From Blind Dates to Swipe Rights: The Graph That Explains Modern Love
Once we met through family and friends; now we meet online
It’s Valentine’s Day 2025! To mark this auspicious occasion, here’s a fascinating graph that goes viral from time to time - perhaps you’ve seen it before. It shows the changing ways that couples have met from 1940 to 2020, and reveals a striking shift in the nature of modern romance.
The main story, of course, is the red line: couples who met online.
Note that “met online” doesn’t just include dating apps; it also includes connections made on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
If you prefer your data in motion, here’s an animated version of the graph. It vividly demonstrates just how dramatically things have changed in the past decade or so compared to the previous eighty years.
The graph is from a 2019 paper by Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben Thomas, and Sonia Hausen. Here’s the abstract:
We present data from a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults. For heterosexual couples in the United States, 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.
In 2020, I was interviewed about the graph by Javier Sinay for RED/ACCIÓN, an Argentinian news website. Javier asked: “What does this graphic reveal about our social environment? Does the nature of couple-love change when meeting online?” Here’s how I answered:
The graph reveals something about the modern world that doesn’t just apply to dating: More and more of human life is taking place online.
Online dating doesn’t change the nature of love itself – love is psychologically and biochemically the same today as it was when we were hunter-gatherers wandering the African savannah. But it does greatly increase the pool of possible partners. That means people are more likely to meet someone very similar to themselves – but also more likely to think “This person isn’t perfect for me; I’m going to back to the app to keep on looking.”
Anyway, whether you’re looking, taken, or somewhere in between, Happy Valentine’s Day to all who celebrate!
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