This graph, from the research of Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben Thomas and Sonia Hausen:
How Couples Meet (1940-2020):
Most people look at this and think: “More evidence of our eroding society.” Couples no longer meet through friends, work or family like they used to. Now it’s all apps and bars.
I think that’s a great thing. Tim Urban writes in How to Pick a Life Partner that:
People end up picking from whatever pool of options they have, no matter how poorly matched they might be to those candidates. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that outside of serious socialites, everyone looking for a life partner should be doing a lot of online dating, speed dating, and other systems created to broaden the candidate pool in an intelligent way.
But good old society frowns upon that, and people are often still timid to say they met their spouse on a dating site. The respectable way to meet a life partner is by dumb luck, by bumping into them randomly or being introduced to them from within your little pool. Fortunately, this stigma is diminishing with time, but that it’s there at all is a reflection of how illogical the socially accepted dating rulebook is.
I have many friends who have been in strong, healthy relationships that started online. In most cases, the relationships came out of a period of dating a variety of different people, the vast majority of whom were instant “no’s.” Online dating feels like an erosion of cultural values because we fear every way that technology replaces our standard way of doing things. And that fear is healthy. But pairing up two of your ten single friends is no guarantee of a sure thing. It makes far more sense to expand your search to a whole city, and to filter down from there based on your interests.