Our survey included many people who at some point had used a dating website or an app, as well as a subset of 9,600 respondents who used them in the past two years.The more recently active group rated specific sites. On the one hand, the numbers indicate that these sites are helping people find mates.“It was—unbelievably—not a crazy experience.” Online dating has certainly lost its lonely-hearts stigma.
There’s a whole range of difficult human emotions to contend with: insecurity, disappointment, rejection, maybe heartache. “Sometimes there is nothing that clicks whatsoever,” says Julien Nguyen, a 30-year-old software designer from Austin, Texas, who has used Bumble and Tinder.
“Sometimes whatever chemistry we had just fizzles out.”Perhaps being in the market for a mate can’t be compared with using other services. D., a professor at the Harvard Business School who studies consumer behavior, thinks so.
Perhaps that’s why, among those who said they had used multiple dating sites, 28 percent had tried four or more.
But our research also found that online dating, however painful and time-consuming, often does produce the intended result if you use it well—and persevere.
If you find your life partner on your first date, the site doesn’t make much money off you.
Our survey found that among respondents who stopped online dating, 20 percent of men and 40 percent of women said they did so because they didn’t like the quality of their matches.A whopping 44 percent of respondents who tried online dating said the experience led to a serious long-term relationship or marriage.That kind of connection rate would shatter Hall of Fame records, at least in baseball.In fact, people over 50 are one of the fastest growing segments.“It’s a product of the growing normalcy of using social media apps,” says Moira Weigel, author of “Labor of Love: The Invention of Online Dating” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).“I was on a date with a guy who turned out to be a convicted felon.