One of my cousins - who's in his 30s - is trying a matchmaker (actually, I think it was his dad's suggestion). He's gone so far as to go to Taiwan for a date, but I don't know how that is working out.
That one hit home.
On a sort of related note, the Seattle PI ran this story on a woman who did an "around the world in 80 dates". She had the luxury of being able to take a year off, but by combining her travel with her search she certainly spiced things up.
It's not as if romantic love in the West is usually so pure that financial and occupational considerations play no part. It's just that Western women seem to have these expectations built-in, in disguised form. It's not talked about so openly, and is not as overriding a concern, but it's still there. So in some ways the world of arranged marriages is familiar.
Well, there are a couple of issues: what one looks for in a mate, which, you're right, isn't so different, and how one goes about finding one, which is.
Reading that story, I'd have to say we are generally looking for different things as well. For example, I want more from my mate than nonsmoking vegetarian. Cripes, ogged, the number of things you don't want in a woman is sufficient to knock out most of the female population in a decent city.
I think ac's right in that we want the things underlying arranged marriages (stability, financial considerations, child bearing hips, etc.), but we want more on top of that. Whether (a) what we want is what we will want, or (b) we are particularly good at figuring out who has that other basket of characteristics, is another set of issues.
It's interesting, the question of what we want. Remember the matchmakers from that NYT Magazine article a few weeks ago? They concentrated on the few traditional, essential qualities too, and some surface compatibility. Everything else, on that view, just isn't very important to whether a marriage will work. Clearly, they're not wrong. Millions of marriages work on those terms.
But (revising and extending my comment at #4), when we go looking for a mate, most of those things are already in place; we date people whose backgrounds, in the grand scheme, are almost indistinguishable from our own--on the traditional view, any of us could reasonably have married almost any of our exes. Is it notions of romantic love that make us think that traditional compatibility is so inadequate? Or is there something about the fact that we do the looking ourselves, independent of our families, that makes us treat the choice of a mate as some kind of self-expression, which makes it such a complicated affair?
The choice of mate as self-expression. Hmm. That's interesting. I tend to think it's a problem of expectations, which would implicate the notion of romantic love as it appears in novels and movies. (Particularly, in my case, from all those damn Georgette Heyer books I read circa 1986.)
I tend to think of it as an attempt to excess returns through better information; the problem is that I increasingly suspect that our models are crap and our information sources untrustworthy. All happy families are the same...and slightly boring.
http://tos.beastlet.com/singles1.zip
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