My maternal grandparents met through mutual friends at a summer pool party in the suburbs of Detroit shortly after World War II. Thirty years later, their oldest daughter met my dad in Washington, D. Forty years after that, when I met my girlfriend in the summer of , one sophisticated algorithm and two rightward swipes did all the work. My family story also serves as a brief history of romance. Robots are not yet replacing our jobs.
For the past 10 years, the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld has been compiling data on how couples meet. In almost any other period, this project would have been an excruciating bore. Derek Thompson: The future of the city is childless.
But dating has changed more in the past two decades than in the previous 2, years, thanks to the explosion of matchmaking sites such as Tinder, OKCupid, and Bumble. A paper co-written by Rosenfeld found that the share of straight couples who met online rose from about zero percent in the mids to about 20 percent in For gay couples, the figure soared to nearly 70 percent. In a new paper awaiting publication , Rosenfeld finds that the online-dating phenomenon shows no signs of abating.
According to data collected through , the majority of straight couples now meet online or at bars and restaurants. Read: The 5 years that changed dating. I figured my Twitter audience—entirely online, disproportionately young, and intimately familiar with dating sites—would accept the inevitability of online matchmaking.
But the most common responses to my post were not hearty cheers. They were lamentations about the spiritual bankruptcy of modern love. But to be free of those old crutches can be both exhilarating and exhausting. As the influence of friends and family has melted away, the burden of finding a partner has been swallowed whole by the individual—at the very moment that expectations of our partners are skyrocketing. Gone are the days when young generations inherited religions and occupations and life paths from their parents as if they were unalterable strands of DNA.
