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How well online dating works, according to someone who has been studying it for years. A couple of months ago, I was sitting at a bar minding my own business when the woman next to me did something strange. Surrounded by potential partners, she pulled out her phone, hid it coyly beneath the counter, and opened the online dating app Tinder.
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On her screen, images of men appeared and then disappeared to the left and right, depending on the direction in which she wiped. Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight. I felt a deep sense a rejection -- not personally, but on behalf of everyone at the bar. Instead of interacting with the people around her, she chose to search for a companion elsewhere online. I wondered to myself, is this what online dating has done to us? Is it creating a new reality in which people actively avoid real-life interactions? Of course, others have worried about these sorts of questions before. But the fear that online dating is changing us, collectively, that it's creating unhealthy habits and preferences that aren't in our best interests, is being driven more by paranoia than it is by actual facts. There are a lot of theories out there about how online dating is bad for us," Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford who has been conducting a long-running study of online dating, told me the other day. "And mostly they're pretty unfounded." Rosenfeld, who has been keeping tabs on the dating lives of more than 3,000 people, has gleaned many insights about the growing role of apps like Tinder. They are important today — roughly one of every four straight couples now meet on the Internet. (For gay couples, it's more like two out of every three). The apps have been surprisingly successful -- and in ways many people would not expect. In fact, by several measures, online dating has proved even more useful — both to individuals and society — than the traditional avenues it has replaced. I spoke with Rosenfeld to hear more about his research, to learn about the ways in which the rise of online dating is defining modern love, and to talk about the biggest misconceptions people have about online dating. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. You have one of the most unique data sets about modern romance. What have you learned about how people date today? Well, one of the first things you have to know to understand how dating — or really courtship rituals, since not everyone calls it dating — has changed over time is that the age of marriage in the United States has increased dramatically over time. People used to marry in their early 20s, which meant that most dating that was done, or most courting that was done, was done with the intention of settling down right away. And that’s not the life that young people lead anymore. The age of first marriage is now in the late twenties, and more people in their 30s and even 40s are deciding not to settle down. The rise of phone apps and online dating websites gives people access to more potential partners than they could meet at work or in the neighborhood. It makes it easier for someone who is looking for something very specific in a partner to find what they are looking for. It also helps the people who use the apps by allowing them to enjoy a pattern of regular hookups that don’t have to lead to relationships. I think these things are definitely characteristic of modern romance. Part of what you have uncovered during your research is how drastic the rise of online dating has been. That's something not everyone thinks this is a good thing. Why are many people skeptical? The worry about online dating comes from theories about how too much choice might be bad for you. The idea is that if you’re faced with too many options you will find it harder to pick one, that too much choice is demotivating. We see this in consumer goods — if there are too many flavors of jam at the store, for instance, you might feel that it’s just too complicated to consider the jam aisle, you might end up skipping it all together, you might decide it's not worth settling down with one jam. What do you think? I don’t think that that theory, even if it’s true for something like jam, applies to dating. I actually don’t see in my data any negative repercussions for people who meet partners online. In fact, people who meet their partners online are not more likely to break up — they don’t have more transitory relationships. Once you’re in a relationship with somebody, it doesn’t really matter how you met that other person. There are online sites that cater to hookups, sure, but there are also online sites that cater to people looking for long-term relationships. What’s more, many people who meet in the online sites that cater to hookups end up in long-term relationships. This environment, mind you, is just like the one we see in the offline world. There’s no obvious pattern by which people who meet online are worse off. And, conversely, online dating has real benefits. For people who have a hard time finding partners in their day-to-day, face-to-face life, the larger subset of potential partners online is a big advantage for them. For folks who are meeting people everyday—really younger people in their early twenties—online dating is relevant, but it really becomes a powerful force for people in thin dating markets. In a 2012 paper, I wrote about how among heterosexuals, the people who are most likely to use online dating are the middle-aged folks, because they’re the ones in the thinnest dating market. It’s harder to feel alone when you’re 23, because everyone is a potential partner. But when you get to 40, most people your age are already settled down. So it’s fair to say that the experience, at least from a bird’s-eye view, isn’t as different as we make it out to be? At the very least, it isn't worse in the way many say? Yes, I think that’s definitely right. Look, there’s always a fear that comes with a new technology. The idea that the new technology is going to undervalue some really important social values is real and rampant. People have had that fear about the telephone and the automobile. They have even had it about things like washing machines. If people weren’t going to go to the laundromat to wash their clothes together, how would we spend time together? That was something people were legitimately concerned about. But now that we have washing machines — and know that people still talk to each other — it’s clear that that fear was overblown, that it was unnecessary. I think the same fears are expressed a lot about the phone apps and Internet dating. The worry is that it's going to make people more superficial. If you look at apps like Tinder and Grinder, they mostly function by allowing people to look at others’ pictures. The profiles, as many know, are very brief. It’s kind of superficial. But it’s superficial because we’re kind of superficial, it’s like that because humans are like that. Judging what someone else looks like first is not an attribute of technology, it’s an attribute of how we look at people. Dating, both modern and not, is a fairly superficial endeavor. When you walk into a room, whether it’s a singles bar or a church, you’re making these same sorts of judgments, the same kind of subconscious evaluations. It's not the technology that makes people superficial. How someone else looks is important to us — it always has been. The visual cortex of our brain has a very powerful hold on how we interact with the world around us. There’s nothing wrong or really new with prioritizing that. One of the most interesting things you have found is that online dating, despite its reputation, actually seems to usher people toward marriage in a way real life dating doesn't. Can you elaborate? That's right. One of the things I have found out as part of my research is that people who meet online actually progress to marriage faster than people who meet offline.
Article:
How well online dating works, according to someone who has been studying it for years. A couple of months ago, I was sitting at a bar minding my own business when the woman next to me did something strange. Surrounded by potential partners, she pulled out her phone, hid it coyly beneath the counter, and opened the online dating app Tinder.
Click here for love and relationship sites
On her screen, images of men appeared and then disappeared to the left and right, depending on the direction in which she wiped. Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight. I felt a deep sense a rejection -- not personally, but on behalf of everyone at the bar. Instead of interacting with the people around her, she chose to search for a companion elsewhere online. I wondered to myself, is this what online dating has done to us? Is it creating a new reality in which people actively avoid real-life interactions? Of course, others have worried about these sorts of questions before. But the fear that online dating is changing us, collectively, that it's creating unhealthy habits and preferences that aren't in our best interests, is being driven more by paranoia than it is by actual facts. There are a lot of theories out there about how online dating is bad for us," Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford who has been conducting a long-running study of online dating, told me the other day. "And mostly they're pretty unfounded." Rosenfeld, who has been keeping tabs on the dating lives of more than 3,000 people, has gleaned many insights about the growing role of apps like Tinder. They are important today — roughly one of every four straight couples now meet on the Internet. (For gay couples, it's more like two out of every three). The apps have been surprisingly successful -- and in ways many people would not expect. In fact, by several measures, online dating has proved even more useful — both to individuals and society — than the traditional avenues it has replaced. I spoke with Rosenfeld to hear more about his research, to learn about the ways in which the rise of online dating is defining modern love, and to talk about the biggest misconceptions people have about online dating. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. You have one of the most unique data sets about modern romance. What have you learned about how people date today? Well, one of the first things you have to know to understand how dating — or really courtship rituals, since not everyone calls it dating — has changed over time is that the age of marriage in the United States has increased dramatically over time. People used to marry in their early 20s, which meant that most dating that was done, or most courting that was done, was done with the intention of settling down right away. And that’s not the life that young people lead anymore. The age of first marriage is now in the late twenties, and more people in their 30s and even 40s are deciding not to settle down. The rise of phone apps and online dating websites gives people access to more potential partners than they could meet at work or in the neighborhood. It makes it easier for someone who is looking for something very specific in a partner to find what they are looking for. It also helps the people who use the apps by allowing them to enjoy a pattern of regular hookups that don’t have to lead to relationships. I think these things are definitely characteristic of modern romance. Part of what you have uncovered during your research is how drastic the rise of online dating has been. That's something not everyone thinks this is a good thing. Why are many people skeptical? The worry about online dating comes from theories about how too much choice might be bad for you. The idea is that if you’re faced with too many options you will find it harder to pick one, that too much choice is demotivating. We see this in consumer goods — if there are too many flavors of jam at the store, for instance, you might feel that it’s just too complicated to consider the jam aisle, you might end up skipping it all together, you might decide it's not worth settling down with one jam. What do you think? I don’t think that that theory, even if it’s true for something like jam, applies to dating. I actually don’t see in my data any negative repercussions for people who meet partners online. In fact, people who meet their partners online are not more likely to break up — they don’t have more transitory relationships. Once you’re in a relationship with somebody, it doesn’t really matter how you met that other person. There are online sites that cater to hookups, sure, but there are also online sites that cater to people looking for long-term relationships. What’s more, many people who meet in the online sites that cater to hookups end up in long-term relationships. This environment, mind you, is just like the one we see in the offline world. There’s no obvious pattern by which people who meet online are worse off. And, conversely, online dating has real benefits. For people who have a hard time finding partners in their day-to-day, face-to-face life, the larger subset of potential partners online is a big advantage for them. For folks who are meeting people everyday—really younger people in their early twenties—online dating is relevant, but it really becomes a powerful force for people in thin dating markets. In a 2012 paper, I wrote about how among heterosexuals, the people who are most likely to use online dating are the middle-aged folks, because they’re the ones in the thinnest dating market. It’s harder to feel alone when you’re 23, because everyone is a potential partner. But when you get to 40, most people your age are already settled down. So it’s fair to say that the experience, at least from a bird’s-eye view, isn’t as different as we make it out to be? At the very least, it isn't worse in the way many say? Yes, I think that’s definitely right. Look, there’s always a fear that comes with a new technology. The idea that the new technology is going to undervalue some really important social values is real and rampant. People have had that fear about the telephone and the automobile. They have even had it about things like washing machines. If people weren’t going to go to the laundromat to wash their clothes together, how would we spend time together? That was something people were legitimately concerned about. But now that we have washing machines — and know that people still talk to each other — it’s clear that that fear was overblown, that it was unnecessary. I think the same fears are expressed a lot about the phone apps and Internet dating. The worry is that it's going to make people more superficial. If you look at apps like Tinder and Grinder, they mostly function by allowing people to look at others’ pictures. The profiles, as many know, are very brief. It’s kind of superficial. But it’s superficial because we’re kind of superficial, it’s like that because humans are like that. Judging what someone else looks like first is not an attribute of technology, it’s an attribute of how we look at people. Dating, both modern and not, is a fairly superficial endeavor. When you walk into a room, whether it’s a singles bar or a church, you’re making these same sorts of judgments, the same kind of subconscious evaluations. It's not the technology that makes people superficial. How someone else looks is important to us — it always has been. The visual cortex of our brain has a very powerful hold on how we interact with the world around us. There’s nothing wrong or really new with prioritizing that. One of the most interesting things you have found is that online dating, despite its reputation, actually seems to usher people toward marriage in a way real life dating doesn't. Can you elaborate? That's right. One of the things I have found out as part of my research is that people who meet online actually progress to marriage faster than people who meet offline.
