Paul Eastwick

The parents will be introducing you to various folks, but you still have a lot of control, typically, in whether you want this thing to proceed or not.

You're being given a few different options for who to consider.

And the key thing is this.

If we just look in these cultures, so cultures where this is common, at the distinction between how happy are women when they're in a love marriage versus when they are in an quote-unquote arranged marriage, there's not much of a difference.

But where you do see the difference is when you ask them,

How much control did you have over the person you married?

And regardless of whether it was an arranged marriage or a love marriage, if the women feel like they had control, they feel great about it.

If they feel like the person was selected for them and they essentially had no control, that's when they're super bummed out.

So there are indeed major cultural differences in how much parents are playing a role in this way.

But I tend to think about it more not in like a systemic thing that's causing the problem.

It's really about the cases where people feel like they don't have a say in who they get to marry.

No.

I think that's right.

That is an important point.

This is something that we humans do.

I think it explains, too, like we're these creatures that evolved in small groups to evaluate folks that we've met for a long time.

Then what have the apps done to us?

We're also pretty flexible and we can make mating work within a variety of different contexts.

Sometimes we do things like we turn mating into a shopping exercise.

In reality, that's what the apps have done to us.