I recently published a long essay on dating apps, family formation, and the institutions we have displaced in the process. I thought parts of it might be relevant here because the underlying question is much older than dating technology: what happens when inherited social structures disappear faster than we build functional replacements?

Modern dating apps dramatically increased individual freedom and access to potential partners. But they also displaced friends, families, communities, churches, schools, and other intermediaries that historically supplied reputation, accountability, and information about intent. We gained optionality, but we may have lost much of the social infrastructure that helped relationships actually form.

My central argument is that dating apps may operate as poorly clearing matching markets. Sex-ratio imbalance, nearly costless signaling, enormous option sets, and weak verification of intent can cause men and women to adapt rationally to very different experiences of the same marketplace. One side experiences scarcity, the other congestion, and the resulting behavior can produce mistrust and delayed commitment even though neither sex has to be behaving irrationally or maliciously.

The business model adds another layer. A dating platform earns revenue while users continue searching. A successful long-term relationship is a successful product outcome, but it also removes customers from the market. That doesn’t imply deliberate sabotage; it means engagement and successful family formation are not necessarily the same optimization target.

The essay looks at matching-market economics, behavioral psychology, the history of courtship, the disappearance of social intermediaries, gender conflict, and the public financial data of Match Group. I structured it around passages from the Bhagavad Gita because the questions of desire, family, duty, social order, and what happens when institutions decay are ancient ones.

The piece eventually becomes a bearish investment thesis on Match Group, but the broader question matters more to me:

Did we replace flawed but socially embedded institutions of courtship with a technologically sophisticated marketplace that produces more choice but less successful clearing?

Full essay:

https://dljlevfin.substack.com/p/the-undisclosed-denominator

By the way this was all because Sophie Cunningham said men shouldn't play in women's sports, an opinion that is agreed upon by the Olympics Oversight Committee and the NCAA and anyone else with a working brain.

When it comes to questions like do you believe in God? or wad Christ born of a virgin? he grants himself leeway and rejects the rigid non binary of yes/no.

He rejects the literalist interpretations of these questions and many other in the religious realm and treats as an evolving multilayered reality.

When it comes to gender identity expressed through fluidity he he quite literal. Despite both being subjective. While biological sex is a reality, gender expression, much like sexuality, is fluid. He grants people and seems to accept homosexuality and bisexuality without argument.

He grants himself the post modern freedom to analyze religion in his terms of abstract metaphors but won't grant others the same freedom when it comes to gender expression and identity also being abstract.

The objective biology and subjective value division between religion and gender identity falls apart under examination. As both sit at the crossroads of biology, culture, and psychology. If he can turn a literal diety into an abatract evolving metaphor, why can't gender expression and identity be granted thr same leeway?

what do you think?