The idea of scanning the crowd for your final soulmate is very specific to our culture. I have to ask, if that's the right model, then why doesn't it seem to have been the case that the massive migrations to cities over the past century spawned a never-before-seen blossoming of more perfect love? Surely, if the number of strangers someone meets in a lifetime has been skyrocketing, the number of people who had found perfect partners would have gone up with it. We'd be living in times that'd make us look back on romantic poets as stodgy.

Sometimes, I wonder if the whole "we got lucky," thing was just that they did get lucky, but only for long enough to bootstrap them into having spent enough time around each other to get attached. My experience of human nature is that everyone is actually really, really close to the same once you get to know them.