This one opens with COVID and codependency — why needing people got treated like a personality flaw, and what the pandemic actually exposed about that. From there we follow the money: emotional capitalism turning partnership into a checklist (flowers, good morning texts, walking on the traffic side), and therapy-speak becoming ammunition people use on each other without ever sitting in a room together. Then the bigger structures come in — economic homogamy, why “caste-blind” and “colorblind” are both oxymorons, the actual data on racial hierarchy in online dating, and how fetishization hides inside what gets called representation. Credits: Track: Disco Sunday — Audio Library Beats Group Music provided by Audio Library Plus Watch: • Disco Sunday — Audio Library Beats | Moder... Free Download / Stream: https://alplus.io/disco-sunday Assigned Readings: Banerjee, A., Duflo, E., Ghatak, M., & Lafortune, J. (2009). Marry for What: Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India (Working Paper No. 14958). National Bureau of Economic Research. Bauman, Z. (2001). Consuming Life. Journal of Consumer Culture, 1(1), 9–29. Becker, G. S. (1973). A Theory of Marriage: Part I. The Journal of Political Economy, 81(4), 813–846. Calvi, R., & Keskar, A. (2022). ‘Til Dowry Do Us Part: Bargaining and Violence in Indian Families. Rice University. Finkel, E. J., Eastwick, P. W., Karney, B. R., Reis, H. T., & Sprecher, S. (2012). Online Dating: A Critical Analysis From the Perspective of Psychological Science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(1), 3–66. Fisman, R., Iyengar, S. S., Kamenica, E., & Simonson, I. (2008). Racial Preferences in Dating. Review of Economic Studies, 75, 117–132. Jamieson, L. (1999). Intimacy Transformed? A Critical Look at the ‘Pure Relationship’. Sociology, 33(3), 477–494. Jayachandran, S. (2014). The Roots of Gender Inequality in Developing Countries (Working Paper No. 20380). National Bureau of Economic Research. Kalmijn, M. (1998). Intermarriage and Homogamy: Causes, Patterns, Trends. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 395–421. Lin, K.-H., & Lundquist, J. (2013). Mate Selection in Cyberspace: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Education. American Journal of Sociology, 119(1), 183–215. Minina, A., Masè, S., & Smith, J. (2022). Commodifying love: value conflict in online dating. Journal of Marketing Management, 38(1–2), 98–126. Rajadesingan, A., Mahalingam, R., & Jurgens, D. (2019). Smart, Responsible, and Upper Caste Only: Measuring Caste Attitudes through Large-Scale Analysis of Matrimonial Profiles. Proceedings of the Thirteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2019). Substack: The Problem With “If They Wanted To, They Would” I Started Dating Like a Man (and I Love It) The Real Reason Dating is So Hard Right Now (That No One is Naming)