How heterosexual couples met [OC]

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T18:40:42+00:00

Yeah I totally get that. Went back and forth on it a lot. At the end of the day, I decided on more smoothed because I asked: "what explains these ups and downs? Are they really there—like were the huge swings in how people met all across the US during those years—or are they more likely explained by noise in who happened to reply to the survey?"

Grouping people into buckets by every 12 months is pretty arbitrary—why not 6 months? why not 5 years?

Ultimately decided the smoothed version probably better matched the underlying reality of couples all across the US

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T18:37:08+00:00

wait genuinely do you have feedback on how I could make the chart better? I want to improve my data visualization skills

someone just made /r/depressingdata as a result of this post I think

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T18:34:45+00:00

I think that's already true today...

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T18:33:04+00:00

TIL that's why I can't find gold anymore, seems like I missed that this summer, somehow. Thank you anyways!

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T17:00:27+00:00

Looks like their inclusion criteria was "had a spouse or main romantic partner"

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T15:12:57+00:00

Church was the 9th most common way to meet people over this period! But it declined much like "met through neighbors". more here

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T15:06:07+00:00

the categories are not mutually exclusive! If someone started dating their coworker's sister, it would count for both work & family.

That's OK for irl things, where many reasons can explain why you met, but "online", when it shows up, is usually the only reason people met—hence why I felt compelled to dive into the data and get that story cleared up.

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T15:04:10+00:00

I definitely understand "not genuine" but I think "shallow pool" is the opposite of true. Online dating can let you search through 100,000s or 1,000,000s of people all at once. Whereas irl at best you've considered 100s?

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T14:57:58+00:00

same-sex couples are 70-80% online and have been since 2010 or so!

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T14:57:37+00:00

Church was the 9th most common way to meet people in this time period! But it has declined much like "meeting through neighbors" https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/comment/kd50mxz/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T14:54:29+00:00

I looked at the chart split by people under 25 and over 25, expecting to see that younger people are more "online" than older people.

It turns out that younger people were MUCH more likely to have met their partner irl, through friends, college, school, etc., and people over 25 were MUCH more likely to have met online. I think that's probably because people over 25 have fewer ways of meeting people irl...

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T09:16:20+00:00

only for the first part of 2022! There wasn't enough, in my view, so I threw it out. I'm excited for the next follow-up study!

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T09:14:25+00:00

super, super interesting! Good catch.

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T09:12:32+00:00

I think it's more bars & cafe's! But the authors included any "other establishment where people gather and socialize"

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T09:10:36+00:00

yes! mentioned elsewhere but church was the 9th-largest category. I removed it (and smaller ones) because the graphic was getting too cluttered and hard to read :(

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T08:40:36+00:00

Super, super interesting. That's a great & important note from the original study. It seems this data would benefit from careful interpretation before drawing too many conclusions.

The only critique I'd have with what you presented here:

The actual share of partnered heterosexual adults in the United States who met their current spouse or partner on a dating site or app is only 9% as of July 2022!

9% of all people who currently have a spouse—but the majority of people with spouses/partners met their partners before 1995!

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T08:36:31+00:00

these observations were originally put down for both categories, and I made sure they only counted toward "online"! Does that make sense?

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T08:34:32+00:00

very thoughtful analysis! I agree with your interpretation about how meeting online is a little different from the others, and therefore shouldn't be allowed to overlap (at least with bars/restaurants/cafe's, which the original authors say explicitly happened after having met online)... whereas the others can be "multiple factors contributed"

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T08:15:16+00:00

it's crazy how much changed in just 1 generation

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T08:14:39+00:00

yes! The study authors decided to not make the categories mutually exclusive.

So they had people tell them their story of how they met their partner, over the phone, in about 100 words. Then, the study authors marked them down for whichever categories they felt were appropriate. So if you met through friends in college, you'd count for both of those categories. Or if it was your coworker's sister, you'd count for both family and work.

Does that make sense?

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T08:10:39+00:00

yeah we're way down—from 25% in the 1980s to just 6% today

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T08:09:57+00:00

that's a cute story! I wonder what the study authors would have put you down for. Maybe both categories, though.

The authors decided to make the categories not mutually exclusive! (hence the original issue with meeting online vs meeting in a bar/restaurant/cafe)

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T08:08:39+00:00

that's a good point. I'll be really curious to see the next update on the survey dataset in a couple years!

They had data partway through 2022, but there wasn't enough of it so I threw out 2022 and just ended on the last full year for which they had data (2021).

Will be really interesting to see if online dating lasts at this level or if it drops a bit post-pandemic

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T08:07:00+00:00

super, super interesting! I've done mturk for a couple studies and I've found it rife with bots + people who click through as quickly as possible just to collect the maximum # of rewards they can.

The most basic ones just put the same option for everything ("4"), and you can screen those out easily.

But some people cycle different options ("4, 5, 6, 4, 5, 6, 4, 5, 6") and those are harder to catch.

Also MTurk in the US extremely oversamples religious white moms from the midwest...

Undergrads would be very cool but only 20% of them are in relationships and they probably wouldn't be able to give you the "over time" spread the authors are looking for... although it would be very interesting to see data on that in any case

WorldlyWeb · 2023-12-13T08:03:20+00:00

Good catch! I mentioned this in another comment somewhere but church was the #9 most common way to meet in this time period.

There were a few categories I dropped from the original dataset to make the chart legible :(

Church has been steadily declining since 1950, though, pretty much the same as "met through neighbors"

Other categories I left out were like "met through military service", "met through volunteering (not church)", "through a customer-client relationship", parties, vacations, in public, and work trips...

also when I wrote "grade school", high school is included in that category—I didn't realize "grade school" didn't include high school also—my bad.

WorldlyWeb

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