to be a con­tribut­ing fac­tor. (There are many other rea­sons for the dif­fi­cul­ties in mod­ern dat­ing, as I have described in a lengthy essay.)

As I wrote in a prior post on the eco­nom­ics behind the advan­tages of monogamy, most peo­ple even­tu­ally end up with some­one with the same gen­eral “value” in the dat­ing mar­ket. But the road there can be long or short.

Imag­ine a small town of ten sin­gle men and ten sin­gle women in their early twen­ties. They have known each other for their entire lives. There are no long peri­ods of dat­ing strangers and then see­ing who they really are once the masks come off months later. Everyone’s mar­ket value has already been set, and every­one (sub­con­sciously) knows where he or she stands. So, there is no more explo­ration needed and no other avail­able options: the tens, eights, fives, and ones end up with each other at com­par­a­tively young ages. The same holds true in any closed com­mu­nity such as Ortho­dox Jews in the United States, high schools, or small, iso­lated, col­lege campuses.

Now, imag­ine a big city like Boston (where I lived for nine years), New York, or Los Ange­les in which there are mil­lions of peo­ple. The sup­ply of dat­ing prospects in the mar­ket is nearly infi­nite because every­one meets hun­dreds of new peo­ple each day — even if only as some­one sit­ting next to some­one else on the sub­way. There is always the poten­tial to meet some­one with a higher value in the dat­ing mar­ket. As an acquain­tance of mine once put it: “Dat­ing in New York sucks — every­one is always look­ing to see if some­one bet­ter comes along.” Peo­ple need much more time to know whether a per­son is a suit­able “match.” Every­one puts off mak­ing a final deci­sion — or, in other words, mar­riage. The avail­abil­ity of a large num­ber of choices makes it that much harder to make a decision.

I do not really have a solu­tion except to say that men and women should choose a qual­ity per­son while they are young — and, remem­ber, what excites young peo­ple is often the oppo­site of what makes a good hus­band or wife — and save them­selves years of sin­gle­ness with future heartaches and increas­ing bit­ter­ness. In addi­tion, the longer that peo­ple remain sin­gle, the more they become com­pla­cent in their sin­gle­ness.

More­over, the unfortunate-but-realistic real­ity is that women lose value in the dat­ing mar­ket as they go from their twen­ties to thir­ties while that of men increases. And this is true regard­less of where a per­son may live.

Ear­lier: Cri­tiques of Fem­i­nism: Argu­ments Against Fem­i­nism Essay

(Hat tip: HaB­itza)

Tags: