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True. "I married my sibling's friend" was a pretty common route of courtship in generations past, which largely doesn't exist anymore as a result of smaller family sizes.
Neatly encapsulating why men and women alike complain about all the bad behaviour on dating apps. If there's no overlap in social circles between you and the person you're dating, there are no social consequences for bad behaviour, so feel free to ghost to your heart's content. It's not that the people who use dating apps are necessarily uniquely shitty people, or that dating apps select for people who are uniquely shitty (though both of these are true to some extent, particularly the latter): it's that dating apps don't incentivise people to behave pro-socially.
You're also gesturing at precisely the "social atomisation" thing I'm describing: a few generations ago, asking out a girl with whom you have no overlap in social circles simply wasn't an option. A hundred years ago, if you lived in a town of a few thousand people and tried to ditch a girl after getting her pregnant, her father would be hammering on your front door with a shotgun before the day was out. Nowadays if you do that, she has no recourse.
It does make one rather cynical about human nature when you realise that a lot of people (not a majority or anything, just a lot) are operating on the basis not of "I should treat this girl with respect because it's the right thing to do and it's how I'd like to be treated" but "I should treat this girl with respect, because if I don't she'll tell everyone and it'll come back to bite me in the ass". The sexual revolution is basically a prolonged experiment in what happens when you take away the personal incentive not to be shitty to girls that you want to fuck but don't want to wife.
I don't know if the author would have gotten a different answer if she'd specified "How would you feel if an attractive man you don't know started talking to you in an elevator?"
I think this is also a large part of the non-stickiness of online dating relationships. You meet somebody, have a fairly good click but the thread drops or there's some light friction for whatever reason and there's essentially nil chance of randomly bumping into them again in person at a mutual friend's social event or however else people tended to get over light cases of 'the ick' historically. I, a few years ago, went through a hell of a lot of app dates and have since come out the other side with a longterm partner and a child. I still had a lot of time to formulate crotchety opinions about the dynamics in a lot of these things.
Now if somebody gets even slightly peeved at the other party, you've got one or maybe two DMs to try and rekindle things then you're dead in the water. Without even getting into the 'there is an unlimited supply of shiny new toys being served up via app' element.
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But isn’t the increased social atomization caused by changes in technology? I don’t think the sexual revolution is what broke down regular social connection
Yes on both counts. The sexual revolution and the free love movement promoted the idea that casual sex should be consequence-free (which that generation of Westerners fully internalised, for the most part) - then technological developments caused social atomisation which actually removed most of the indirect social consequences for bad behaviour among "cads" and "rakes".
It's possible to imagine an alternate history where we had the same technological developments in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that we had, but not preceded by the dramatic social liberalisation of the sexual revolution. In this counterfactual world, social atomisation still happens, but sexual misconduct (e.g. impregnating a girl and running off on her) remains so aggressively stigmatised that most men refrain from it of their own accord. What I'm describing actually sounds fairly similar to modern Japan and Korea, in which less than 10% of live births are out of wedlock, as opposed to the West in which they're 30% at the absolute minimum (granted, more abortions are carried out in South Korea than in the US or UK per capita, so it's not quite as rosy as I'm making it out to be).
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I imagine that yes, the answer would be different.
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