A study this week has concluded that if you met your partner online, you are more likely to be happy and stay together than couples who met any other way. The study by US researchers was looking at how the dynamics of marriage may be being altered by the internet, and specifically by online dating.
A third of US marriages now result from meetings that take place through online dating sites, and this is being heralded as a significant shift in how men and women are meeting the people they marry. With Australian wedding and divorce rates being pretty similar to those in the US and Europe, it makes for some pretty interesting reading. The ages of the couples who said they met their other half online tend to range between 30 and 49 years old, and they are typically earning higher wages than their offline counterparts.
The figures for the people who met in more traditional ways make for a great snapshot of how many people live and form their relationships. Of those people surveyed, about twenty percent met either at work or through friends and another ten percent first meeting while they were at school. While we thought that meeting at bars and clubs would be more popular, only nine percent of the people who went on to marry did so after first meeting there. Another seven percent came about through family introductions, and around four percent of those who got married first met while they were at church.
The claims about happiness come from a comparison of divorce rates over the duration of the study, and the figures showed 5.96 percent of the online couples had divorced as opposed to 7.67 percent of those who met offline. Even allowing for variables like income, the year they got married, education and age, the difference remained about the same.
Surveys of general happiness tend to favour those who originally met online, but the difference between scores is much closer. Of those who met online, the happiest tended to be the couples who knew each other from a younger age, or met through social gatherings, schools or churches. In contrast, the unhappiest couples seem to be those who met through work, blind dates, family or bars.
While it seems certain that there is a definite effect on the nature and longevity of some marriages based on the role of the internet in how people get together, the study seems a little less clear on exactly why this is so. One theory is that the people who do use dating sites to search for a partner may have certain different personality traits or things motivating them in how or why they create a marital relationship.