so I found out why there have been numerous reports that this mod prevents marriages from happening (myself included). something I noticed is that no one really cares about anyone else unless they were family or already married. pretty much everyone was only an acquaintance. romance attempts rarely work unless you're friends, and the higher your opinion, the better. for example, the first successful romance attempt in my current colony, a year and a half in, was when someone beautiful moved in, and made a pass on another beautiful colonist. they were both instantly friends with each other because they were both beautiful. also, I had 3 games previously with no successful romance attempt in about 12 years game time combined.

at first I thought it was that no one actually interacted with each other, but that's not true, people are interacting. but then I noticed that, despite talking a lot, they aren't gaining any points for doing so. the primary way of making friends in the game has been neutered.

in vanilla, chitchatting increases your opinion by .66, up to a max of +10. it would take 16 chitchat attempts without dissipating for that to be reached. with this mod, chitchatting is changed to 1, resulting in only needing 10 chitchat attempts to reach the max gain of +10. cool. but, of course, chitchatting won't make friends. deep talks, however, do. in vanilla, deep talks give +15 points each, but only stacks 10 times on the same pawn, and has a .9x stack multiplier. that said, that's still +135 for 10 stacks. with this mod, deep talks only give +3. it has a .95x stack multiplier, but the value's so low that it really doesn't matter. deep talks are rare compared to chitchats, but in order for someone to befriend someone else, you'd need 10 chitchats and at least 4 deep talks in a short amount of time before any other modifiers. if they have a difference in work or drug ethics, or happen to make an offensive remark, or god forbid they're ugly, this is made far, far worse. at max value (10 chitchats and 10 deep talk stacks), this only reaches a value of +40, which barely qualifies people to actually pass romance attempts. considering it's not uncommon for people to value people they talk with all the time way higher than their own family, I can't say that's even a realistic value, in case realism was the reason for setting this so low.

you may not change how pawns interact with each other, but by influencing how pawns feel after interacting with each other, you indirectly neuter friendships, not to mention marriages.