Outsourced Romance
Soft-focus Washington Post article on what I guess you’d call dating consultants observes “And in a nation that relies on personal trainers and wardrobe consultants, outsourcing the search for love isn’t all that surprising.”
That seems backwards to me — long before there were personal trainers or wardrobe consultants, people were outsourcing the search for, if not love, then at least marriage. Arranged marriages being, of course, a very common practice historically speaking. And even as we moved into more love-and-romance oriented times, there continued to be a robust explicit infrastructure (often involving school- or church-based dances) to get people to date. Of course the “fix up” by friends is incredibly common. And even a person not interested in doing anything quite as heavy-handed as a fix up is still going to, if he knows two single people of appropriately matched genders and sexual orientations who he thinks might like each other, try to introduce them.
The strange thing isn’t the rise of businesses that cater to our strong need for third party support of romantic activities, the strange thing is the modern day convention of pretending to believe that people in some sense “should” get together through pure serendipity.
27 Responses to “Outsourced Romance”
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September 24th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Great name for a dating service, Matt: Pure Serendipity.
I love it.
September 24th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
You are kind of missing the point. In the olden days, love was not really the point. Your family arranged a marriage to somebody else from a suitable family. This wasn’t a primitive form of outsourcing, it was the residue of clan-based social formations.
In modern times, love is the point and marriage only one possible outcome. Each individual is a free agent looking for the romantic partner and it is, in a real sense, a matter of serendipity whether we fall in love with any particular person, even if we rely on services that create opportunities for this to happen.
September 24th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Huh? Obviously the point of the whole article is that people are paying third parties to help them find mates. That parents used to arrange marriages or had friends fix them up is completely beside the point.
Matthew’s really been mailing it in since the move to CAP. Jeezus.
September 24th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Is this the triumphant return of the notorious Al?
September 24th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Also, if you named a dating service “pure serendipity” you could really let your customers take advantage of the de re/de dicto distinction. Imagine A asks B how he met C. B first met C through a dating service called “pure serendipity,” but they later arranged to meet in the old book room at a used book store.
A: Hey B. How’d you and C meet?
B: Well, we met through pure serendipity. The first time I saw her, I was in the rare book room at Fancy Used Book Store. We both enjoy old books! It was meant to be.
This raises additional, difficult questions about whether one actually sees the object of a photograph when he looks at it. But I doubt anyone will ask those questions.
September 24th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Triumphant return?
September 24th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
This is the first Al post I’ve seen in some time.
September 24th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Al,
You obviously are not up on your fiddler on the roof. People have been paying third parties to find their mates for a long time, although not always in the same way in every culture.
September 24th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Let alone the assertion a nation consists of the .0001% of people who can both afford and want personal trainers or wardrobe consultants.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Hear, hear, Roger–what jumped out at me was the absurdity of the notion that “the nation” relies on personal trainers and wardrobe consultants. And people on the coasts (of which I am one) wonder why people in “flyover” country don’t like them.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Uh, Al? Try the play The Matchmaker, about Dolly Levin, a matchmaker for pay in New York a hundred years ago. Since I know you are such a big Barbra Streisand fan, you probably saw the musical version, Hello, Dolly.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Hear, hear, Roger–what jumped out at me was the absurdity of the notion that “the nation” relies on personal trainers and wardrobe consultants. And people on the coasts (of which I am one) wonder why people in “flyover” country don’t like them.
Never mind “flyover” country, how about 98% of the populations of either coast? This kind of idiotic cultural myopia is one of the reasons I gave up on Newsweek and Time. Every feature article about “American culture” was actually about the troubles and trends of pretentious urban yuppies with $100,000 incomes. The other 280 million of us barely exist for the people at those magazines.
When was the last time you saw a story about getting into universities that wasn’t about the elite 1% of students who want to get into Harvard or Yale? Apparently the students who go to the big state schools, get B averages, and provide the engineers, civil servants, school teachers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, and business managers who actually keep the country running don’t exist for them either.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Re: In the olden days, love was not really the point. Your family arranged a marriage to somebody else from a suitable family.
Sensible families however did take pains to make sure the prospective spouses were compatible. At the highest levels (royalty) completely compulsory matches were common, but at lower levels the couples were each allowed usually to veto the proposed match if they found the other party unacceptable.
Re: Obviously the point of the whole article is that people are paying third parties to help them find mates.
Paid matchmakers were not unknown in the past. Didn’t “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Hello Dolly” both feature such persons?
September 24th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
The best book on this subject was one by Dr. George Bach (and his ghostwriter, I forget the name) called “Pairing”, which came out in the ’70’s. One of his main points was that all “dating services” or “match-making services” are utterly irrelevant and ineffective, because “1 and 1″ do NOT make “1″ in relationships. 1 and 1 make “3″ – each party and the relationship. He considered that a person involved in a relationship does not necessarily reflect the person as a singularity, and that therefore trying to match individual “compatibilities” was a complete waste of time.
What matters is emotional openness – the ability to say what you feel truthfully and honestly in a non-confrontational way while listening to the other person and allowing their feelings to be “visible” to you – which was the main point of his book.
He gave many examples from his counseling and training sessions on how people could learn to relate better in an intimate way which almost magically opened the doors to an improved ability to create and maintain a romantic relationship even between persons who might be thought to be unlikely to relate.
A terrific book.
September 25th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Berken,
I doubt you can become a doctor or an engineer with a B average, at any university. Engineering is often considered to be the most rigorous and demanding major. Lawyers, teachers, and ‘business managers’ are a different story.
I quite agree that the brand name of the university counts for infinitely less than the work that you put in when you get there.
September 25th, 2008 at 8:58 am
“I doubt you can become a doctor or an engineer with a B average, at any university.”
You are kidding, right? Aren’t you? You know that you can become a working engineer without a graduate degree, right? I work with many engineers, civil, structural, electrical, and I agree – engineering is demanding, painstaking work. But I promise you, the huge undergraduate engineering departments of schools like Texas Tech, Kansas, Iowa, etc., etc., crank out thousands of graduates every year, and an appreciable number of those who maintained B averages (or even – gasp – below) do not, in fact instantly kill themselves out of shame, but rather go on to get jobs and design stuff and supervise stuff, and live full lives.
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