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Professor Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford does research on how heterosexual couples in the US meet ( https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ https://web.stanford.edu/
by StopTheWorld 2y ago
Professor Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford does research on how heterosexual couples in the US meet ( https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ ).
In 1940, over 50% met via friends or family. About 36% met at school.
In 2021, about 20% met via friends or family. About 10% met at school. Over 50% met online. So the majority of US couples are now meeting via profit-maximizing corporations. He has a 2019 paper on this (and it has only increased since that paper).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lawlessone 2y agoI'm surprised dating sites work well enough that 50% of customers meet via it. They've no incentive to help you leave.
- autoexecbat 2y agoThey probably have some internal churn targets to hit, else people will start to figure out that the app isn't worth their time and try a different one
- jprete 2y agoThat's both a horrible thought and a near-certainty.
- flappyeagle 2y agoIt creates a much worse problem actually. Why have a committed relationship when you can always press a button to look at hotties and have a pull at the sex slot machine? If they design the system right, their audience just won't marry or have long term stable relationships
- kevinob11 2y agoI can think of a few reasons why people want (either already or after enough pulls of the slot machine) a committed relationship. Though to be clear, just because I think the other more stable thing is valuable to folks even with the availability of the sex slot machine, I still don't love businesses trying to push slot machines or any kind really.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sulandor 2y agoonline dating (apps) did not invent uncommitted sex. debatable if it got more prevalent because of them, as afaik the statistics indicate both, less short _and_ less long term relationships, so :shrug:
- ta_1138 2y agoOnly the people that have really huge success rates, which is very small, and gets way worse as one ages. Have you seen the swipe stats from many Tinder users? What you describe is not a reality for even the top 1% of hetero male users.
- tsss 2y agoIt is true for the top 99% of women.
- XMPPwocky 2y agoDo people go on dating sites to look at "hotties"? I've heard there are better websites to do that, many free of charge! (Not a rhetorical question - as a queer person who's never used a dating site or app and who's been in a long-term relationship (now married) for almost 8 years now, I really do have no idea what people do on there.)
- racional 2y ago[dead]
- ZoomerCretin 2y agoGood thing Match is a monopoly that owns all of the giant dating apps except for Bumble!
- KittenInABox 2y agoIt might not be dating sites. I've heard of people in WoW guilds dating back in the day.
- itishappy 2y agoCustomer success stories are free advertising.
- loa_in_ 2y agoAnd the need for the service doesn't need to be fabricated, it's innate.
- darby_nine 2y agoThey just need to work once. Who knows how many failed attempts at finding someone preceded the one that suck.
- ars 2y agoThere is no shortage of potential customers, there is a shortage of actual customers. Anything they can do to attract more business helps them. So if they have tons of success stories they'll get far more business. It would be different in a saturated market, where they might want to try to keep people on the site, but that's not the case here.
- kelipso 2y agoWonder what that percentage would look like as a function of relationship length.
- smcameron 2y ago50% of heterosexual couples meeting online is not the same as 50% of customers of dating sites entering a relationship. It could be the case that say, only 10% of dating site customers end up in a relationship, and this 10% amounts to 50% of the total couples, and the math would work out. E.g.: suppose the total population is 1000 people, 500 of which are on a dating site, and the total number of couples is 20, 10 of which were formed via the dating site and 10 of which were formed by other means, and 960 people are out of luck.
- throwaway48540 2y agoThat's a possible theory, but we know the reality is opposite.
- fsckboy 2y ago>They've no incentive to help you leave they have plenty of incentive to get you some dates, after that what are they gonna do?
- dyauspitr 2y agoGet you bad dates with incompatible people?
- chongli 2y agoI'm surprised dating sites work well enough that 50% of customers meet via it It’s not that surprising when you think of selection effects. Suppose you have a sack full of marbles. Half of the marbles are pink and the other half are random assorted colours. Now reach into the sack and pull out two marbles. If they match then they get married and you set them aside, otherwise return them to the sack. It’s easy to see that it won’t take very long until hardly any pink marbles remain. After that it’s going to be a total crapshoot to pull out a pair of matching marbles. Maybe some more pink ones get added at a later date but they’ll match and get removed. The fundamental problem with dating sites cannot be solved by any business model: marriageable people (or otherwise people who can form and maintain a longterm relationship) are removed from the pool of potential dates. What’s left are all those who can’t or won’t form relationships. These “misfits” (for lack of a better term) tend to get concentrated in the pool over time. Perhaps it even gets so bad that marriageable people give up and just avoid dating sites.
- Hnrobert42 2y agoThis describes what I have intuited happens while dating in ones 40s.
- bravetraveler 2y agoSeems to start in the 30s, in your 20s there's still hope. After that finding someone unscorned is rare, becoming such yourself. Ask me how I know
- roenxi 2y ago> The fundamental problem with dating sites cannot be solved by any business model Well, it can be solved but not by a dating site (evidence: this was a solved problem in the past). But it'd have to be very radical compared to modern dating. Arguably the branding couldn't be as a dating site, but as a stable community where people don't get removed over time so the concentration of non-pink marbles never rises. That is something like the old model that church communities would have used. The marriageable ones pair off, but they are still in the community of people talking to each other. New marriageable people entered the community, didn't feel overwhelmed or different and eventually pair with other new entrants. The business model has to be that drawing a pair isn't ever expected to result in marriage and is fun by itself but serious dates might happen. Then the system would be viable.
- dv_dt 2y agoHasn't the divorce rate also gone down. So one question is if the method of meeting is improving that rate
- bilbo0s 2y agoYeah. Marriage rate and divorce rate have plummeted since 1940. Probably not much to do with electronic media there. A lot more likely that financial and social pressures are squeezing what were previously considered cultural imperatives. ie - church, marriage, home ownership, etc.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoOr simply that fewer marginally good fit marriages are occurring. Fewer teen marriages, shotgun weddings, ect. There were always a lot of financial imperatives to wed.
- bilbo0s 2y agoThere were always a lot of financial imperatives to wed. The point is that now the financial imperative is not to wed. ("Girlfriend get serious! Why marry some loser who can't even buy a house?" or "Bro what? Do you know what will happen if you get divorced?") The financial imperative is not to go to church. Working on Sunday has become the norm as people are regularly expected to be available on the weekends. This is especially true in the startup or tech space. And don't even get me started on how workers in the services sector, who would in any other era be the most likely to attend church, get so few weekends free between their multiple jobs, that church is now an afterthought for them. The financial imperative is not to purchase a home. ("Bro! You don't have that kind of money! And what if you have to move for your job?")
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI think we have very different perceptions of the world, but I don't have much interest in having a discussion predicated on quotes from imaginary characters.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThere has also been about a 70% drop in number of marriages since the 50s.
- nozzlegear 2y agoAnd as someone else noted, a significant drop in the number of divorces since its peak in the 1980s.
- SoftTalker 2y agoDoes that include breakups? Can't get divorced if you were never married.
- littlestymaar 2y agoNo, unfortunately. And the number of divorce + breakups with kids involved is still rising…
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tivert 2y ago> Over 50% met online. Is that actually true? I read something recently (in an recent article in a major publication about how online dating sucks and people are getting tired of it), that the proportion is much lower. Like people put all this money and effort into dating apps, but must successful relationships still form outside of them.
- watwut 2y agoOnline is not necessary the same as dating app. It can be any online group where people have an in person meetup once in a while.
- slightwinder 2y ago"Online" these days more likely means social networks, games and other services where people with common interest meet. Meaning, you meet through your hobby, instead of a dedicated service for meeting or because you just happen to live in the same area.
- jrussino 2y agoInterestingly, there was another big shift happening from 1940-1980: - in 1940, the top 3 were: met through family, met through friends, met in primary school. In that order, but pretty much equal - From 1940-1980, two of those three (family, primary school) trended sharply downward, as did "met in church", while these trended upward: met through friends, met in bar or restaurant, met as or through coworkers, met in college. "met through friends" was by far the most common circa 1980 - starting in 1995 "met online" sees a sharp rise, and by 2010 it has overtaken them all. The only other category that was still on the rise after 2010 was "met in a bar or restaurant". Is that really increasingly common? I have a strange feeling that some of those are just people too embarassed to say they met online... Anyway, my point is there was (perhaps unsurprisingly) already a big shift going on 1940-1980, namely that the immediate family, church, childhood friends became less dominant in people's lives and friends, work, commercially-facilitated interactions (bars and restaurants) became more central. Did we learn anything from that adjustment? Were people in the 80's and 90's talking ad worrying about this the way we're talking today about the way social interactions are replacing the "old" ones? (also, the values for "met online" on that graph seem to be small but non-zero in the 1980s! I'd like to hear the stories of some of those couples...)
- 5- 2y ago> stories of some of those couples this one, about two people having met online, was written in 1879 (not a typo): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24353 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24353
- atribecalledqst 2y ago> (also, the values for "met online" on that graph seem to be small but non-zero in the 1980s! I'd like to hear the stories of some of those couples...) IIRC Jason Scott's BBS documentary mentions this a bit. There's a couple that shows up a number of times that met on a BBS.
- silisili 2y ago> I have a strange feeling that some of those are just people too embarassed to say they met online Probably right. I don't really get the stigma, but I've known a few people personally who told the same lie and found later it was online. One in particular had a huge elaborate story about their bar meeting. His wife told me later one day he basically selected her from a website. So like most questions, probably worth taking self reporting with a giant dose of salt.
- maeil 2y agoFWIW here in Korea the 1940 statistic still holds, yet I don't think youth mental health is any better.
- Animats 2y agoWell, of course. Today, approaching someone of the opposite sex whom you haven't previously chatted with online is creepy.
- BoredPositron 2y agoReally? How old are you? There are still school, work, parties, clubs, bars... I even know a couple that met in their church.
- SergeAx 2y agoSince around 1997 all my romantic partners did have a solid online footprint. However, I can't say I met any of them online. Every time it was 1) getting merely acquainted on a forum or in a social network, 2) some kind of offline event initiated by users took part 3) "oh, hi, are you <handle> from <site>?" I don't think it may be counted as "we met online", and specifically I never had any meaningful relationships via dating sites/apps.