15 ms·

Disintermediating friends: Online dating displaces other ways of meeting (2019) [pdf]

108 points by arkj 5y ago

arkj 5y ago
There is a very interesting chart at the last page of the pdf showing how heterosexual couples have met over the past years. Here is a direct link to the chart as an image, https://thebrowser.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/image-10.jpeg https://thebrowser.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/ima...
- mabub24 5y ago
  The apps are exceptionally good for meeting people. I think the animosity many people have for the apps comes from the idea that using the apps is dating. For a certain generation, the first generation that grew up with the various dating apps now, using the apps is often considered dating. This is, however, a creation of the dating app companies. More people using the apps = more user numbers/engagement/data for $$$$. Couple that idea of dating as using the apps with the general decline in the use of social institutions like clubs/societies/team sports/ etc. (the decline in social partnerships and friends in general for many), and you get a generation that views dating apps as the sole way of meeting people for dating and that often recoils from the idea of asking someone out in person.
  - nicbou 5y ago
    They're excellent for platonic relationships. I met many great people that way. They are not so great for finding love in my opinion. It's a meat market, and one that's not particularly favourable to all. It magnifies biases about attractiveness and race, for instance.
- joshz404 5y ago
  It took me a bit to see the hiding in plain sight trajectory of "Met in a bar or restaurant". Everything but it and of course the dominate Met Online, are decreasing. Curious.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    The drop of "met in college" is the weirdest one to me. Isn't that where most people meet? Am I living in a weird bubble?
    - mehrdada 5y ago
      I suppose large fractions of people in college meet their schoolmates through the dating apps.
    - elseweather 5y ago
      Most people don't go to college, but if you did, you're likely to have a mostly college-educated bubble
      - spywaregorilla 5y ago
        Most people do go to college, and the proportion has been increasing for years, in the united states.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        Most Americans have some college education.[1] But not all of them start at 18, move away from home, or finish. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
    - majormajor 5y ago
      Probably an aspect of people using apps while in college, and ending up in that bucket instead. A graph of "age when met" for current couples would be interesting, if today's "final" couples meet at a later age than in the past because people don't want to settle down as early, you'll have less school couples. We also need a graph of "number of relationships still around started by year" - if fewer relationships started in 2018 are still extant compared to ones in 2014, that's gonna skew numbers too.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
- cheq 5y ago
  Met in church?, that one is good haha.
- propogandist 5y ago
  I wonder what the data looks like in 2020, it must've been almost exclusively all online, if that. Human behavior has also changed with the lockdown, where everyone was isolated and limited to electronic comms, so I don't think this chart applies to 2021+
mdorazio 5y ago
I’d love to see this correlated with data on prevalence of “casual” dating, satisfaction with dating, and something like # of dating partners before marriage. I have a strong suspicion that the rise of online dating has had many not-so-great impacts on expectations, satisfaction, and finding a partner in general, but I have very little data to back that suspicion up.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Norah Vincent in Self-made Man describes her experiences dating women (while pretending to be a man). She observes that, in person, they tend to reject her for not being masculine enough. But she has far more success than most men in translating online contact into dates in person. The women demand extensive correspondence before being willing to meet, and the feminine style of her writing appeals to them in a way that the feminine style of her body and personality doesn't. You can interpret this as evidence that one thing contributing to problems in the online dating landscape is that women don't know what they want. They have one set of requirements for agreeing to a date, and a different -- to some degree conflicting -- set of requirements for thinking that a date went well. (Vincent contrasts contemporaneous experience dating men -- she specifically comments on the coherence between what they want online and what they want in person. To agree to a date, men want to see your picture. And in person, they're happy if you look like your picture.)
  - mdorazio 5y ago
    Thanks - I've just added this to my reading list.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    I'm having trouble following why this would be a contradictory set of requirements from women vs simply a pickier set of requirements compared to men. "Lots of men are shallow" is an olddddd cliche, no surprise there, but a female perspective being reported as "I want someone I can connect to in words that is also physically attractive to me in person" doesn't read as contradictory to me. (I'm also unclear on what "feminine style of writing" means, but would think for such an experiment to be really useful you'd need to pretend to be a man in your writing as well!) I had far more success in online dating when I started moving towards "let's meet in person as quickly as possible" because (even for me as a man) I found that the physical connection was harder to predict yet also more important than just a text-based one. The only area where my experience doesn't match hers is that I didn't encounter much resistance to something along the lines of "hey, let's meet up in person and see if we can keep this going" after just a few messages.
symlinkk 5y ago
And online dating is massively biased towards women, so more and more men are being left out.
- martinky24 5y ago
  incel culture shit right here
- tacker2000 5y ago
  Yea somewhat of course, since they are swamped with requests, but i would say that probably it is more biased towards people of both genders who look good on photos and who can sell themselves. “The top 10% get all the matches” so to speak. Anyway its an interesting time we are in. One company (Match) owns like 90% of the dating apps and gets to “dictate” the future procreation of our species, if we put it in extreme terms.
  - symlinkk 5y ago
    And why are women swamped with requests do you think?
    - foogazi 5y ago
      Because there are more men than women using the service: https://www.statista.com/statistics/975925/us-tinder-user-ratio-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/975925/us-tinder-user-ra... But if there are proportionally less women than men, why would men look for them there ?
      - symlinkk 5y ago
        Ok, so why are there less women on dating apps? There’s a roughly equal number of men and women in the general population.
        whynotminot 5y ago
        Just a hunch, I think a solid proportion of women can have a reasonable dating life sort of just by going about their lives regularly. Women have dating opportunities present themselves pretty organically on a regular basis (for better or worse). Most men don't have this. If a man wants a woman, he's gotta go pursue one. Dating apps present a lower-threat/easier way for men to pursue.
colmvp 5y ago
I found a good match via online dating recently, but only after about half a decade of usage. I honestly cannot stand online dating. In all my years real-life dating, online dating had substantially worse experiences. Last winter on a 'Zoom date' one match multi-tasked while I was trying to talk with her. She was literally shopping. Another 'left the chat' after I said I wasn't a property developer, I was a software developer. I hesitate to even mention this because it practically reveals my identity to friends who know that story. I've met women who chatted for a while, and setup a date, only to finally reveal at the 11th hour that they are seeing someone. Sorry! I've also met women who used very, very misleading photographs in their profiles. I've had 'matches' who return curt answers to very simple conversational questions, as if how dare you attempt to grace their presence with your messages. I'd take a non-reply over that sort of signal. I would not be texting them in the first place if they hadn't also swiped right on me. My real life experiences dating someone from Meetup/College/Work had substantially more honesty and humanity. In online dating, I truly feel there's a loss of treating others like human beings instead of a disposable item. And to be fair, I am guilty of that sin as well. But for all the talk I've heard from my female friends about how guys are awful on online dating (and I believe it), I can assure you that it's not any easier on this side.
- munk-a 5y ago
  I found my partner through a common interest and I'd suggest it as a preferable route for most folks looking. Do the things you enjoy and be open to friendships and other relationships with the people you enjoy doing it with. I would admit that I'm rather introverted and never really felt the need to seek a relationship specifically - I was pretty happy existing on my own until I found a good partner.
  - maroonblazer 5y ago
    Agreed. In my experience with yoga and book clubs the females tend to outnumber - sometimes significantly - the males. I'm sure there are others.
    - munk-a 5y ago
mellosouls 5y ago
(2019) particularly relevant considering the online nature of much our social lives since then.
baron816 5y ago
Whenever online dating comes up here, it inevitably leads to discussions of imbalances in favor of women and elite men. This predicament isn’t really unique to online dating though. Lots of society throughout history have had polygamy (elite men get many wives, others are shit out of luck). I’ve been wondering if war mongers in times past have been driven by this—decimate men to rebalance the scales towards the general male population (and also the elites who don’t fight). There were baby booms after the two world wars. How much of that was due to a perceived scarcity of men among women? Did that cause them to settle quickly?
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  The people waging wars already had enough women for themselves in all likelihood.
  - Shugarl 5y ago
    But as he said, it wouldn't have been for themselves, but for the rest of the population
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      The idea that warmongers opted for war out of altruism for lower ranking men rather than personal gain, geopolitics, and power acquisition seems especially unlikely.
      - baron816 5y ago
        If they’re seeing a lot of disaffected young men without wives who commit crime and otherwise cause trouble, it might have led them to say “men these days have lost their way, we need a war to help them mature.”
        spywaregorilla 5y ago
        That's a very silly idea.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Is it good for society that dating is being monetised? Does this shift to online partly explain the recent declines in birth rates in the West? Should we ban online dating, or regulate it?
- tolbish 5y ago
  Haven't communication channels always been monetized? Singles' speed dating events will have an admission fee and people seem to be fine with that.
CogitoCogito 5y ago
My main issue with online dating and especially apps that match you like tinder is that you're sort of always "in the game" a little bit. Every time you swipe you get a sort of mini-rejection if you don't match. And since you can match at any time, you're receiving these mini-rejections implicitly all the time. Obviously basically none of them are actual rejections, but the low-level lack of success builds up over time and just becomes depressing. To add to it, you can't actually see what's happening in the system at all. You might never even have been seen by the people you're interested in. Contrasting this to events occurring in person, you're only ever in the game when you're at a bar actively looking or at some social event. Even better you might mainly be there to see friends and the potential love interests is just an extra. And when you're done at the place you're done. You're not trying to attract some abstract far off person while sitting on the subway. On the subway you're off and thinking about other stuff. I think the issue is similar to the problem of not being able disconnect. It just feels mentally unhealthy to me.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > You might never even have been seen by the people you're interested in. If I were developing an app like Tinder, I would introduce a small number of totally random shows besides those algorithm-driven.
  - yetihehe 5y ago
    E-darling has option "see women who don't match your profile".
- AlecSchueler 5y ago
  Interestingly I think I had the opposite experience, in that I found only a small minority of people worth swiping right for and even then still managed a good match ratio. I'd always rated myself quite low before trying Tinder, but it gave me a much better perspective on my datability. I haven't used it in a while now, thanks to lockdown ending meetups, but I've since partnered with someone who I previously would have considered out of my league.
amelius 5y ago
Is anyone working on DNA-based dating?
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  I think eugenics mostly went out of fashion when the Nazis took hold of the global fad and went way too far with it.
  - amelius 5y ago
    For me it would be a big step if I could filter out all the people with incompatible pheromones/body smell. This type of thing you can't do with regular online dating.

108 points by arkj 5y ago

arkj 5y ago

There is a very interesting chart at the last page of the pdf showing how heterosexual couples have met over the past years. Here is a direct link to the chart as an image, https://thebrowser.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/image-10.jpeg https://thebrowser.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/ima...

mabub24 5y ago
The apps are exceptionally good for meeting people. I think the animosity many people have for the apps comes from the idea that using the apps is dating. For a certain generation, the first generation that grew up with the various dating apps now, using the apps is often considered dating. This is, however, a creation of the dating app companies. More people using the apps = more user numbers/engagement/data for $$$$. Couple that idea of dating as using the apps with the general decline in the use of social institutions like clubs/societies/team sports/ etc. (the decline in social partnerships and friends in general for many), and you get a generation that views dating apps as the sole way of meeting people for dating and that often recoils from the idea of asking someone out in person.
- nicbou 5y ago
  They're excellent for platonic relationships. I met many great people that way. They are not so great for finding love in my opinion. It's a meat market, and one that's not particularly favourable to all. It magnifies biases about attractiveness and race, for instance.
joshz404 5y ago
It took me a bit to see the hiding in plain sight trajectory of "Met in a bar or restaurant". Everything but it and of course the dominate Met Online, are decreasing. Curious.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  The drop of "met in college" is the weirdest one to me. Isn't that where most people meet? Am I living in a weird bubble?
  - mehrdada 5y ago
    I suppose large fractions of people in college meet their schoolmates through the dating apps.
  - elseweather 5y ago
    Most people don't go to college, but if you did, you're likely to have a mostly college-educated bubble
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      Most people do go to college, and the proportion has been increasing for years, in the united states.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      Most Americans have some college education.[1] But not all of them start at 18, move away from home, or finish. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
  - majormajor 5y ago
    Probably an aspect of people using apps while in college, and ending up in that bucket instead. A graph of "age when met" for current couples would be interesting, if today's "final" couples meet at a later age than in the past because people don't want to settle down as early, you'll have less school couples. We also need a graph of "number of relationships still around started by year" - if fewer relationships started in 2018 are still extant compared to ones in 2014, that's gonna skew numbers too.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
cheq 5y ago
Met in church?, that one is good haha.
propogandist 5y ago
I wonder what the data looks like in 2020, it must've been almost exclusively all online, if that. Human behavior has also changed with the lockdown, where everyone was isolated and limited to electronic comms, so I don't think this chart applies to 2021+

mdorazio 5y ago

I’d love to see this correlated with data on prevalence of “casual” dating, satisfaction with dating, and something like # of dating partners before marriage. I have a strong suspicion that the rise of online dating has had many not-so-great impacts on expectations, satisfaction, and finding a partner in general, but I have very little data to back that suspicion up.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
Norah Vincent in Self-made Man describes her experiences dating women (while pretending to be a man). She observes that, in person, they tend to reject her for not being masculine enough. But she has far more success than most men in translating online contact into dates in person. The women demand extensive correspondence before being willing to meet, and the feminine style of her writing appeals to them in a way that the feminine style of her body and personality doesn't. You can interpret this as evidence that one thing contributing to problems in the online dating landscape is that women don't know what they want. They have one set of requirements for agreeing to a date, and a different -- to some degree conflicting -- set of requirements for thinking that a date went well. (Vincent contrasts contemporaneous experience dating men -- she specifically comments on the coherence between what they want online and what they want in person. To agree to a date, men want to see your picture. And in person, they're happy if you look like your picture.)
- mdorazio 5y ago
  Thanks - I've just added this to my reading list.
- majormajor 5y ago
  I'm having trouble following why this would be a contradictory set of requirements from women vs simply a pickier set of requirements compared to men. "Lots of men are shallow" is an olddddd cliche, no surprise there, but a female perspective being reported as "I want someone I can connect to in words that is also physically attractive to me in person" doesn't read as contradictory to me. (I'm also unclear on what "feminine style of writing" means, but would think for such an experiment to be really useful you'd need to pretend to be a man in your writing as well!) I had far more success in online dating when I started moving towards "let's meet in person as quickly as possible" because (even for me as a man) I found that the physical connection was harder to predict yet also more important than just a text-based one. The only area where my experience doesn't match hers is that I didn't encounter much resistance to something along the lines of "hey, let's meet up in person and see if we can keep this going" after just a few messages.

symlinkk 5y ago

And online dating is massively biased towards women, so more and more men are being left out.

martinky24 5y ago
incel culture shit right here
tacker2000 5y ago
Yea somewhat of course, since they are swamped with requests, but i would say that probably it is more biased towards people of both genders who look good on photos and who can sell themselves. “The top 10% get all the matches” so to speak. Anyway its an interesting time we are in. One company (Match) owns like 90% of the dating apps and gets to “dictate” the future procreation of our species, if we put it in extreme terms.
- symlinkk 5y ago
  And why are women swamped with requests do you think?
  - foogazi 5y ago
    Because there are more men than women using the service: https://www.statista.com/statistics/975925/us-tinder-user-ratio-gender/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/975925/us-tinder-user-ra... But if there are proportionally less women than men, why would men look for them there ?
    - symlinkk 5y ago
      Ok, so why are there less women on dating apps? There’s a roughly equal number of men and women in the general population.
      - whynotminot 5y ago
        Just a hunch, I think a solid proportion of women can have a reasonable dating life sort of just by going about their lives regularly. Women have dating opportunities present themselves pretty organically on a regular basis (for better or worse). Most men don't have this. If a man wants a woman, he's gotta go pursue one. Dating apps present a lower-threat/easier way for men to pursue.

colmvp 5y ago

I found a good match via online dating recently, but only after about half a decade of usage. I honestly cannot stand online dating. In all my years real-life dating, online dating had substantially worse experiences. Last winter on a 'Zoom date' one match multi-tasked while I was trying to talk with her. She was literally shopping. Another 'left the chat' after I said I wasn't a property developer, I was a software developer. I hesitate to even mention this because it practically reveals my identity to friends who know that story. I've met women who chatted for a while, and setup a date, only to finally reveal at the 11th hour that they are seeing someone. Sorry! I've also met women who used very, very misleading photographs in their profiles. I've had 'matches' who return curt answers to very simple conversational questions, as if how dare you attempt to grace their presence with your messages. I'd take a non-reply over that sort of signal. I would not be texting them in the first place if they hadn't also swiped right on me. My real life experiences dating someone from Meetup/College/Work had substantially more honesty and humanity. In online dating, I truly feel there's a loss of treating others like human beings instead of a disposable item. And to be fair, I am guilty of that sin as well. But for all the talk I've heard from my female friends about how guys are awful on online dating (and I believe it), I can assure you that it's not any easier on this side.

munk-a 5y ago
I found my partner through a common interest and I'd suggest it as a preferable route for most folks looking. Do the things you enjoy and be open to friendships and other relationships with the people you enjoy doing it with. I would admit that I'm rather introverted and never really felt the need to seek a relationship specifically - I was pretty happy existing on my own until I found a good partner.
- maroonblazer 5y ago
  Agreed. In my experience with yoga and book clubs the females tend to outnumber - sometimes significantly - the males. I'm sure there are others.
  - munk-a 5y ago

mellosouls 5y ago

(2019) particularly relevant considering the online nature of much our social lives since then.

baron816 5y ago

Whenever online dating comes up here, it inevitably leads to discussions of imbalances in favor of women and elite men. This predicament isn’t really unique to online dating though. Lots of society throughout history have had polygamy (elite men get many wives, others are shit out of luck). I’ve been wondering if war mongers in times past have been driven by this—decimate men to rebalance the scales towards the general male population (and also the elites who don’t fight). There were baby booms after the two world wars. How much of that was due to a perceived scarcity of men among women? Did that cause them to settle quickly?

spywaregorilla 5y ago
The people waging wars already had enough women for themselves in all likelihood.
- Shugarl 5y ago
  But as he said, it wouldn't have been for themselves, but for the rest of the population
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    The idea that warmongers opted for war out of altruism for lower ranking men rather than personal gain, geopolitics, and power acquisition seems especially unlikely.
    - baron816 5y ago
      If they’re seeing a lot of disaffected young men without wives who commit crime and otherwise cause trouble, it might have led them to say “men these days have lost their way, we need a war to help them mature.”
      - spywaregorilla 5y ago
        That's a very silly idea.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

Is it good for society that dating is being monetised? Does this shift to online partly explain the recent declines in birth rates in the West? Should we ban online dating, or regulate it?

tolbish 5y ago
Haven't communication channels always been monetized? Singles' speed dating events will have an admission fee and people seem to be fine with that.

CogitoCogito 5y ago

My main issue with online dating and especially apps that match you like tinder is that you're sort of always "in the game" a little bit. Every time you swipe you get a sort of mini-rejection if you don't match. And since you can match at any time, you're receiving these mini-rejections implicitly all the time. Obviously basically none of them are actual rejections, but the low-level lack of success builds up over time and just becomes depressing. To add to it, you can't actually see what's happening in the system at all. You might never even have been seen by the people you're interested in. Contrasting this to events occurring in person, you're only ever in the game when you're at a bar actively looking or at some social event. Even better you might mainly be there to see friends and the potential love interests is just an extra. And when you're done at the place you're done. You're not trying to attract some abstract far off person while sitting on the subway. On the subway you're off and thinking about other stuff. I think the issue is similar to the problem of not being able disconnect. It just feels mentally unhealthy to me.

qwerty456127 5y ago
> You might never even have been seen by the people you're interested in. If I were developing an app like Tinder, I would introduce a small number of totally random shows besides those algorithm-driven.
- yetihehe 5y ago
  E-darling has option "see women who don't match your profile".
AlecSchueler 5y ago
Interestingly I think I had the opposite experience, in that I found only a small minority of people worth swiping right for and even then still managed a good match ratio. I'd always rated myself quite low before trying Tinder, but it gave me a much better perspective on my datability. I haven't used it in a while now, thanks to lockdown ending meetups, but I've since partnered with someone who I previously would have considered out of my league.

amelius 5y ago

Is anyone working on DNA-based dating?

mkr-hn 5y ago
I think eugenics mostly went out of fashion when the Nazis took hold of the global fad and went way too far with it.
- amelius 5y ago
  For me it would be a big step if I could filter out all the people with incompatible pheromones/body smell. This type of thing you can't do with regular online dating.