Yes that is a very good point. Sloppy wording on my part. I recently had a piece come out in Tablet about the Romantasy boom (lol) that kinda uses the genre as a window into what sort of anxieties young women these days have about dating/marriage etc. I ultimately land in a very similar place to CHH in that I agree that marriage being more optional these days has made it more complicated to get (probably in large part because family members aren’t involving themselves as you are talking about, but also because not everyone is necessarily looking for marriage or is sure if they are, which adds a whole layer to the process of getting married i.e. sifting through people to find the ones who are looking for commitment). But I think you are right that the anxieties about finding a marriage aren’t really new so much as they have shifted in character. And the outcome of failing in that search is likely to be different than it once was. In the past, the outcome of bungling the search for a good spouse is settling for a bad one. Now it’s just no spouse at all.