A subject which has been on my mind a bit lately has been online dating. No, not actually engaging in it, but thinking about how it works and how people interact with each other when they are meeting others on a dating site.
In the real world, we meet a fairly limited number of people in our daily lives. We have the people we work with, see at the grocery store, the gym, school, etc. We can increase this number in a few ways, by going to clubs, for example. The more people we meet, the more choices we have and the greater the chance we will get noticed.
Online however, on a lot of dating sites, there is a virtually unlimited menu of people we can interact with without leaving our homes. I am thinking mainly of the sort of websites that allow free access to speak to other people. We can choose who we wish to speak to, and then decide how long to continue the conversation. But there is never any reason to actually choose someone, because at the same time as you are in a conversation with the person you can be "shopping" for other people. So it is possible to be getting to know several people at once, and not one of those people has any intention of getting to know you.
A hypothetical Adam and Eve would have had no other options but to be with each other. So they would have taken their relationship seriously, because it was the only one possible for them.
A person living in a small hunter-gatherer village of 10 adults (5 male 5 female, in 5 marriages) would have technically had options, but would have had every reason to want to choose and stay with one mate for life because in a village that small there is not a very high likelihood of another mate becoming available.
The greater the number of people available to you, however, the less reason you have to choose and stay with a mate. In our current society, despite the limited number of daily contacts we have, there is a virtually unlimited number of potential mates out there. The only limiting factor once again, is that we can only meet so many of them in our daily lives. So the only reason to stay with someone is love, as long as that lasts. (I could write another essay on that topic).
So to return to the topic of online dating, and the ability to surf for mates from home, we get an extreme case, where people spend so much of their time in the very initial phase of a relationship, the meeting and initial assessing, that often people don't learn how to actually carry out a relationship. So you end up with people starting conversations and dropping them at the drop of a hat, and becoming serial daters, rarely reaching the second date because one or the other has found another potential mate within days.
