[SuoDuanDao]

I think you're onto something. It seems like thinking about 'meta-relationships' tends to depersonalize the individual interactions and devalue the individuals involved. It's as though successful relationships are a fitting problem, and looking at the macro environment strips out the individual quirks which optimize for one's own fit.

If that kind of thinking were helpful, I think we'd have evolved to have a very accurate guess as to what the majority of our preferred demographic finds attractive - but apart from psychopaths, most of us don't. the optimal mating strategy doesn't actually seem to be to work to approach some generic ideal, but to be most authentically and extremely oneself, then filter out everyone who doesn't like that. It's intuitive why looking too seriously at averages distracts from that project.