How Online Dating Has Changed the Landscape of Dating in the 21st Century

     I will never forget the afternoon of June 28, 2009. It was two days before my birthday (I’m not going not say how old I was going to be…sorry, lol) and Michael Jackson had just died the day before which was dominating the news. This afternoon, and if I remember right, it was a Friday, I talked for the first time to the woman, who, at the time I did not realize, but would, only two years later, become my wife. Her name was Jennifer. We had been emailing each other on our computers for almost a week prior to our first talk. We met on the online dating service eHarmony.

     So many people, nowadays, meet this way. Whether that be eHarmony, Tinder, Bumble, Match etc. This world that we live in today is not what it was during my parent’s generation back in the 1950s when they grew up.

     Different age groups look at internet dating differently. Overall, forty-two percent of adults think that dating apps makes it easier to find a long term partner, but twenty-two percent of adults thinks that dating apps makes it harder to find a long-term partner (Shrikant, 2023).

     That statistic just quoted goes mainly for adults over thirty. For the under thirty crowd, a more pessimistic attitude prevails. For the eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds, thirty-five percent said dating apps made finding a partner easier while thirty-three percent said it was harder (Shrikant, 2023) to meet online as opposed to meeting at school or through friends. The following are some notable statistics that CNBC reporter Aditi Shrikant found:

     Forty-three percent of men said they are using the apps to date casually:

     The lifestyle of dating for only hedonistic pleasure instead of for something serious brings out the playboy in nearly half of the men who choose to meet partners through online dating. However, that forty-three percent figure only barely edges out the real numbers for men who are looking for lifetime partners, which is forty-two percent. Forty-eight percent of women claim they use online dating to find long-term partners and only thirty-seven percent are using apps to date casually (Shrikant, 2023).

     Eighty-eight percent of adults are disappointed by what they’ve seen on the dating apps:

     There is a good reason why ninety percent of women and eighty-seven percent of men report being disillusioned with the results of online dating. In many cases what happens when a person goes online is they will send a message to a man or woman then that person does not get back to them in a timely manner or maybe they do not even get back to them at all. Men are more insecure about this kind of rejection than women (Shrikant, 2023). Also, the expense. Dating sites are expensive and people think why should they lay down forty dollars a month or whatever the site costs if they are not even going to get responses to their messages.

      Despite all this, according to Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld, “Matchmaking is now done primarily by algorithms” (Shashkevich, 2019).

     It seemed to be, according to a study done by sociologist Rosenfeld that heterosexual couples are more likely to meet online than LGBTQ couples. Rosenfeld, the lead author on the research and a professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford gleaned his findings from a 2017 survey of American adults and found that twenty-nine percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting their partners online, compared to twenty-two percent in 2009 (Shashkevich, 2019).

     The more traditional ways of meeting a life-partner through school, church, friends, or a childhood sweetheart in the neighborhood has been on the decline since the 1940s said Rosenfeld (Shashkevich, 2019).

     There used to be a stigma attached to those singles who dated either from the newspaper personal section (before internet), or the earlier days of the internet with online dating. It used to be people that met through the personals were looked at as having something wrong with them, or they were “desperate”. Although there are still many people who have the old-time mindset where they never moved past that thinking the newer generations are much more open minded to accepting online dating. Technology has become much more trustworthy than in the mid-nineteen nineties and people are more open to using it to find love (Shashkevich, 2019).

     But, back to the dating introductory service eHarmony. As said, that is where my wife and I met. We met that glorious summer day in June 2009, and have been inseparable since. We are more in love now than we ever were.

     eHarmony has found some statistics of their own pertaining to online dating that have not been covered in this article. They know what they are talking to. When they speak, I listen.

     Age can impact finding a match. This service has found that a woman’s desirability peaks at twenty-one. Yet at twenty-six they have more suiters at that age than men do at that age, yet, at the age of forty-eight, men have more women pursuing them than women do when they are forty-eight (ed., 2021).

     Fifty-three percent of people lie on their online dating profile. No!! Are they serious? Ok just kidding. I think all people who have ever had any kind of real experience with online dating know that people, use older pictures of themselves on their profile when they were thinner, had more hair, less facial wrinkles and had a more youthful vigor (ed., 2021). This, to me, never made sense. If somebody puts an older picture of themselves on their profiles, they must assume that they will meet someone online sooner or later and when they go out and meet that person, the minute that other person lays eyes on them the jig will be up. So, why lie? Chances are, at least this would be the case for me if it happened to me and it never did, believe it or not, but I would only go out with the woman (or man, I am bisexual) that one time and then never go out with he or she again because he or she was dishonest. If they can not even be truthful about what they look like, then God only knows what else they are lying about.

     Location matters. eHarmony reports that New York state has a fifty-percent single rate whereas Idaho has a sixty-percent married rate. If someone lives in New York they will have a better chance of meeting a man or woman on eHarmony than if a person is from Idaho.

     And, finally, this is a cruel fact for a lot of people, but sixty-four percent of eHarmony members polled said that looks and common interests rule the day and will greatly influence whether someone is going to be interested in dating a particular person. Let’s face it folks. If you look like Brad Pitt you are going to have a much better chance of getting a date than if you look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I know that is not nice and it is hard to accept in this politically correct climate we live in because nobody wants to offend anybody, but it is a fact of life. Beautiful people have always had better luck at finding lovers than ugly people. I hate to break the news. This is straight talk. Not trying to offend anybody.

     Internet dating really works for some people, such as the author of this essay. But, for a lot of people, the old-fashioned way of meeting someone at church or through their friends still works the best. There is no best way to go about dating. For me, eHarmony was the magic potion that got me to the front of the church. Not everybody can say the same.

References

(2021, March 18). 10  Online dating statistics you should know. eHarmony Editorial Team. https://www.eharmony.com/online-dating-statistics/

Shrikant, Aditi (2023, February 7). 42% of Daters think apps like Tinder and Bumble make it easier to find a long-term partner. CNBC.com. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/07/new-study-dating-apps-make-it-easier-to-find-a-partner.html.

(2019, August 21). Meeting online has become the most popular way U.S. couples connect, Stanford sociologist finds. Stanford News. https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-way-u-s-couples-meet/