Online Dating is Mainstream—But What Are the Consequences?

 In the days of Netscape and AOL Instant Messenger, online dating was something of a fringe concept. Some even saw it as a sign of desperation. But since the early 2010s, it’s been the most common way for couples to get together, a striking change I discussed previously in this space. More recent data shows an outright majority of couples meeting online in the current decade. Even married young people sometimes maintain dating profiles, as Wendy Wang has noted. But what are the consequences? An interesting new study, released as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research, tries to tease out some answers.

The authors divide online dating into two distinct periods, the desktop (2002-2013) and mobile (2017-2023) eras. They find that in the former, online dating’s spread increased divorce rates but had no measurable impact on the formation of new marriages. In the latter, when online dating was entirely mainstream, it reduced both marriage and divorce. Meanwhile, while some previous research has suggested online dating increases the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), the authors find little sign of this and even some signs to the contrary.

Let’s take a closer look at how they reach these conclusions and what it might mean.

To measure the use of online dating, the authors combine Internet-use data from a handful of companies that collect it from users. This is an important limitation of the study, because participation in these efforts is voluntary and sometimes paid, and thus not representative of the general population. However, with some statistical jujitsu,¹ the researchers use these data to measure how online dating increased in some counties more quickly than others, and to check to see if these shifts correlated with other trends.

During the desktop era, a 1% increase in online dating corresponded to a 0.5% increase in divorces but had no measurable impact on marriages. A possible explanation is that people in troubled marriages gained access to a new exit strategy, but singles didn’t become dramatically more likely to find a marriage partner. However, in the smartphone era, the technology appears to reduce marriage and divorces, by about 0.4% and 0.3%, respectively (again, for a 1% change in use), which is a little trickier to explain.

Pickiness is a strong candidate, though. Maybe when dating moves online in a big way, people just get overwhelmed by the amount of choice. They’re less likely to settle down with someone—there are lots of candidates out there and the next may be better. But if they do, it’s because they found an especially good match.

As the authors write, greater use of online dating means that “users have to sort through more irrelevant profiles (choice overload),” not to mention that “each user faces more rivals when pursuing any given potential match.”

They further investigate some measures of demographic “sorting,” and the results are a mixed bag. Online dating seems to increase same-race partnerships (in contrast to some previous work), but educational sorting seems to decline. 

Their STD findings are interesting as well. On one hand, it’s easy to imagine how instant access to online matchmaking could lead to an explosion of casual hookups, but on the other, the younger generations who grew up with this technology famously aren’t having that much sex. In the authors’ estimation, mobile-era online dating has little effect on chlamydia and syphilis and might even reduce gonorrhea.

This study undermines worries about online dating leading to widespread promiscuity and disease. But it also supports concerns that the modern mating market, of which matchmaking apps are an integral part, isn’t particularly healthy, with a generation of young people failing to form partnerships and get married (and ultimately have kids). Maybe it’s time to bring back dating people we actually know?

Robert VerBruggen is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a Contributing Editor at National Review. 

*Photo credit: Shutterstock

1. On a technical level, the authors “instrument” each county’s use of online dating with the usage recorded in nearby counties, as well as some other attributes of those nearby counties. This has two advantages. One is that it can help correct for measurement error, since their data is thin in smaller counties. The other is that if certain underlying causes can affect both online dating and the outcomes being studied, using instruments can address the confounding—though in this case, if the same causes affect nearby counties too, their approach might not be entirely effective. (They argue that correlations between counties at the distances they use likely reflect the network effects of online dating itself, rather than other confounders.)