I've known people who click through dating/mating apps and go on dates with three or four different people a week. Hell I've known people who will scheduled three dates in an evening, if the first one is going well they will cancel the next two and so on. I suppose it's playing the odds, dating like you are buying a lottery ticket, you never know the next one might be a winner.

The cold ask out of a person you just met or didn't even know was always there but it seems like people are more like to go for the quick and shallow date without much meaning attached to it than they ever were before.

I don't know if I'm saying this at all well. If you go on one hundred dates a year you might look at going on a date with a coworker with little consideration of the consequences. It's just another date. All dates are just another date, nothing to em, just push through em like enemies in a video game until you find a golden chest.

You used to only be able to date people you knew and consequently would have to gauge the social or work related consequences of who you were going to go out with more carefully than an average tinder date. You had to weigh the relative merits of the person and how they related to your world with some care (not necessarily some kind of extraordinary care but it mattered). There was always the cold ask out of a person you met while at a book store, the bar or a show but there were way less of these people to hook up with than there are now that the internet has aggregated demand.

Now a days you can go on three dates in a night or one hundred dates in a year even if you are less than the studliest guy or more desirable girl around. You don't have to try and suss out how compatible a person is, what your friends would think if you started seeing her, if Donna would still consider going out with you if she knew you went out on a date with Susan. You can just date your ass off, separate the wheat from the chaff as you find them. No worries about if your compatible, do you share the same tastes, does their laugh annoy the shit out of you. The consensus of people I've seen who date hard and often is that you should know in the first ten to twenty minutes if a person is worth your time. No more working up the nerve or deciding if your really interested.

It's a different world.