A Better Solution: The Season
The London Season was an annual event in which the rural nobility of England would send their young daughters and sons to London to socialize and look for a mate. When Queen Victoria’s mother and husband died in quick succession, she went into mourning and this essentially canceled the London Season for three years (1861–1863). Both immediate and long-term ramifications of this suspension demonstrate how effective London Season was:
“peer–commoner intermarriage rose by 40%; titled women married husbands 44 percentile ranks poorer in terms of family landholdings.
Such marriages caused real harm to the daughter’s brothers and even fathers. Her brothers were 50% less likely to enter parliament; her family’s prestige fell.”[[90]](#_ftn90)
Eventually, this break in the cycle led to a collapse of the entire institution.[[91]](#_ftn91) We are seeing the second iteration of this. The infection of boarding schools and elite private schools by the cultural supervirus has made high-performing families reluctant to enroll their kids, reducing the rate of exchange among the high-impact cohorts. This makes the elite weak and presents an opportunity for an outside-but-unified cultural group to replace them by creating new mechanisms of exchange.
Not only have the former elite of our society lost their marriage markets, but rates of both sex and marriage have crashed since the invention of swipe-based dating apps (which have mostly wiped out apps that encourage prospective matches to find each other based on values, shared goals, and interests). This problem is likely to get worse across all levels of society as de-urbanization takes hold due to demographic collapse (why this will happen is discussed at the beginning of the book).
Many today bemoan the difficulty of finding a partner, especially as like-minded groups of people become more dispersed. That said, every dispersed and semi-nomadic people throughout history has needed to address the same challenge, from some Native American groups to the Romani. One persistent solution these groups develop involves (roughly) annual gatherings in some form of “intra-community convocation.”
While modern intra-community convocations exist, like the Romani marriage market, this is hardly a new practice. In fact, one of the earliest human settlements known, Göbekli Tepe (occupied between 9500 and 8000 BCE) was likely such a place. The amount of fresh water that would have been at the site as well as an absence of traces indicating local agriculture imply it was not a permanent settlement but instead a periodic gathering point. We have seen some modern iterations of events like this for distributed secular cultures at events like Burning Man or Ephemerisle, which offer models of what a modern convening might resemble.
If the Index were to offer the function of a London Season or Romani marriage market, what would the convening look like?
For the annual season, Houses equipped to host gatherings (either financially or in terms of specialization and access) will invite dating cohorts from participating Index members to events over a fixed series of months, composing guest lists from a master list put together by Season organizers. While hosting will bestow greater status within the larger community, Houses can also use hosting as an opportunity to advertise unique elements of the cultivars they have crafted, giving youth within the Index a broader perspective of cultural practices they might eventually incorporate into cultivars they spin off for their own newly-founded Houses.
Each event hosted during the Season will be designed to facilitate interactions that allow people to get to know each other. Whereas during the traditional London Season, this was typically limited to dinner parties and dancing, events hosted during an Index Season may expand to cover everything from ropes courses to group trips and hackathons.
By reintroducing a temporally constrained period in which participants are actively searching for partners, a modern Season incentivizes participants to take dating seriously, as you will have to wait a year before encountering serious, intent-driven singles at scale each time the Season ends.
By actively opting into the Season (passive Index members are not involved by default), single participants signal that their intent is to come out with a serious partner by their chosen culture’s metrics. Formally declared pairings at the end of the Season will be posted, imposing social pressure on participants (one doesn’t want to publicly “fail”), and subjecting them to mostly-beneficial social scrutiny. Like it or not, the community will judge the quality of matches, impose switching costs on those who might otherwise flake on commitment, etc.—which is beneficial, as low switching costs present a huge problem in modern dating markets (low switching costs increase the perceived value of exploring additional partners by making it easy to end current relationships and start new ones, thus lowering the perceived value of an existing relationship).
Whereas traditional matchmaking-oriented convenings are often intended only for singles, an Index Season will also welcome still-dating-and-not-yet-totally-committed partners. Partnered individuals entering the Index Season will publicly post their partnership upfront, both to signal unavailability and increase switching costs. Partnered participants will also be invited to submit their partnership to a small handful (eight to 15) of Index members for their anonymized approval or disapproval.
In addition to increasing relationship switching costs (assuming the group sees them as good partners), this dynamic grants already-partnered Season participants an opportunity to express their respect for the Index members whose approval they seek while also giving Index outsiders a shot at feeling approved by and welcomed into the community. In other words, non-Index members participating in the Season with an Index partner are likely to feel very welcome if members of the community—who matter to them and their partner—approve of their relationships through a vote. This feeling of acceptance will make them all the more likely to join the Index themselves.
To avoid confusion, people participating in the Season will wear bracelets or wristbands with colors that signify what they are looking for, with black signaling a desire for “nothing” (i.e., they are already partnered), red signaling monogamy, white signaling a multi-partner relationship, and blue signaling anything. The arm on which one wears the band indicates the gender(s) to which they are receptive, with the left arm indicating men and the right arm indicating women (and both arms indicating both).
Just as the Season is designed to augment the overall Index community’s wealth in terms of families and future generations, it is also intended to encourage the retention of capital.
As the London Season anecdote cited above highlights, social seasons are, to a great extent, about establishing business and political connections among families. Even though the primary objective of a Season may be to forge new families, the fact that an Index season will encourage various Houses to socialize, mix, and form alliances through intermarriage will naturally produce new corporate and political alliances.
How will an Index Season lean even more into business? More business-oriented Houses will host events related to investment, business partnerships, startup competitions, hackathons, and investment, encouraging disparate Houses to invest disproportionately in within-Index organizations (not just because of cultural exchange, but because shared Index culture can facilitate greater trust and reduce due diligence costs).