Online Date with Fish2Fish: meet offline

Does Online Dating Lead to More Break-Ups?

You can probably count at least a few couples you know who met through a site like eHarmony or Match.com Fish2Fish. Hey, maybe you’re one of them. And there’s no denying some peoples’ good luck. But a surprising new study out of Stanford and Michigan State shows that while online dating sites do work well for dating (obviously), they aren’t as successful at setting people up for marriage—or a lasting marriage, at that.

As more people search for love in cyberspace, and polls show that online dating has lost much of its stigma, researchers decided to look and see how meeting your mate online compares to meeting in real life.

And the results aren’t so pro-web: After polling more than 4,000 people, researchers found that those who used sites like eHarmony, Match.com, and Zoosk are less likely to get married than folks who met the old fashioned way. On top of that, the online couples who did get into long-term relationships or marry had a higher rate of break-ups compared to the couples who met offline.

But does it really matter how a pair got together? Maybe. The researchers theorize that endless options online may lead people to put off starting a serious relationship. Also, online relationships often take longer to get going (think about all the back-and-forth messaging), so they’re not as developed as offline ones over the same time period. Trust may also be an issue: Since many people are concerned that other users are lying in their profiles, they may be hesitant to get involved emotionally.

And then there are people who are in denial about what they want. “Some men and women use online dating as a sort of distraction when they want to meet someone, but don’t take it seriously,” says Seth Meyers, PsyD, author of Dr. Seth’s Love Prescription.

But none of this news means you should automatically delete your accounts—researchers say the more time couples spend with each other, the more they’ll get to know the other person and develop trust, which can up any couples’ odds of staying together in the long run.

But note: By “time together” they mean IRL.

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Online daters break up more. Source: News Corp Australia

IF YOU consider how many of your friends have met their significant others on OkCupid, you know there’s considerably less stigma surrounding online dating than there was 10 or 15 years ago. But does that necessarily mean these relationships will be successful, 10 or 15 years down the line?

That’s what researchers at Stanford and Michigan State University wanted to know. In light of websites like eHarmony’s claims that more than a third of marriages start online, they recently polled more than 4,000 people to see whether eHarmony and OkCupid are as successful at predicting long-term romantic compatibility as they claim to be. Instead, they found the opposite: Couples who meet online are less likely to stay together long-term than those who meet offline.

It might start well, but online dating doesn’t end well. Source: Supplied

According to the study, couples who meet on websites like eHarmony, Match.com, and Zoosk are less likely to get married than couples who meet offline. Furthermore, even couples who meet on those sites and do end up getting married tend to break up at a higher rate than their offline counterparts. Perhaps most damning of all, online dating isn’t the most efficient way to find a romantic partner, with online couples taking a longer time on average to initiate a relationship than couples who met offline.

The reasons for this discrepancy, Michigan State University researcher Aditi Paul speculates, probably have to do with the fact that even though online dating is less stigmatised than it once was, we still tend to take online relationships a lot less seriously than ones in real life.

“We don’t put in too much thought into online relationships,” she wrote in the study. “Maybe this casualness that is associated with online relationship initiation impedes the development of the relationship in the long run.”

After all, if you don’t think of the guy you emoji-flirted with on Tinder as a serious dating prospect from the get-go, it’s unlikely that your views on him will evolve much six months down the line.

Don’t delete your profile, but be wary. Source: Supplied

Do the results of this study mean that we should all delete our Tinder and OkCupid accounts en masse? Of course not. After all, not everyone is logging on to dating websites and apps looking for a long-term romantic commitment. Even if you are, the study is quick to note that online dating isn’t a totally fruitless endeavour, as long as you take the time to build relationships with people and get to know them first.

“The more couples spend time with each other, the more they get to know the other person and develop interpersonal trust and intimacy with them,” the authors of the study wrote. “This leads to greater stability of the relationship, which in turn increases the odds of them staying together in the long run.”

So think about that the next time you’re half-heartedly thumbing through profiles on Tinder, swiping right for your soulmate.

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