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Happy Friday, my friends. Since I know many of you date online, I like to throw in some articles on online dating from time to time. And, because I just finished my latest book, Find The Love of Your Life Online, I found some interesting online dating stats to share with you all.
Now that online dating is completely mainstream and continuing to grow in popularity, people – including scientists and academics – are starting to quantify who dates online and how. Some of the information won’t surprise most of you, but some of it will.
Here is a link to some interesting stats from WebPersonalsOnline, but I will discuss of few of the highlights here:
- Notice the percentages of female subscribers on the sites, with the highest being Chemistry at 71.8%, followed by eHarmony (68.6%), Match (55%), and Yahoo Personals (48.6%). So the guys who complain that online dating doesn’t work because there are way more men than women online will have to find a new excuse… or reconsider which site they belong to.
- Note that the sites with the most females are match-based sites. These sites require you to fill out a long questionnaire (something many men don’t like) and choose your matches for you rather than allowing you to browse freely for who you want. eHarmony in particular is known for people looking to get married rather than hook up or date casually.
- Match-based sites have higher subscription fees. Makes sense — someone has to pay for whoever developed the assessment battery and matching algorithms. All the sites’ fees decrease if you sign up for longer periods.
- While you might assume the Boomer generation would be less inclined to date online since they didn’t grow up in the Information Age, in fact they are quite active online and online dating is the #1 way the 50-and-wiser crowd meets other singles. As you can see from the stats, they are the fastest growing online dating demographic.
In a separate article from the University of Rochester:
- The percentage of couples who meet online is up to about 1 in 4 and still on the rise.
- Online dating is second only to meeting through friends as the most common way to meet.
- Men are 40% more likely to email a woman than women are to email a man. Not surprising, although that number isn’t as high as I would have thought. Women DO email men, even if not as often…
- Scientists cast a wary eye on the “scientific” methods match-based sites like eHarmony use. We have no evidence if the matching algorithms stand up to empirical testing, and we can’t test that because these are private companies and thus their algorithms are proprietary.
I’ll keep you posted when I hear more…
Very interesting stats Christie!
Interesting statistics Christie – maybe that’s why i couldn’t find my mate in Chemistry.com or Match.com! I love Helen Fisher’s work though. I found that while Chemistry.com is for a mature-long-term-marriage-minded relationships, the selection in men are limited and while men may be equal subscribers on Match.com, they are more on the prowl for casual hook ups. Unfortunately the latter didn’t work for me either. *Sigh* I’ll keep trying the old method – continue being actively involved in my leisure pursuits.
Hi Christie,
(1) I am going to use my mathematical IB skills towards evil (haha) and debunk one of the stats in that report… It’s not just the percentage of men versus women on the site, it is also the *rate* at which men sign up versus the rate at which women sign up. That can differ significantly from the percentages. I’ll give an example. Suppose that in a zip, there are an equal number of men on Match versus women, and furthermore, suppose that men stays on Match for 4 months (and leave empty-handed), while women stay on Match for a year. Then for there to be an equal number of men versus women on Match in a zip, for every 100 women that sign up to Match in a year, there have to be 100 men to sign up on Match *in 4 months*. So even though there is the same number of men and women on Match in a certain area, men are signing up at a rate of 3x the rate at which women are signing up! As (my understanding anyway) that a man stays on Match for a far shorter time than a woman stays on Match, I am not just being a smartass!
(2) I get maybe 1 unsolicited wink/email a month.
(3) Sometimes I find myself thinking that OLD tends to select people who, on the positive side don’t settle, and on the negative side, have unrealistic expectations–including myself. I find myself thinking that MOST of the emotionally healthy 30-something women who are cute and smart AND who have realistic standards, were swooped up a long time ago and now have rings on their fingers. As such a woman is so desirable, she met her share of guys who wanted to commit to her, and as she has realistic standards, at least one of the guy she met in her 20’s was good enough for her and so she married him. (It could be argued that I have unrealistic standards too–otherwise why wouldn’t I have found someone by now…) There are a few late-bloomers who are exceptions though….
Magdalena: I like Helen Fisher’s work too. I think there’s something to her typing system. It’s tough: more men on sites like Match, but you have to weed through the NSA guys…
Michael: A rehashing of numbers is always welcome here. Unfortunately, they almost never share how they arrived at their figures (a problem with private companies who don’t have to share their methods). Even if your difference-in-rates idea were the case (would be interesting to know if it were), there’s some other force at work than imbalanced M-F ratios. My vote is unrealistic expectations, on the part of both sexes.
Christie, kind of off-topic here but what is your opinion on the number of newly divorced people who jump right into online dating? I encounter so many women who have been divorced less than a year but are already putting themselves on the market so to speak
Secondly, is it ever a good idea for a man who has never been married and has no kids to date / pursue a relationship with a divorced woman with several kids? Should the 30 and 40 years old crowds stick with their own kind? In other words, never married only dates never married and divorced only dates divorced.
I would love to hear some professional input on this!
Hi Christie, Yes I would agree with you there that unrealistic expectations are to blame. I do wonder if that is due to how online dating works (so many options and the person in front of you is a stranger so unless there’s magic on the first date there’s no second date). Or if it is due to how a lot of us single people past 30 are (we’re the ones doing OLD), and I stress that I am including myself in this. We aren’t married partly because we won’t settle for whom we have been with so far, and this might mean unrealistic expectations on our part.
Mark, I’d be more concerned with separated people than the newly divorced. If actually divorced, then it just depends on their circumstances and whether they’ve moved on. I don’t think people need to match on kid or marital status, as long as they’re compatible in more important ways. In fact, doing so can rule out many good options…
Just to add I use to think like you christne and now after having lived it I know mark has very valid points. Wish I had understood this prior to what I thought would be a life long marriage. Sometimes its not the person but the situations that create all the issues that can’t go away. Its not an easy road for both.
I was wondering if you had any information on American Women pursuing sites to Find Husbands/love abroad. It seems as though it is very rare, but if one were to think about the struggles of women in foreign countries – and our own domestic struggles not with standing – it make sense to not search for a foreign husband. However, the fantasy of American women having an exotic lover is fairly ingrained in our society.
This is pure research for me, but I’ve been hitting walls left and right. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
I have heard of no examples of that, Bryce. It’s usually the other way around – men looking abroad. If there’s a market for it, someone will tap into it at some point.
There is a logical fallacy in the way we are approaching human relationships with this new technogolgy, which is supposed to be based upon a scientific approach. That fallacy has to do with assuming that processing all kind of personal data and using it to qualify people somehow reduces the natural uncertainty of the process. It does not. Nothing really matters until you make in person, eye-to-eye contact. All the info processing in the world can be nothng more than wheel spinning and I think women are more prone to this than men ironically enough. I say that because from the dawn of time women have relied on their instincts when deciding who to mate with….
In the future ppl will only meet online!
http://jonmillward.com/blog/attraction-dating/cupid-on-trial-a-4-month-online-dating-experiment/
just saying…. its a much more detailed analysis than ratios and success rates, and these figures are around the same time as yours, so interesting to see the comparison between two different types of sites.
definitely matches my personal experiences of getting a reply once in a blue moon and giving up on online dating after plenty of time wasted.