Marriage and commitment being disrupted

Typically we speak about disruption when discussing technology companies, but two incumbents that we wouldn't typically associate with disruption may be under assault: commitment and marriage.

The fascinating essay A Million First Dates in the Atlantic explores the thesis that online dating is making meeting people so simple and efficient that people are less likely to commit to marriage or even long-term relationships that hit a bit of rocky waters.

After two years, when Rachel informed Jacob that she was moving out, he logged on to Match.com the same day. His old profile was still up. Messages had even come in from people who couldn’t tell he was no longer active. The site had improved in the two years he’d been away. It was sleeker, faster, more efficient. And the population of online daters in Portland seemed to have tripled. He’d never imagined that so many single people were out there.

“I’m about 95 percent certain,” he says, “that if I’d met Rachel offline, and if I’d never done online dating, I would’ve married her. At that point in my life, I would’ve overlooked everything else and done whatever it took to make things work. Did online dating change my perception of permanence? No doubt. When I sensed the breakup coming, I was okay with it. It didn’t seem like there was going to be much of a mourning period, where you stare at your wall thinking you’re destined to be alone and all that. I was eager to see what else was out there.”

The positive aspects of online dating are clear: the Internet makes it easier for single people to meet other single people with whom they might be compatible, raising the bar for what they consider a good relationship. But what if online dating makes it too easy to meet someone new? What if it raises the bar for a good relationship too high? What if the prospect of finding an ever-more-compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, in which we keep chasing the elusive rabbit around the dating track?

The article is intriguing throughout. Another choice excerpt:

In 2011, Mark Brooks, a consultant to online-dating companies, published the results of an industry survey titled “How Has Internet Dating Changed Society?” The survey responses, from 39 executives, produced the following conclusions:

“Internet dating has made people more disposable.”

“Internet dating may be partly responsible for a rise in the divorce rates.”

“Low quality, unhappy and unsatisfying marriages are being destroyed as people drift to Internet dating sites.”

“The market is hugely more efficient … People expect to—and this will be increasingly the case over time—access people anywhere, anytime, based on complex search requests … Such a feeling of access affects our pursuit of love … the whole world (versus, say, the city we live in) will, increasingly, feel like the market for our partner(s). Our pickiness will probably increase.”

“Above all, Internet dating has helped people of all ages realize that there’s no need to settle for a mediocre relationship.”

The ideal economic model of online dating sites wants to work well enough to attract customers but not so well that you find a lifelong mate and stop subscribing to their services, so a model of lifelong casual dating might end up being the perfect world for them, if not society. The article includes an interesting analysis of why couples who meet online are more likely to hook up earlier than in the past.

Disruption, as those who study the topic tend to know, usually comes from the low-end. It's not surprising, then, that marriage and commitment is being disrupted at the low end, where bad marriages and relationships reside. Divorce might be seen as a healthy thing if it were not so costly: I have not seen statistics on this, but based on this article I'd predict we've seen a healthy rise in pre-nuptial agreements this past decade.

American Express and low-end Asian restaurants

Payment platforms are a classic multi-sided market. Visa and Mastercard are the two dominant payment platforms outside of cash. American Express is in third place in  payment card market share.

Most dominant platforms in multi-sided markets either subsidize one side of the market or make it essentially free for that side of the market. You can get a huge selection of Visa and Mastercards for no annual fee. Unlike, Visa and Mastercard, American Express has taken a strategy of splitting their monetization between both merchants and consumers, and many of their cards carry an annual fee. In exchange for that, they tend to offer more attractive benefits and perks which attract a higher end customer, often business people.

For merchants, a consumer that uses an American Express card costs more since American Express takes a bigger commission on the transaction. The tradeoff that makes it worthwhile, from the merchants perspective, is the hope of bringing in that attractive high end customer.

This model breaks down in low-end Chinese restaurants, though. A rich and/or business person won't spend substantially more on Chinese food than any other customer of the restaurant since there's a limit to how much you can eat, and a cheap Chinese restaurant can fill you up for very little money. Most cheap Chinese restaurants don't even have any single high end dish or alcoholic drink that they can use for price discrimination to siphon off extra profit from that high end customer.

So many low-end Chinese restaurants don't accept American Express. Some don't even accept credit cards at all.

I thought of this yesterday because for the first time in a long time, I had to do a walk of shame to the ATM to pull out cash to pay for a meal. When I go running, I usually throw my Mastercard in my running shorts so I can grab groceries on the way back. Since my refrigerator is broken right now, I'm also eating out for every meal. I forgot to grab my Mastercard out of my running shorts yesterday after my morning run, and after dinner at a low-end Asian restaurant my American Express was summarily waved off. I had no Mastercard and not enough cash.

I had to endure the stink-eye from the restaurant manager as I sheepishly left an Amex and driver's license as collateral and schlepped a few blocks to the nearest ATM. I would have offered to wash dishes, but given what I suspect was the meager hourly wage of a dishwasher at that restaurant it might have cost me a few hours of my life.

Louis C.K.'s Proust Questionnaire

Louis C.K.'s answers for Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire have to be the best ever for that section. I don't know for sure since I've only ever read maybe two dozen of those, but I will take this one versus the field if you put a gun to my head.

Looking back on all the 2012 TV I watched, the enduring image that sticks in my memory is Louis C.K. in a Chinese village, eating Chinese food with those natives.