> Look at a city with a massive population of eligible young people, like say NYC.. and then listen to what people in NYC say about the dating scene there. It's not pretty. Having such a huge pool of potential mates discourages people from committing. In other words, it makes it harder to find a long term mate, and it makes you less satisfied with whoever you're seeing.

I disagree, this just means you are not optimizing properly. You should optimize based on desired characteristics. It is a binary search. Based on my, abet fairly limited set of anecdotal evidence ( including my own ), it works very well.