Do I have any readers under 30? This chart made the rounds today and I'm confused:
I don't know how accurate this is, but I've seen plenty of charts like it. Here's what I don't get.
It makes sense that online introductions have gone up. But that much? People still go to college, they go to work, and they go to bars. They still have family, friends, and neighbors. But those modes of introduction have dropped to almost nothing. Why?
Is it because online dating is so hugely superior that no one is willing to risk any other method now? Have we gotten so woke that no one dares make an in-person advance these days? Are you just more likely to hit it off with someone you meet online compared to meeting IRL? Thoughts?
For the record, I wish the authors would distinguish between meeting someone at an online dating site and meeting someone during some other kind of online activity. These are very different things to casually lump together.
Note that the chart *ends* in 2020. In-person dating wasn't much of a thing in 2020.
Also, I'm wondering (as I saw this chart a few days ago on reddit) if it's of *married* couples, which is going to have a time lag from time of meeting... I'll dig up the link to put at the bottom here as they had a comment about methodology.
Very few people meet online from "some other activity" as opposed to the apps, which are pretty much ubiquitous. If you're younger than 40 and single, you're using the apps when you're dating. I have a number of single friends in their late-30s. They're all on the apps, but only when they're dating. The experience is not a good one, so they often take breaks.
Here is the original content creator posting this chart on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/how_heterosexual_couples_met_oc/
"I've seen charts like this before, but they've all had a big error in them, so I went back to the original data source (which was pretty messy) to find the truth.
In the past, this chart has been shown with the category "bar or restaurant" rising since 2000—the only category rising in addition to "met online". But the authors noted in their original study that:
[The chart's] apparent post-2010 rise in meeting through bars and restaurants for heterosexual couples is due entirely to couples who met online and subsequently had a first in-person meeting at a bar or restaurant or other establishment where people gather and socialize. If we exclude the couples who first met online from the bar/restaurant category, the bar/restaurant category was significantly declining after 1995 as a venue for heterosexual couples to meet.
Well, I dug up the original dataset to find out the real story.
As far as I know, this is the first time someone has ever shown this chart where the "bar & restaurant" category has been corrected to not include people who first met online, and then met up for drinks or coffee."
Online is everything.
It's forums, chat rooms, games, comment threads, social media, events, places, hangouts, zooms, voices, text...
And it's also dating programs.
I met my spouse online. Friend of a friend, we hung out in the same chat spaces, then phone calls, then... She needed a roommate and I needed a new place and to be closer to jobs and... we started dating and that was over twenty-five years ago.
Online is like saying, 'yeah, I met them in a bar' or 'I met them at the board game club' or 'I met them at this sport or hobby'
It's far safer, you meet far more people, so of course it's going to explode.
Is it because meeting someone through an app who knows none of your friends or family dramatically lowers the risk of ever seeing them again after you don't hit it off?
Good thought. Could be awkward.
Might it be entirely be the opposite what you squares are thinking about?
My son (age 23, works in tech) and his friend from high school were not doing well in the on-line dating scene. So I told him - go to where the women are: try out dancing. Here is the time and place for a weekly line dancing event (Seattle area). I also told him of some alternative dance varieties to try, if the line dancing crowd didn't work.
Bingo.
And many iRL activities have online components.
There are apps to find these events, or people who want to attend them!
Look'n for love in all the right places.
Lots of women in the horse community
Dance clubs are a great place
My late wife and I did line dancing and international folk dance.
I met my current wife at a Sierra Club meeting
I was looking for a partner who did not shop as a blood sport and did not mind sleeping in tents or racing a small sailboat across SF bay with a threat of drowning or hyperthermia
My wife has a horse
She is a pilot and owns a 172
She snow skis
She scubas
She dances
Sounds like you married the 1%. A horse and a plane?
When we married I knew my place in the family would come after the cats. Sacrifices have to be made.
When you plan a trip, do you go online to investigate the things you might do in a different city, or do you just go there and wander around, hoping that you'll bump into something interesting by accident?
I'm very much over thirty and after about eighteen years of looking for a prospective wife at college, at work, through friends, through family, at bars and by just wandering around, I finally found her at an Astronomy meeting. The marriage lasted thirty years, and now I find myself back on the dating scene.
However, I have a better sense of what I'm looking for now, and I calculated that there were about nine eligible women in the greater Ann Arbor metropolitan area, and if I just wander around, I'll meet one of them in about 160 years.
So, I went online and found a woman with the characteristics I wanted (age, personality type, general attractiveness, mostly solvent, responsible and kind) in about three months of looking.
Dating has been compared to finding a place to eat for lunch. You don't know beforehand what restaurants are available, and if you drive around and look at each place, if you reject it, you're not likely to revisit it. Finding the -best- place by driving around randomly will take some time. Maybe more time than you have. Maybe longer than the life of the solar system.
The best thing about online dating is that you have a much larger pool to draw from, and you can investigate the choices much faster than you can by just hoping to randomly meet someone in real life.
Actually, some of my favorite memories in traveling were when I was just wandering around and found something interesting by accident.
For sure. That's the best part of traveling. Do I plan some stuff? Sure. But I make it a point to leave time to allow for wandering, discovering, and taking the advice of locals.
I met my late wife while in college. Dorm friends had met some women at the beach and a party had been set up. The friends asked me to come as they needed an extra guy. So I went. I did my duty and forgot about the event. Later one of my friends said: Linda would like to talk to you. So what the hell, I called and set up a date. She was the smartest person I have ever met. She became a CPA after the youngest was in school. She worked for the IRS but she quit when asked to lie on TV. She won one of the Elijah Watt Sells Awards for her score.
One other thing about online dating vs. meeting someone in real life.
When you are on a dating site, you both know why you are there.
In real life, you might know why you are there, but the odds are that they don't have a clue about what you want, probably don't care, and most likely, aren't looking themselves.
In my experience with real life dating, I was interested in a woman who was a manager in a bank because she wasn't wearing a ring. Turns out, she was married with kids and just hates to wear jewelry.
Another time, I fell into infatuation with a gorgeous babe, also not wearing a ring, who then introduced me to her life partner, a female nurse.
THAT is exactly the reason why this elderly person went to online dating after my divorce. When the age range of the desired dating pool is 50-60, it's extremely difficult to tell which women are available and which are just friendly. If they've put themselves on a dating site, the availability question is answered.
Online dating works well for me. Several women found that they enjoyed my company, and vice versa, but not enough to make it long term. After several very pleasant short term relationships, I met the right woman, hope triumphed over experience, and I'm remarried and no longer on dating sites.
While I'm here, let me add one final thing, even though it is off-topic.
Let's say that you really know yourself and you really know the kind of person that you want to spend the rest of your life with. I mean, you're not subconsciously looking for your mother and you've been around the block. Maybe the woman of your dreams is a 2001 BMW Z8 in midnight black with a tan interior.
You go online and WOW. There are lots of them out there, and you can just buy one for money, not blood or your firstborn male child.
Now, your job is to find that model that hasn't been in too many wrecks, that has been well-cared for, and that isn't in need of a complete restoration.
Get a copy of Jeb Kinnison's "Bad Boyfriends" and read the chapter on "Types in the Dating Pool." It's all true.
It's not exactly wokeness, but young people think it is creepy if someone calls them on the phone. I wouldn't be surprised if approaching someone in real life also reads as creepy.
It's not creepy, it's just annoying.
+1
Ask before calling, leave a voicemail if it was important, but definitely text.
My young female coworkers (20s and 30s) have told me that asking for a date face to face (not because I was asking, I'd better specify!) is considered so aggressive that it is borderline harassment.
I'm suspicious of the accuracy of the whole thing, because it doesn't include "church," which doesn't obviously fall within any of the listed categories and would have been a major meeting source up to 1965 or so at least.
I met my wife at a science-fiction convention. What category does that fall into?
I met my wife in the Society for Creative Anachronism. I would list under "friends" for lack of a more specific category. Same with an SF con. Church might fall there too, but it could go under family, depending on the details. I am surprised it wasn't included as a separate category.
People of all age groups do really have fewer friends than they did 20 years ago. This has been well documented elsewhere. They are also much less likely to know their neighbors or have any kind of relationship with them. Obviously they still have family, but I'd also guess they're much less likely to form bonds with extended family - cousins, second cousins etc, who once would have served as built-in friends.
And yes, a male romantically approaching a female co-worker, or a random female stranger in a store or street, is much more likely to be considered harassment now.
Are you just more likely to hit it off with someone you meet online compared to meeting IRL? Thoughts?
Haven't read through the thread, but, I think in the main it's volume. It's just easier and vastly more efficient to find dates online. This, after all, is measuring "couples" and that presumably means "successful" pairings—not "all" dates or introductions. So, imagine the average 20-something over a three year period: call it age 24, 25, 26. That person might meet, say, 20 people through non-online means they're interested in dating, and get first dates with seven of them. So, seven first dates. But during that same three year period, they might conceivably make online contact with 219 people they'd like to date, and secure 28 first dates. Pretty good!
Seven (real world) vs. twenty-eight (online). Simple math suggests the latter method leads to more actual relationships.
I expect something like the above is the reason online dating seems to work better. Dating more frequently simply improves one's odds of finding a lasting relationship. (Also, people have gotten a lot more cautious about dating coworkers, so, that source of dates has atrophied).
Not under 30 anymore, but I was pretty much fully transitioned to online dating by 30, and so was everyone else I knew who was single.
Whatever other forces were are work, the principle reason I ended up on the sites (now apps), was that I had run out of organic contacts through social networks. I was done with grad school and the friend-of-friend pool was fairly exhausted. Big parties full of potentially random people had pretty much dried up at that age and weddings had yet to become a common feature. Approaching strangers at bars was not a done thing for my cohort by that point.
I suspect that in the past, I would have had to fairly radically revise my dating standards to keep going. But I didn't have to! Would it be better for society if people still had to undergo a natural winnowing process and settle within their communities, instead of stretching the process out for an additional 5-10 years? Maybe!
Sure glad I didn't, though!
I'm not under 30, but my 19 year old met their significant other on Tinder. Back in my dating days an app like Tinder would have been considered an app for sex, but now it's just how they meet people.
I met my wife on eHarmony.
The logistics of this are interesting. How many people that one contacts on the internet are close enough to have an in-person relationship? Wouldn't increased travel to actually see the ideal mate have shown up in statistics? The results in the graph should have some wide implications.
The graph implies that there is no longer any significant mating interaction on college campuses, for example. So what has happened to the old social events on campus? Do they still have proms and other events? Does nobody show up, or are half the people there from off-campus? How about other social events which have traditionally been meeting places for those looking for mates?
The internet dating services evidently boomed, but that implies that other things that used to do meeting functions have crashed.
Just an aside, how is it that the trendline for "online dating" begins ca. 1980? There was no (civilian) internet back then and sites like eHarmony didn't come on line until the 00s at the earliest, iirc.
There were BBSes before the internet went public. I can remember looking at dating sites in the early '90s, quite soon after the internet went public.
Phone sex?
“Computer Dating” has been around since the 1960s. A company would start a database of subscribers, and match clients with each other. Of course, each company had its own database, so each pool was much smaller. And more expensive.
The chart completely disagrees with my understanding of my kids lives. Unless the chart's point is that during Covid, strange things happened.
Having now read the thread it occurs to me that people being able to pick the perfect companion like this excludes all the people between them that might otherwise have distracted them, a perfect illustration of assortative mating.
You never need to see or know any of those people you have less interest in or less compatibility with, and you may never realize most of them even exist, so when you hear about them it's difficult to take anything they say seriously and everyone starts to feel marginalized.