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Edited by Andrew J. Cherlin, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, and approved July 30, 2019 (received for review May 23, 2019)
Significance
We show in this paper that meeting online has displaced friends as the main way heterosexual couples in the United States meet. Traditional ways of meeting partners (through family, in church, in the neighborhood) have all been declining since World War II. Meeting through friends has been in decline since roughly 1995.
Abstract
We present data from a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults. For heterosexual couples in the United States, meeting online has become the most popular way couples meet, eclipsing meeting through friends for the first time around 2013. Moreover, among the couples who meet online, the proportion who have met through the mediation of third persons has declined over time. We find that Internet meeting is displacing the roles that family and friends once played in bringing couples together.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: mrosenfe{at}stanford.edu.
Author contributions: M.J.R., R.J.T., and S.H. designed research; M.J.R., R.J.T., and S.H. performed research; M.J.R. analyzed data; and M.J.R. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The data reported in this paper are publicly available at Stanford University’s Social Science Data and Software Social Science Data Collection (https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst and https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst2017).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1908630116/-/DCSupplemental.
Published under the PNAS license.
Disintermediating your friends: How online dating in the United States displaces other ways of meeting
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