I was thinking about what he says here, regarding decision-making, and how no one is truly happy with a decision until they have done a sort of market-survey to see what the various _appropriate_ choices are, on offer, and get to select the most-appealing one from among them.
Seems relevant to women's modern dating behavior. Especially in a country (such as America) with highly-anonymous and socially-isolated populations and no acknowledged socio-economic classes. That leaves women facing The Entire Male Population as the selection of _possible_ husbands, and each woman has to sort of sift through that mass of men to narrow down the _appropriate, possible_ husbands. And then she still has to test and examine from that narrowed selection, to find the one she can finally "settle" on. She has to sort of iterate her way down, and it typically takes years and lots of women just give up.
The more a woman is grounded within a particular class (subset) of the population, the smaller her iterations are and the faster she can discover the Final Four and then pick the one she likes best because he has the nicest teeth and goofy humour, or whatever the winning trait is, and finally move on with her life, with the feeling that she got a good deal within her personal budget.
Her dating experience is akin to the struggle to purchase a bottle of ketchup at the grocery store. There is no readily-apparent indicator for why one bottle is more appropriate than another. You can stand in front of that stand for 3 hours and just give up and go home without ketchup. Or you find some brand, that speaks to you because of some previous association, and then you just need to select one of their sub-brands, for a bit less sugar or curry-flavor, or whatnot.
Or, to put it differently, most women start "shopping", thinking they have champagne taste and a champagne budget, but they eventually get mistreated by enough champagne-guys that it finally dawns on her that she's more of a craft-beer girl, and then she can finally concentrate on picking her favorite craft beer and just ignoring the champagne stand. And then she finds a craft beer that looks appealing and happily heads to the register.
What social classes, religious sects, guilds, villages and neighborhoods, and similar subgroups provided, was the ability for craft-beer girls to start out looking only at the craft beers and ignoring the champagne. If you were the miller's daughter, you would tend look around at the various miller's sons and throw a fit if your parents tried to pawn you off on Tom Miller instead of Stefan Miller. That was the hill you were going to die on and if they acquiesced and let you marry Stefan, then you felt like you were winning. That someone else was marrying the king, was something far off, abstract, and completely irrelevant to your own existence. At the most, you were eying the butcher's son and weighing if you could level-up like that.
Other something vaguely like that.
#society #dating #marriage
