The case for a pronatalist dating site

The capitalist market is a wonderful thing. I’m sitting outdoors writing this sentence, in Scandinavia in December, writing on a touchpad, dressed in layers of clothes. I can thank the capitalist market economy for my comfortable state: Competition made excellent electronics and textiles evolve.

The market is great at serving human instincts. Some such instincts are entirely uncontroversial, like the instinct to maintain an even body temperature. Other instincts are less obviously beneficial. For example, smartphones serve our instincts to seek entertainment, but as more and more people find out, uncritically following that instinct gives us empty lives.

The market gives us what we instantly, instinctually crave. That is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing when we instantly crave the right thing. A curse when our cravings go against what we value in the long term and what builds a good society.

Love is against nature

As a rule of thumb, societies and individuals should only trust the market in areas where we trust ourselves. For a century, Westerners tended to believe that love was such an area. Watching films and reading books from a century ago, it is obvious that by then, people wanted to believe in the power of romantic love. Novels like Le Grand Meaulnes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Meaulnes

(1913), about two men’s quest to locate the brides of their dreams, makes a naive impression today.

When love marriage was taking the place of convenience marriage, people held high hopes. And many were disappointed. Life-long love certainly exists. It is just that many other opportunities exist too. And the market serves them all in proportion to what people feel like paying for.

Blaming the companies behind the dating market for the superficiality and seediness of dating sites is mostly unfair. Mainly, those sites are a reflection of the mating psychology of the human race. And the mating psychology of the human race is not entirely pretty.

We destroyed culture

If the main fault lies in underlying human nature rather than in Tinder’s algorithms, why are the problems manifesting themselves right now? Human nature changes only very slowly and the dating market has changed very rapidly. So why blame human nature for a very rapid course of deterioration?

Because before, we actually had a certain layer of culture that softened the effects of human mating psychology. A culture that many assertive members of my generation did our best to ...