If you can pull any kind of coherent thesis out of this ambling Laura Vanderkam op-ed, you’re a step ahead of me.

Near as I can tell, it’s some kind of complaint about how iPods, Internet dating, and too much choice (evil choice!) are causing twenty-somethings to put off marriage for a bit. And apparently, this is something we’re supposed to lament (never mind that divorce rates are down dramatically, which might lead a clever observer to conclude that perhaps people are holding off for the right person, a development I’d imagine most people would find positive, but that Vanderkam also seems to find lamentable).

I’m still trying to figure out how iPods fit into the picture, except that they’re becoming enormously popular. Which means that like all things popular (see McDonalds, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola), they must be to blame for everything from broken hearts to bone cancer to ring-around-the-collar. And if you can work them into your article, someone might think you’re hip (she also casually drops in that she listens to both the Indigo Girls and Renaissance motets. Wow! Hip and cultured!).

As for Internet dating, Vanderkam’s chief complaint seem to me to be the very characteristic that make the service popular. Vanderkam thinks the abundance of potential mates available via online dating services makes us more picky, and less likely to settle.

Um. So what? If technology enables us to better sift through a series of awful first dates in order to get to someone with whom we’re more compatible, where’s the rub?

I know of three happily-married couples who met through an Internet dating service. And in all three cases, the half of the couple I knew was fed up with conventional dating. Yeah, that’s just three data points. But obviously others have had similar experiences, or Internet dating sites wouldn’t bustle with profiles.

Of course, it’s possible I missed Vanderkam’s point entirely. If there was one. The thing reads like a sadly unaborted attempt to cram iPods, choice fatigue, happiness studies, and sociological quackery into a Valentine’s Day theme.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 1:31 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.