According to a new study from Stanford University, more couples meet online these days than they do through friends and family members.
Researchers found a whopping 70% of couples are now meeting each other online.
That’s a huge jump from the early 2000s, when only 20% percent were hooking up on dating sites.
Derek Thomson — who met his own girlfriend though an online dating app — suggests that the new dating landscape has both benefits and drawbacks.
Online dating has freed young adults from the limitations and biases of their hometowns. But to be free of those old crutches can be both exhilarating and exhausting. As the influence of friends and family has melted away, the burden of finding a partner has been swallowed whole by the individual—at the very moment that expectations of our partners are skyrocketing […]
With the declining influence of friends and family and most other social institutions, more single people today are on their own, having set up shop at a digital bazaar where one’s appearance, interestingness, quick humor, lighthearted banter, sex appeal, photo selection—one’s worth—is submitted for 24/7 evaluation before an audience of distracted or cruel strangers, whose distraction and cruelty might be related to the fact that they are also undergoing the same anxious appraisal.
It sounds like online dating is here to stay.