There is a conspiracy by which the human animal is prevented from saying aloud what it knows, though it knows it very well because the survival of human societies depends upon its members collectively honouring the conspiracy. It is that human animal pairs, just as non-human animal pairs, simply settle for each other. The former, being as they are, a species of conscious beings, go on to create all sorts of fairy tales around this coupling; they sublimate their consciousness to various institutions (religions, countries, families) and one of the oldest of which, and one of the more consequential for their survival, is that of human marriage.

Nothing is more irrational than human marriage. Isaiah Berlin, expounding Joseph de Maistre, puts the proposition better than I am able to when he said something to the effect of; why should a person elect, freely and for the whole of a life, one companion, when his attention may at any later hour be drawn to another he finds more agreeable, and whom he might with equal freedom elect instead? ‘Nevertheless marriage is the fundamental institution upon which human society is founded, and every attempt at constructing a society upon free love has toppled’. Irrationality is therefore an essential property for human coupling and no better arrangement had been created to meet it than the institution of marriage. Societies which submitted marriage to rational inspection, which demanded that it stand up and account for itself in reasonable terms, did not survive the inspection. Reason is corrosive to the ground it stands upon.

The inverse of Maistre’s proposition, the premise upheld by those so-called free societies which exposed the ancient institution to innumerable genuinely rational objections and, having found it wanting on every count, dissolved it into something more congenial, is that every man and every woman must go out and find the right partner. What has to be true for this sentence to be meaningful? It requires that there be such a thing as ‘the’ right partner, which is to say that the space of candidates must somehow contain some distinguished element rather than being a large flat field of persons any of whom would serve about as well. It requires that this partner be, in practice, findable, that the search for him or her is terminate and that you would recognise the terminus upon arriving at it. It requires that you know in advance what you are looking for. And it requires, most of all, that the goodness of the marriage afterwards is some function of the quality of the search beforehand, from which follows the corollary that a marriage which failed did so because the search was insufficiently thorough, and from which follows in turn the only remedy the doctrine has ever managed to prescribe, which is more search. Search and search and search is what modern dating prescribes. Not one of these propositions has ever been asked to account for itself in the way that the institution of marriage was asked to account for itself. They were thought up by people who prided themselves on having examined everything and they are now held with the dogmatic fervour of a medieval churchman.

But what would freely finding the actual optimal partner require in practice as opposed to principle? One would have to assess every living person of the relevant description and compare them across each other and return the maximum. Since life is ephemeral and since candidates number in the billions, this is impossible in any modality. Not a better application nor a longer youth nor a more disciplined method could salvage this.

One might concede that the computation is in practice impossible, that is very good and well. But the retort is that of course nobody optimises, we merely approximate, we merely fix a threshold of ‘good-enough’ and take the first candidate who clears it and the whole procedure is perfectly rational once the cost of searching has been priced in. Free human coupling is rationality par excellence! However the rejoinder is merely restating the fairy tale that we just clicked and fate put us together. Consider the fact that what one wants from a partner does not hold constant across the duration of their lives; persons change and the years spent besides one another revises one’s preferences, one’s sense of what matters, the very standard the search was initiated to serve, until what one comes to prize in the other is frequently a thing one had not the knowledge to want on the day they met. One cannot, in other words, declare in advance what one is optimising for because in the act of optimising one goes on to posit the specification into existence. There is then no perfect choice standing behind the search that one can meet or fall short of given that the standard does not precede the choice if it in fact is instantiated by it. To the rationalist I say: the threshold is vague to the point that no one really understands it. A threshold is a standard you carry in with you and hold the candidates against. But if there is no determinate antecedent standard then there is no fact of the matter about whether you stopped too early, no candidate who failed to clear the bar so to speak, and ‘acceptable’ is simply a post-hoc rationalisation to whatever happened to be accepted. One happens upon another person by circumstance and then create out of proximity and repetition and the need not to have erred the sensation she will afterward call ‘love’.

The pool over which one did not optimise was itself a small and heavily conditioned remainder determined by the accident of where one were born, the language one were raised in, the work one drifted into, the doorway one happen to pass through on a Tuesday, the friends whose friends in time become one’s own. By the time a person is a living candidate the lot has already been cut down by circumstances owing nothing whatever to one’s preferences. No one likes to believe that there is no perfect figure waiting somewhere to be found and that there merely is a constrained accident which the two will spend the rest of their lives redescribing as fate.

Someone may be asked how he feels about his girlfriend and he replies: ‘If I were to reduce my feeling to a technicality she is an approximate optimal solution within acceptable range’. On its face this seems true. He did conduct a search. He did fail to enumerate the candidates and he could not have enumerated them. He did stop at a point nowhere near provably best. The band he stopped inside is one he would have called acceptable had anyone asked him at the time.

Crude, yes, but surely an accurate descirption of the perfectly rational behaviour humans seem to be undertaking when coupling. Yet it is also flagrantly, comically, hopelessly, outrageously absurd and I do not mean that it is impolite or unromantic or the sort of remark a man keeps to himself at dinner. I mean that it is completely and utterly false. Nothing in it explains why he would give a damn about her. Nothing in it survives thirty seconds of contact with the brute fact of her. It is nonsense, gobbledygook, foolish. It sounds like a very incredibly reasonable description of an institution but it is somehow also very incredibly absurd! How can this be? Well, it is because the institution is itself absurd.

You will invariably, however much you protest otherwise, want another partner, perhaps for the sole sake of wanting. Schopenhauer described a blind and insatiable life-force, the Will, which drives us and is never quieted by its object, so that desire attained is merely desire transferred. ‘Man does not know what he wants’, also says de Maistre, ‘he wants what he does not want; he does not want what he wants; he wants to want’. The dating application is the first machine in history purpose-built to make the search for a partner non-terminating. It had done so by design since a terminated search is a lapsed subscription. It presents an unbounded supply of candidates each arriving with the intimation that the next may still be better, at a rate no ancestral mind was ever built to metabolise. People do not, as a result, find better partners. They simply find that the aspiration level which used to be fixed for them by the poverty of their options and by everyone they knew being married by twenty-six now floats upward with the supply, and the stopping condition recedes as they approach it. No one on dating apps is ‘choosing’ badly since no one is being held permanently inside the deliberation that choosing is supposed to end. Free love did not topple in the eighteenth century for want of a serious attempt though it is being attempted now on our telephones in a controlled trial with several billion participants and I invite you to look at the results and tell me what you see.

Consider the man who married because he had found the right woman. He has, from his first morning, a live objection permanently available to him and which became so through the same reasoning that got him married. He married her on the ground that she met the standard. He may therefore leave on the ground that she has ceased to meet it, and she will cease to meet it because standards drift and persons change and the years revise what one wants. His exit is licensed by his entrance. The reasoning cuts in both directions and there exists no version of it that cuts in only one. Whereas the man who went in blind never really invoked a standard at all and so has none to appeal to and cannot complain that she has failed a specification he never really possessed. A commitment made through reason can be equally dismantled through. Reasons are cheap and abundant and there is an entire economy devoted to supplying them to you at the hour of your weakness.

What human pairing therefore requires is blind commitment; to stop early enough in the search and commit without reservation; accepts at the outset the irrationality that human pairing in fact requires, which is to go in blind and forgo the endless deliberation over rival candidates that delivers a person, soon enough, into paralysis. It is in this respect that arranged marriages works somewhat better when indexed to the goals to which most people I think want from human pairings. They do not do so gloriously and not in the manner of the films and I am not going to pretend that every one of them is an idyllic garden. They work in the sense that the people are still there twenty years on, that they are fond of each other in a way that visibly took years to build and could not have been detected in the first month by a rational instrument. The fondness in fact looks quite similar to what I imagine what most of my Western friends say they wish they had. Meanwhile the cousins who went abroad and did it the free way are, a striking number of them, thirty-four and exhausted and explaining to me over coffee that they simply have not met the right person, by which they mean that they have met four hundred people and terminated the search on none of them.

There are many rejoinders to this point too. The obvious one is that durability is not the single measure of success. Arranged marriage produces low measured dissatisfaction because exit carries severe consequences and people are culturally or otherwise compelled into it; and women in particular frequently have somewhere to be and nowhere to go. Marriages of this kind are indeed prisons. I have seen those too and they suck.

All well and good. I concede all this. Now consider the proposition that a sphere is a good shape for rolling. I may compare, upon this single count, a tennis ball and the moon, and the comparison is sound, and it is not disturbed in the least degree by the observation that the moon is enormous and grey and made of anorthosite while the ball is small and yellow and made of rubber. The man who answers a proposition about rolling by describing the moon’s diameter has not refuted me and has merely changed the subject and hoped I would not notice the change. Arranged marriage as it is practised is an object, and the object is a bundle, and the bundle contains items I would not defend for a single sentence. I condemn force as well as surveillance by the family as well as the precarity of a woman with no money of her own, and the whole system of pressure amounting in its worst instances to captivity. None of that is the property I am praising about arranged marriage. All of it is accident local implementation. The point is that, whether arranged or otherwise, one must go in blind. Should you want the property without the bundle, then take the property without the bundle. I have no attachment to the bundle and would burn the greater part of it myself. What I decline to do is surrender a property because it has been discovered keeping bad company.

So: arranged marriage is a blind commitment made on inadequate information by people who cannot possibly know what they are choosing. It tells the truth about itself. It tells you at the outset that you will go in blind, you will not know, the knowing comes later if it comes at all, and you will have no argument to leave on, which is the point. Ours institution tells you that you will search, you will find, you will know. It says this while operating a system engineered with a great deal sophistication to ensure that you never stop searching, never find, and never know.