It's a funny "joke" but for a large percentage of people, their college decision and entrance exams were the determining factor in who they married; where you put yourself has a huge effect on whom you meet.
Going to an engineering college where the demographic was 99% male, I guess I was determined to finish alone ;). But honestly 100% agreed with your point, even with online dating, a lot of people end up dating people they know or people they meet through a common friend.
It's funny how predictive that is. There was a woman in the dorm we'd lived in -- we were definitely not friends but knew each other. A few years after graduation we ran into each other at a party on the opposite coast...and ended up together for a few years.
I mean I moved out of my hometown with that - meeting people - as an additional objective. It didn't work relationship wise (I ended up with someone I met online over a shared hobby / community), but it was an interesting experiment I guess. I like to think I ended up a bit more worldly, a bit more resilient to social situations and dealing with people very different from me personality wise.
And ironically, if you met your partner on a dating app in a large city or metro area, your dating encounters were ostensibly under direct influence by a tech company’s algorithm, yet you were likely in a pool vastly larger than a college campus.
The thing is if it's not the college decision it'll be something equally as random and trivial. 99% of what we do is just bumping atoms against atoms in a soup of probability.
