Entering my thirties still single, I think about this a lot. First read about it in Algorithms To Live By.
“Before”, one would choose (or even be strongly recommended) a partner, commit, and make it work.
Now (culturally), one expects to find the absolutely perfect person/flavor and have everything worked out at the time of selection.
You can see how such an attitude would drastically limit the choices.
Another difference is that nowadays partnership is expected to include that person being the perfect lover, perfect co-parent, best friend, partner in crime, sometimes therapist etc. while in the past the expectation that the romantic partner would also be someone to entertain us or always understand us or share hobbies etc. was much much lower.
obviously not absolutes but more of a cultural slider which limits choices and puts more stress on relationships.
Because divorce was not on the table, so you had to "make it work", even if in the end was just a toxic relationship, where couple in their 60s or 70s plainly hated their spouse.
This isn't 1950. Divorce (and even easier, separation) has been "on the table" for a long time. Yet the culture around dating and marriage today is miles away from decades ago.
You can tell yourself old couples hate each other, because of course some do. But people have been happily "making it work", across cultures, for centuries. It's about the expectations you have in a partner and what you want from the relationship. If that's made-for-TV-movie romance until eternity, good luck.
Edit: typo
What happens if the secretary you decide to hire is just using you to calibrate their search for what a good boss looks like?
Feels like there would be some interesting maths in that.
Humanity has 33 bits of entropy. So with 33 pieces of information about a person that don't depend on each other can very likely uniquely identify any person. Individually a person is likely to meet 10000 different people in their life, that's 14 bits of entropy if you start there.
Male/Female, College educated/not, looks, substance use, desire for children, compatible hobbies, compatible diets, compatible cultures, compatible monetary beliefs, compatible sexual preferences, my own level of attractiveness. Each hard preference has a corresponding reduction in dating pool size.
Clearly I am also single.
I immediately threw out anyone below 85-90%. My dating pool in a dense urban area over a period of months was tens of people. Once filtered for attractiveness and mutual interest, I was down to single digits. I married the first 99% I went on a date with.
Unfortunately (for others) I don’t know if that method is still available anywhere but the app I was using got acquired and reduced to swiping left and right.