How Online Dating Went From Socially Awkward to a Normal Way to Meet

When exactly did it stop being embarrassing? The data puts the turn somewhere between 2009 and 2013, which is a narrow window for a change in courtship practice. Before it, a couple answering the question at a dinner party produced a small pause. After it, the same answer produced nothing at all, and anyone under 30 now finds the original awkwardness difficult to picture.

The Personal Advertisement and Its Reputation

The lonely hearts column ran in British newspapers for the better part of 2 centuries, and it always had a particular reputation. The format was compressed, abbreviated and paid for by the word. That produced the coded language everyone remembers. The assumption behind reading one was that the advertiser had exhausted the ordinary routes.

That assumption had a basis in how the columns worked. Placing an advertisement cost money, took a week to appear and produced replies by post, so the people using them were, by construction, people prepared to spend money and a month on the problem. The medium selected for a particular kind of determination, and readers drew the obvious conclusion about anyone who had reached that point.

The first internet services inherited that reputation intact. In 2005, 29% of internet users agreed with the statement that people who used online services for meeting partners were desperate. Only 44% agreed that it was a good way to meet people, and 15% said they knew someone who had found a spouse or long-term partner that way. The numbers describe a practice that people were doing quietly and describing to nobody.

The Numbers Between 2005 and 2013

By 2013 the same survey questions produced different answers. Agreement that this was a good way to meet people had gone from 44% to 59%. The desperate figure fell from 29% to 21%. The share of Americans who knew someone personally who had met a long-term partner this way doubled from 15% to 29%.

That last number is the one that matters. A social practice stops being embarrassing at roughly the point where everybody knows a couple who did it and is visibly fine. The other 2 figures moved because the third one did.

New Vocabulary in the Profile Field

The profile format also changed what people could say about themselves. A form with fields for orientation and relationship style produced a vocabulary that had almost no mainstream currency 20 years earlier. Someone can now state that they are panromantic, aromantic, monogamous or open, and expect the term to be understood.

Such precision was impossible in 40 words of newsprint. Stating it in advance also removes a conversation that used to happen 3 dates in, badly, and it filters the responses before anyone has spent a Tuesday evening finding out.

The same field structure did something less obvious to the stigma. A form that asks direct questions about what a person wants makes the whole activity look administrative, and administrative activities are difficult to be embarrassed about. Filling in a form is what people do for mortgages and passports. The format itself drained a good deal of the drama out of the process.

The Displacement of Friends and Family

The Stanford research on how couples meet found that around 39% of heterosexual couples surveyed in 2017 had met online, up from 22% in 2009. Since 2013 it has been the single most common route, ahead of introductions through friends.

The researchers called the process disintermediation, and the term is accurate. Work on how American couples meet has tracked the same displacement across every category of introduction. Meeting through friends has been declining since about 1995, and meeting through family longer than that. The people who used to perform introductions were doing a job that most adults now do for themselves, and they were doing it from a much smaller pool. A friend can introduce you to the 11 single people she knows. Nobody was ever going to compete with that on quality alone, and the pool size settled the matter.

The Collapse of the Reputation

Three things happened at once. The technology moved into the phone, which turned an activity requiring a desktop and a private hour into something done in a queue at the supermarket. The user base broadened until it stopped being a self-selecting group. And the number of visible success cases passed the threshold where the practice explained itself.

Writers were asking why online meeting still attracted a stigma well into the 2010s, and the explanation at the time was the gap between behaviour and admission. Plenty of people were doing it and describing their meeting as a coincidence at a party. Coverage of the period noticed the same split, with internet romancetreated as normal in aggregate and slightly suspect in the particular case of whoever was standing in front of you.

The Speed of It

The whole change occupies about 15 years, which is short for a change in courtship practice. As recently as 2013 the activity was still in minority use, with roughly 1 in 10 American adults having tried it. A decade later it was the default assumption about how any new couple had met, to the point where meeting at work or through a friend became the version that required explaining. 15 years is roughly one generation of daters. Somebody who was 25 and mildly ashamed of a profile in 2010 is 41 now and has probably watched 2 younger siblings meet their spouses the same way without a word said about it.

One finding from the Stanford data deserves more attention than it gets. Once the decade of meeting was controlled for, how a couple met had no measurable effect on their chance of breaking up. The long argument about these relationships being somehow lesser was settled in the data, and almost nobody noticed, because by then the argument had stopped being had.

The Next 15 Years

The generation now in its twenties has never known a version of this that involved any shame at all, and the interesting question is what they are quietly embarrassed about instead. Every era of courtship has one practice that people use and do not admit to. The lonely hearts column had it, the early services had it, and something in the current set of introductions is being described to parents as a coincidence at a party. Working out which part that is will take another survey and about 10 years.