Well written, and agreed.

What I find in particularly striking is how dating/marriage in both articles and comments is described in such mechanical terms. As a market. You being the consumer matching specs against supply.

The absolute most important thing, actual love for somebody, seems an outdated concept. It's utility now. What can you do FOR ME, the obvious center of the universe?

Some seem angry with this "product" marriage. It doesn't seem to do exactly what they want, kind of like a bad product to be returned.

Hyper-individualist consumerist society.

Actual love for somebody was never an important part of marriages until recent years. In the good ol' days, parents decided who their kids would marry, and money and power were the important things to consider.

You make a very wide set of assumptions about some kind of metaphysical complementarity inside a couple that erases homosexuality and presupposes some naturally ordained monogamy.

I am sorry, but unless you substantiate it in anthropological terms, it is utterly unfalsifiable and the argument should be thrown out in its entirety.

The lived experiences of many queer and polyamorous people, plus the evidence of "deviant" behaviours in many animal species and historical and present societies contradicts your prescriptions.

There's nothing natural about monogamy. Humans only practiced it after agriculture became widespread and the idea of land ownership became important. In tribal hunter-gatherer societies, children were raised by the tribe and not just their parents, and who the father was wasn't considered important.

> Within the liberal tradition, a doctrine that discernibly initiated the process of decline in male/female relations is the view that men and women are essentially the same.

Is this less preferable to a system where women are a few steps above chattel? I think the increased freedom and self-determination the sexual revolution has afforded women is well worth the ills found in modern dating.

If marriage and child-rearing is something you would like to see more, make the material conditions more suitable for that and it will happen.