Time & Perspective Quote by Stockard Channing

Channing’s sentence has the halting, run-on texture of someone thinking in public, which is part of its tell: she’s circling a cultural frustration that feels bigger than any tidy sound bite. The spark is “phenomenon of our time,” but the real tension is in the mismatch she sketches between effort and ecosystem. “A lot of women keep themselves in good shape” isn’t just about fitness; it’s shorthand for the ongoing labor of self-maintenance women are socially trained to perform well past youth. What’s biting here is the implied bargain: if you do the work, connection should be available. Instead, she describes a market with no “accommodation” - a word that quietly frames dating as infrastructure, not fate. Who’s building the ramps, the rooms, the invitations?

The subtext lands in the uneasy pivot to “technology,” tossed in at the end like a culprit everyone recognizes but no one can quite name. It suggests a world where the tools meant to connect people have also thinned out real-world pathways: fewer shared spaces, more filtering, more atomized lives. Coming from an actress of Channing’s era, there’s also a generational edge: a sense that social scripts have been rewritten faster than the emotional customs that once guided meeting, courting, partnering.

She’s not romanticizing the past; she’s diagnosing a present where women are urged to remain “viable” while the culture provides fewer coherent ways to actually meet, match, and be met - especially outside the narrow lanes youth-centric dating culture rewards.