ubiq: What’s beshows have to do with anything? How do you think shidduchim were made until World War I in Europe and in the Sephardic lands? It wasn’t boy meets girl, falls in love, gets married. It wasn’t even shadchan redts shidduch, couple goes on dates to local venues, decides whether to marry. No. For the most part from the time of the churban Beis HaMikdash until World War I the parents would make most of the decisions. Who their children could consider for marriage. And who their children will see. Then the the children would have a short meeting or two and if there were no major objections, and the children were quite young to even know any reason to object, it would be a Mazal Tov!
The goyim didn’t do things that much differently from that either.
Yes, there were a minute amount of exceptions, but for the vast amount of society that was more or less “the system”.
Once boys started picking and choosing, they picked usually girls as young as they could get and often frowned on anything older than they could otherwise get, even being disinclined to consider girls their own age.