The second-cheapest bottle on my list is the most-ordered wine in the room.
It is on nearly every list in the world, and on nearly every one of them it outsells the bottles on either side of it. Not because it is better. Because of where it sits.
Nobody wants to be the person who ordered the cheapest thing. So they move up one, and they stop.
I have watched that happen thousands of times, mostly on first dates, and I have never once seen anyone look happy doing it. There is a particular pause before it. The list comes back to the same page twice. A finger lands, lifts, lands again one line down. Then a slightly-too-casual voice says we will do this one.
That order is not about wine. It never was. It is a person deciding what they are willing to be seen wanting, in front of somebody whose opinion they have not earned yet.
The pause is the whole story
I bring this up because there is a conversation happening right now about why people are not dating, not partnering, not sleeping together. Dating apps consolidated attention. A small number of men get most of it. The bar is six feet and six figures. Depending on who is talking, this is either proof that women are mercenary or proof that the market is broken.
I have no standing in the market argument and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I do not study this. I stand in it.
What I can tell you is that the room where this is supposed to happen is my room, and I have a view of it that people writing about mating markets do not have, because they are describing a thing I am physically inside of five nights a week while sober and holding a wine list.
And from here, six feet and six figures do not look like preferences.
They look like the second-cheapest bottle.
What a number is actually for
Height and income have one property in common that nothing else on the list has. You can verify them from a profile, before you have met anyone, without trusting yourself.
That is the entire appeal. Not that people want them. That they can be *checked*.
Everything that actually predicts whether you will be happy with somebody is unmeasurable in advance and requires you to be in a room with them, paying attention, forming a view you might be wrong about. Whether they are kind when nobody is grading them. Whether they get funnier or smaller when they are tired. Whether being around them makes you more yourself or less. None of that fits in a field. All of it requires judgment, and judgment can be wrong, and being wrong in public is the thing everyone is organising their life to avoid.
So people reach for the number. Not because the number is good. Because the number is defensible.
Six feet is a criterion you can state out loud to your friends without embarrassment. "He made me feel like the most interesting person at the table" is not a criterion. It is a judgment, and you own it, and if it turns out badly you cannot point at the spreadsheet.
My own trade did exactly this to itself. Wine went numerical, because a ninety-four-point score is a thing you can hold up and hide behind, and "I liked it" is a thing you have to defend. The scores did not make anyone's palate better. They gave people something to point at instead of having one. Counting is not choosing. It never was.
The dating market did not invent this. It just ran the same play on people.
Nobody removed the romance. They removed the sommelier.
Here is the thing I actually believe, and it is not the thing either side of this argument is saying.
The apps did not break mating by making it a market. Mating was always a market and everybody involved always knew it. What the apps did was hand every person on earth a list with four thousand bottles on it and no one standing there to read them.
That is my literal job. A guest sits down in front of a list they cannot parse, in a situation where they feel evaluated, and they are about to order defensively. They will take the second-cheapest, or the only name they recognise, or whatever they think signals correctly. All three are the same move: outsourcing a decision they do not trust themselves to make.
What I do is not tell them what is good. Anybody can do that, and now a machine can do it faster than I can. What I do is read what they actually want underneath what they are asking for, and then give them permission to want it.
Sometimes that means selling down. A man is reaching for something expensive to perform provision for someone who does not care about the price and would rather he relaxed. The right move is to put my finger on something cheaper and better and say, honestly, that this is the one I would drink tonight. He gets to look like a man with taste instead of a man with a budget. She gets a better bottle. I make less money.
That is the job. Not the knowledge. The permission.
Nobody is doing that for anyone on an app. There is no one in the loop whose entire function is to look at you and say: the thing you are performing is not the thing you want, and the thing you want is allowed.
What we actually lost
The conversation about all this keeps looking for a villain. Porn. Apps. Inequality. Phones. Somebody's politics.
From the floor it looks less like a villain and more like a demolition.
Courtship used to be a script. Not a good one, and not one I would want returned intact, but a script: where you sat, who ordered, who paid, how you signalled interest without having to say it, how you declined without having to say that either. The rituals were not the point. The rituals were the scaffolding that let two frightened people get through an evening without having to invent every move from nothing.
We took the scaffolding down. We replaced the finding, efficiently, and we replaced none of the doing.
So people arrive at my tables with the hardest possible task. Be interesting, be unguarded, be discerning, be relaxed, and improvise all of it from scratch, in front of a stranger who is deciding about you, with no inherited moves to lean on.
And then, increasingly, without a drink.
The part I did not expect
Alcohol was doing a lot of quiet work in that script. Not romance. Anaesthetic. It let people be slightly braver than they are and gave them something to do with their hands. Drinking is down, it is down hardest among the young, and daily drinking has all but disappeared among people under thirty.
I am the last person who will argue for putting that back. I do this job without drinking and I am better at it than I was when I drank. Every night I watch what alcohol was actually covering for, and it was rarely the good part.
But I would be lying if I said nothing was lost. What alcohol bought people was permission, badly and at a cost. Take it away without replacing it and you get a room full of people who are more sober, more careful, more legible to themselves, and much more afraid.
Sober courage is real courage. That is the whole problem with it.
The scarce thing
So I do not think dating is dying because women want six feet or because men want too much or because a market got efficient.
I think an entire generation was handed unlimited options and no one to help them choose, and choosing badly in public became the most expensive thing you can do, and so people are doing the thing anyone does when the stakes rise and the confidence falls.
They order the second-cheapest bottle. They pick the criterion that survives a friend's cross-examination. They wait for something to be obviously correct before they will risk wanting it.
I cannot fix that from where I stand. What I can do, on a Tuesday, at one table, is take a list out of somebody's hands and tell them the truth about what they would enjoy, and watch a person relax about a decision for the first time that evening.
It is a small thing and it is the entire job, and it turns out to be the scarcest skill in the economy right now, in a hundred contexts that have nothing to do with wine.
Somebody who reads what you want under what you are asking for, and tells you it is allowed.
We used to have those everywhere. Now you have to book a table.