Modern Love: Match Sweeping Up and To The Right
Everyone has stories about meeting someone they liked or how they tried to meet them. I’m talking about dating.
I have met women through friends’ introductions, at coffee places, while waiting for a bus or train, nightspots, etc. but the fastest way was the internet. It’s about connecting. There have been good times, dead-ends and very close friends.
One person was charmed by a message I sent and she drove up from the Southeast U.S. to meet about 12+ hours later. I ended up meeting a friend of hers who lived in the West Coast, and I fell head over heels for the friend, leading to a long distance thing for a few years. But that’s a story for another time.
Time for a history talk.
A long time ago the idea of dating didn’t exist. You either got married to someone from your village or at best to someone from the next village.
If neither of those worked, you became the family member that lived in the spare room and helped keep the family farm or shop going.
Good old Uncle John, Aunt Mary or Cousin Jack, bless their hearts…
Not too long ago marriage was defined by tradition, distance, lack of transportation, and communication… unless you were wealthy at the time, like royalty or a rich merchant.
The Ruler of Kingdom 1 would marry off his daughter to the Ruler of Kingdom 2 to make a bigger kingdom. The regular people were stuck unless the odd boy in the village or town decided to go on some adventure abroad and actually made it alive to a new place.
Eventually travelling to a new land in search of opportunity became a broader trend. First, that new land was the next province, then the next country, and eventually it was halfway around the world. Cities was where the action was in the new world.
We have family stories about how our great-great-grandparents met someone and how the family tree came to be. That’s how my folks met. They were from different parts of the old country. Their families ended up in the same city for the same reason - in search of opportunity - and ended up in the same building.
I imagined that my parents bumped into each other at the entrance, or maybe their friends in the building made the introductions since they were “old school”. A new place but old ways and old school rules…
Eventually new rules came in an entirely new kind of place — The Internet. The world became one big noisy city online. If you’re reading this, then you’re my neighbor in a way. Hi!
But let’s circle back to the idea of dating and how people meet and mate.
For the longest time, people did this through things in common, including friends, school, a college campus or church. It was mostly random meetings because we didn't really control the world around us, we just lived in and moved through it. After the birth of the Internet this changed.
Back in 1999, when the Matrix debuted and blew minds, “computer dating”, which used to be novel and outside the mainstream, was gaining acceptance as one of the leading ways people met.
No more sitting in the living room, or the parlour-room (what is a parlour-room anyway?) with the first (and maybe last) person you’ll ever date. No more sitting with his/her parents hoping you’ll shake hands with your date before the evening is done - oh, life in 1899.
Now with the Internet, it’s all different, and it seems we’ll never run out of company.
But not so fast, this trend has displaced people’s random life connections in person. And there is a downside to that.
There is an epidemic of loneliness in the most crowded of spaces, the Internet. In the most connected of communities like Palo Alto, suicides were at record levels for young people. We are never more connected electronically and never more disaffected and disassociated from ourselves and with each other. I think part of this is because people still need to be around each other in person.
The need to meet and greet, to match and mate, remains. The times change, but we remain the same. Displacing family and friends, Facebook and “facetime” seems to have taken over matchmaking.
And Match.com has become a King that plays cupid for everyone in the Kingdom of the Internet. The company’s recent numbers, were reported as Q2 498M, up 18% year-over-year, with 503K more subs.
Q2 revenue: $498M (18% yoy)
Q2 EBITDA: $204M (41% mgn)
Q2 subscription adds: 503K
Looking at this map, I wonder what a date is like in South Dakota, it certainly seems less stressful on the pocketbook. BUT Minnesota at 109.81 is over twice the cost of neighboring Iowa (at 50.90)! Anyway, it’s clear that dating in the right and left coast is a bit pricey.
(I wonder how this map compares if overlaid with other economic and societal data points, like job and health trends. That’s for another time. Can you imagine a timeline of the cost of love: the cost of first date, that wedding industry scam of full package ceremony, first home, first kid, first divorce..?)
A chart from a study at Stanford shows how couples met over the last few years post-WW2.
Modern love has become, to use a 1999 internet word, modem love.
What’s sad is the dating trend of “met through friends” peaked in the 1970s/80s. What happened?
I think it must correspond with the change in the economy. Or maybe we all need new friends.
One of the dating trends in decline is “met through or as coworkers”. In today’s socially sensitive times, it’s no surprise that meeting at work may flatline to zero. But extrapolation is a bad habit.Maybe new rules of how people socialize in the workplace will develop.
(Just picture it, all those WeWorkers, stressed lonely entrepreneurs and all those people who moved to the “big city” for work, all trying to find love. I wonder if some Iowans or Nebraskans miss the low cost of dates back home.)
Let’s go through some of the trends drawn in the chart. The category “Bars and restaurants”, that original standby of late 20th century life, comes in a distant second to “met online”. It’s certainly less expensive and intoxicating to hit send than to get a round of craft beer, white claw, and 19th century cocktails.
Another category, how people “Met in college”, peaked during Internet 1.0. It seems to have been displaced as laptops and then smartphones took over via apps and games. This is no surprise. Facebook according to the company’s official story was started to help “Zuck” meet girls, and it was likely just the beginning of the end of pre-Internet “Met in college” dating.
A fascinating trend is that “met through church” may have stopped falling and it may have flattened out its decline. I wonder if the loneliness epidemic is one part of the reason. We all seek solace and maybe also at one of the oldest of gathering places: Church.
Forget 1999, it’s like 1949 for a small number of couples still finding love just like the “Greatest Generation” at places of worship.
Speaking of 1949, according to that same study from Stanford, “From the end of World War II until 2013, the most popular way heterosexual Americans met their romantic partners was through the intermediation of friends.” Dating pre-Internet was the same for decades until the 1990s.
The study reported that many trends were in sharp decline due to the rise of the Internet. I believe that it may have been for some simple reasons.
What helped propel online dating was the ease and safety of “meeting” first via app, less stress in coming up with text messages, and video instead of the unique stresses of in-person conversation. In person meetings are so very different from disposable messaging.
The Stanford paper’s abstract summarized findings we all kind of already knew:
...new data from a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults. For
heterosexual couples in the U.S., meeting online has become the most popular way couples meet, eclipsing meeting through friends for the first time around 2013.
Moreover, among the couples who meet online, the proportion who have met through the mediation of third persons has declined over time. We find that Internet meeting is displacing the roles that family and friends once played in bringing couples together.
This rise of meeting online comes at the same time as the loneliness epidemic. We made it so easy to meet, so easy to avoid, cut and run, “ghost” each other in seconds. This leads to less conversation and more loneliness. And lonely people want company, so they resort to the Internet to fix this loneliness. Does this become a self-perpetuating, endless cycle?
But all is not lost. The Wall Street Journal noted that marriages have not been disrupted by apps. In fact, these tools actually helped:
Couples who meet online tend to communicate better and have longer and happier relationships.
“Modem Love” might not be so bad for marriages because the key to success is the same as before the Internet.
It comes down to communication.
We made it too easy to talk less, move fast, swipe left, delete or ignore…
The happiest folks may be those who do the complete opposite. That’s on us.