It’s still happening
This train of thought was triggered by this headline:
Couples who meet on dating apps are doomed science says
Well, OK. That does not surprise me. But then the first line of the copy says: “A new study has found that people who meet their romantic partners online are less happy in love compared to those who meet in person.” Now that is a very different statement than the headline. What about all the people who meet online through other mechanisms than dating apps? What about all those who meet through community groups? Gaming? People you know mutually through social media? Or (my own experience here) social virtual worlds? Those are very different dynamics and aren’t mentioned in the article.
I posted about this on Bluesky (follow me @markchilds.bluesky.social) a month ago, and not only is it still annoying me (hence the blog) but also the news item is still appearing on my browser home page
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2492159-couples-who-meet-online-may-have-lower-relationship-satisfaction/ for example.
And this one is an earlier study that says the same thing, the news item is in 2023 https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/dating-in-the-digital-age/202310/unpacking-the-online-dating-effect. (Links to the Sharabi and Dorrence-Hall paper)
which also got picked up by the media, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/18/relationships-online-mates
Now you expect this from reactionary rags like The Guardian, but New Scientist?
The original article doesn’t link to the research (shameful!) but does mention the lead researcher (Marta Kowal) so I tracked down the paper, assuming that the conflation occurred through sloppy reporting. But no – it’s in the original paper!
The literature review is even-handed – they reference studies that find no difference, or even stronger relationships if begun online (due to enhanced disclosure online). However, they then note that since those studies online dating behaviour has changed – there’s more of a swipe right / left culture – which leads to a more transactional mindset and gaming the algorithms. Also if you’ve scanned through a thousand opportunities and picked one, it’s going to make you wonder more about the 999 you didn’t pick and if perhaps one of those would have been a better choice so increasing the chances of dissatisfaction with the person you did pick. Fair enough.
They also acknowledge in their limitations “our binary categorization of meeting context—online versus offline—did not account for nuanced digital contexts.” Well true. But this caveat does not appear in their conclusions or their paper title. A simple addition of the phrase online dating apps would have made the distinction clearer.
And this conflation occurs all the way through the paper. They’re obviously talking specifically about the mechanics of dating apps, but throughout they describe this as meeting online. For example the Discussion section starts: “The present study aimed to better understand the increasingly common phenomenon of meeting romantic partners online.” No it doesn’t – it better understands the phenomenon of meeting romantic partners through online dating apps. Meeting offline involves the various serendipitous, low stakes, casual connections that can occur through the traditional venues like family, friends, work, school and the Oldenberg third places list (1997). They don’t just get you through the day – though these last group have declined. It’s the (I’m assuming) low stakes, random connections, where you’re not meeting with a potential partner in mind, but just doing stuff, then suddenly after a while thinking “hang on, this person I like a LOT” and taking it from there that makes those relationships so great in the long term (no evidence about in general, but that’s how it worked for me). Doing research like this either means comparing like with like – so all the serendipitous, third space type places online with the equivalent offline ones – or being very cautious about how the claims are framed. Particularly when the key distinction is something other than what you’re claiming. This isn’t offline v online, it’s serendipity v algorithms.
And the other reason why if I was a reviewer of this paper I would have rejected it. There’s no qualitative data. They surveyed a huge number of people, BUT DIDN’T TALK TO ANYONE. Essentially they have no real clue about what the data mean because they haven’t checked their thoughts with any of the people they surveyed. Even my undergraduate students do a better job than this – they understand the complementary roles of data in a mixed methods approach (in an interpretivist study) and why both are necessary for a fuller picture.
But this leads to a wider question – the glee with which the “journalists” pounced on the findings and spread them abroad. There is still (despite lockdowns) a widespread mistrust of online interactions – that for many people there is an in inherent inauthenticity to them. What Carl Mitcham (1994, p.298) calls “ancient scepticism”. It’s a distrust of technology. I see it at work where people say they prefer to teach in person because they can judge the engagement of their students better.
I’m here to tell you. No. You. Can’t. There is no evidence (unless I’ve been very bad at tracking it down) that perceptions of engagement actually correspond to actual engagement. All those nods and eye contacts DO NOT MEAN anyone is paying attention. In fact, students report all that performance around paying attention distracts them from actually paying attention. Admittedly anecdotal, but no-one has anything else to go on.
Sure I agree the apps are pretty dodgy, I would hate them, but the relationships you can build up through online communities, through gaming, through social virtual worlds, are real relationships and it’s disengenuous to criticise one through the guise of reporting on something completely unrelated, just because it happens in the same place.
References
Marta Kowal, Piotr Sorokowski, Adam Bode, Michal Misiak, W.P. Malecki, Agnieszka Sorokowska, S. Craig Roberts, Meeting partners online is related to lower relationship satisfaction and love: Data from 50 countries, Telematics and Informatics, Volume 101, 2025, 102309, ISSN 0736-5853,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2025.102309.
Liesel L. Sharabi, Elizabeth Dorrance-Hall, (2024) The online dating effect: Where a couple meets predicts the quality of their marriage, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 150, 2024, 107973, ISSN 0747-5632,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107973.
Mitcham, C. (1994) Thinking Through Technology: the Path Between Engineering & Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Oldenberg, R. (1997) The Great Good Place: Cafes, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts and how they get you through the day. Marlowe and Company, USA: New York
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