Algorithms, and not friends and family, are now the go-to matchmaker for people looking for love, Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld has found.
Online dating has become the most common way for Americans to find romantic partners. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Rosenfeld found that heterosexual couples are more likely to meet a romantic partner online than through personal contacts and connections.
Since , traditional ways of meeting partners β through family, in church and in the neighborhood β have all been in decline, Rosenfeld said. Rosenfeld, a lead author on the research and a professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences , drew on a nationally representative survey of American adults and found that about 39 percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting their partner online, compared to 22 percent in Sonia Hausen, a graduate student in sociology, was a co-author of the paper and contributed to the research.
Meeting a significant other online has replaced meeting through friends. People trust the new dating technology more and more, and the stigma of meeting online seems to have worn off. In , when I last researched how people find their significant others, most people were still using a friend as an intermediary to meet their partners. Back then, if people used online websites, they still turned to friends for help setting up their profile page. Friends also helped screen potential romantic interests.
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I was surprised at how much online dating has displaced the help of friends in meeting a romantic partner. Our previous thinking was that the role of friends in dating would never be displaced. But it seems like online dating is displacing it. What do you believe led to the shift in how people meet their significant other?
