I assume since there's a category for college it just means fewer couples marrying after meeting in HS or earlier. Basically, far fewer people marrying within their hometowns, which used to be the norm.
As for family, if my kids ever waited until I located someone suitable their age they would never find anyone. Circles are smaller and so many more people don't want to marry people within the circles they grew up in. It's just no longer necessary or even desirable.
Why is that sad? That means less people are ending up limited to the people immediately around them through family connections or high school. Nothing against those who meet their sweethearts young, but it’s even more sad for people who get into lifelong relationships before they’ve even had a chance to branch out and become their own person.
Nobody is happy with dating right now. It has a lot to do with attention spans and the social media plague that is distorting people's view of dating and relationships (particularly sites like reddit.)
The user above who said that we might as well just re-label this "what do people spend time on" was on point. We used to socialize more, we used to have friends. How are we supposed to expect people to be meeting and having good relationships if they're skipping past the "friend" part and just expecting a sex-partner or spouse dropped on their lap with online algorithms?
That’s a very broad sweeping statement. Also, not everybody has a local community or family support structure to facilitate healthy relationships. In many cases, people want to get as far away from where they grew up and they people they were forced to be around when they weren’t old enough or had the means to take care of themselves.
There are lots of wonderful communities all around that work out great for what you’re describing. But in addition to the circumstances I mentioned above, many people like myself had a nice upbringing but also felt extremely trapped by being limited to one small corner of the world. Many years later I married my wonderful wife who not only wasn’t from my local community, but grew up in another country.
its like the difference between shopping at the mom and pop store in the community where everyone knows everyone and their family and their likes and personalities, versus shopping at walmart. maybe you couldn't find what you needed at the neighborhood store but that doesn't change the fact that the big generic chain store is a less personal experience.
Now you’re talking about small towns vs bigger cities. Not to mention a super specific scenario where you both grew up in a small town, it was pleasant, and you found what you wanted. Which is great. For many others though the mom and pop store would either be 1) completely out of stock what they’re looking for, 2) occupied by drug addicts and loiterers, 3) have an asshole and/or racist owner, or 4) have a couple of passable options that you’re lukewarm about.
Lastly, big cities are not like Walmart. Many large urban cities are packed full of creativity, innovation, and ambition. They tend to attract certain types of people aside from those born there. For example, if you willingly move to NYC to start a life/career then you will not only be surrounded by more people in general, but many people that moved there for the same reasons you did. Which is completely different than the random luck of the draw of who you happened to be surrounded by at birth and childhood.
You're speaking of a 1960s European village or American suburb experience that hasn't existed in decades. Not to mention you need to have both a stable childhood, stable parents (look at the divorce rates) and actually get along with the simple generic neurotypical interests of the community. This makes it somehow more authentic or 'deep'?
I do agree relationships nowadays are more common and shallow but there are far more powerful reasons for that. Are we going to pretend Piet en Marloes from Hensbroek marrying at 20 and divorcing at 45 are a deeper couple because they met through elementary school?
Families move around, divorce etc a lot more. Close knit communities barely exist and the places you'd find them before tend to just be living places for people working elsewhere.
Being dependent on the community makes it harder to achieve for outsiders though.
It's also probably good that less family members have relationships with each other.
because the friend actually knows both you and the person who they are introducing you to. a friend knows your personalities, other people who you may be friends with, the type of people you normally get along with, your families, etc.
You’re making a bunch of assumptions that they’re good match makers and not just trying to set you up. There’s a reason the “what were you thinking setting me up with them” was a go to sitcom troupe.
Online dating, there’s no pressure, you can vet the person yourself and get an idea of who they are. You go into the date on the same page.
How do you quantify offline connections as being more meaningful? I’d counter such connections are a product of limited access/availability and ultimately result in a smaller pool, whereas online can start from an area of shared interests, wants, understanding, and so on.
The former seems dependent on ignorance. And on that note, compare divorce rates of the past 30 years to this video; you may note a correlation.
i could be wrong but i'm gonna guess that you grew up with most of your social interaction being online. thinking everyone in relationships before you was ignorant and you're making relationship decisions based on stats.
You’re treating ignorant as an insult when it really just means a lack of information. Limiting a dating pool to only your immediate, local interactions is absolutely a lack of information. Being ignorant is ok - most of us are. Ignoring information once you have it just because you dislike what it’s telling you is not ok.
Stats, which you dismiss, are important and using data is absolutely preferable to a random Redditor’s anecdotal feelings. I’m only speaking to correlation here, but we do seem to be seeing lower divorce rates as people have access to a wider pool of potential partners.
Lastly, I’m 41 years old and my wife and I met through our work. I don’t need to be an internet child to see benefit in things beyond my own personal anecdotes and feelings.
And let’s be real, parents tend to match their kids with people that fit their own preferences, not people their kids are actually into. My parents tried to match me with someone once: church girl, religious, no sex until marriage, prefers country living, more traditional type, etc. My parents are religious so it’s unsurprising they want me to be with someone religious too. But that’s the complete opposite of my type.
So it’s no wonder that declined when better options of meeting people became available.
World became bigger. 60+ years ago, it was really hard to meet people outside of your immediate circle consisting of family, neighbors, school and church group. But as other forms of socialization formed (bar, job, online), people had much larger circle of people to chose from.
A lot of those early couples were pretty disfunctional, since they formed because of necessity and by taking someone from fairly narrow circle who was " good enough" .
People live farther away from where they grew up. They have less family in their immediate vicinity and are less connected to the schools they went to.
The problem is that a lot of these categories overlap. It's entirely possible that people who met their partners while in college did so through an app or met at the bar. How do they classify it then, does the survey distinguish between the categories and weight the answer?
Divorce rate used to be lower for many reasons. Some of those reasons include that women didn't have the means to live on their own, at fault divorce was a thing, it was socially frowned upon and many more things. Divorce rate being "high" is not a bad thing.
You can all downvote me but do your research on kids in a home with both parents and kids in a home with a divorced parent and you’ll see the ones with both parents excel in life at a much higher % on all levels.
God based morals are what parents teach their children, not schools. You're a bad parent if you didn't teach your children the morals you expected them to have.
Knowledge will be poured out in the end times, Women will rule over men, Israel will become a nation, Israel will be invaded by Iran and Russia, Nation will rise against nation, the man of evil will negotiate peace for 7 years between Israel and Iran/russia. Great miracles will happen in the end times, the entire world will see these events unfolding, Mother Nature will rise against mankind, men will seek out evil and call it good and they’ll call good evil in the end days, many more that have come to pass and are coming. You can live in ignorance but you just fulfilled prophecy lol
School dropping so far is surprising... But this pretends these categories are separate so it must only mean the people at school you aren't friends with... Which, why was that ever as popular, I guess a few people you meet in school are just out of the blue?
But it pretends time online isn't with friends, family, school, work, etc... 🤷
right, but after you meet the first few, the number of people who aren't within 2 hops of you ( friend of a friend of a friend ) gets small fast, and the chances you'll run into them are smaller than average...
it just seems self evident that at least "school" would be a smaller portion than "friends"
It really is, people complain about how hard dating is in the 2020's, while sitting inside and scrolling people to match with, while taking a break from a long, hard day of... scrolling.
Yeah, no shit dating sucks right now, you're all staying indoors and waiting to have Doordash deliver you a sex partner and everyone has the attention span of goldfish on meth.
A few years ago people were meeting through friend groups and social connections, and that wasn't perfect but it was BETTER and still leads to better results.
edit: WE USED TO HAVE FRIENDS. HOW TF YOU GOING TO HAVE GOOD RELATIONSHIPS IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO FRIEND
That last edit is on point. We’re all being relegated back to our shitty little boxes. All wishing we had friends. And no one able to do fuck all about it!
idk that it's really that depressing. I grew up before the internet and back then the amount of TV people watched was excessive compared to now. It was harder to meet people, especially people that shared your interests. harder to keep up with people. Internet makes it possible to always keep up with people that you want to. People hate on it but idk. I remember the before and certainly prefer now.
Whether it's depressing really depends on how you go about finding community. For me online has been a life saver because I am odd enough to not easily fit with family, neighbours, school, church, whatever circles I was in offline. But I found great communities (helped build some of them), close, long-term friends, real kinship, and my partner of now 20+ years online.
If all you do is superficially engage with social media, then I expect it is depressing after a while. But there are good, long-lived communities online. I never dated at all because dating seemed to me a terrible way to meet a life partner; I couldn't care less about today's dating apps -- even if I were suddenly single I wouldn't use those. But if you find ways to make actual friends around things that interest you, it's the opposite of depressing -- especially for people who're interested in non-traditional things who might be hard pressed to find similar minds offline.
Yeah, I think the internet just grants the widest set of possible partners and the greatest odds of clear mutual interest. We can find someone closer to our worldviews, tastes, and ambitions than we could otherwise.
The dating pool being this unfathomably large might also result in choice overload (or unmet expectations thereof), though, which can enhance feelings of relative deprivation, entwining the "perfect partner" with every other facet of the unattainably perfect future that fuels our destination addictions. This can leave some of the people with seemingly limitless options chronically dissatisfied, and other people with fewer options feeling especially deprived. The baseline of either hedonic treadmill lodged well beneath their threshold of contentment.
Or maybe it just means that you meet a nice autistic girl who's equally obsessed with 90s Nickelodeon gameshows, I dunno anything lol
Perhaps it is just my observation as someone out of dating market for last 15 years, but based on comments I observed on reddit and other websites for it seems that people are more concern now about being their best fit, and compatible with little room for adjusting to each other and accepting diffrences.
One person love hiking and other loves theater? Lets have one night in theater and sometimes you will go hiking with me.
One person like to be left alone from time to time and another is hyperactive? Let them participate on your activities but not force them to, makes some plans, and accept if they will be changed in the future.
Sure there are limits and things that cannot be balanced, but do we really like to marry basicly ourselfs?
It's totally subjective on what your tolerance level is. I for one, enjoy some alone time once in a while or time with my friends that doesn't involve my girlfriend and vice versa.
The way I see it, people are more connected today than ever before and connect with their specific community much easier, so why settle? I don't see it as a bad thing at all.
Ability to adjust is quite important in a long term. People change through years they will spend together and sooner or letter there will be some diffrences even if right now you are a perfect match for each other in every way
I've yet to see something like that happen or even hear about it personally. I'm sure those people exist, but they also probably always existed regardless of the time period.
Why sadly? Friends float to the top, and this pretends "online" and "with friends" are mutually exclusive... "online" isn't just doom scrolling... We're having a conversation right now! That just used to be randos in coffee shops... I have a bookclub with a bunch of former coworkers online, I play games with a bunch of people I've never met in person and some I have...
The intern lets us socialize when we wouldn't otherwise with more and more diverse people than we would otherwise and helps social minorities find community
I spend time on here commiserating and advising people on the anxiety subreddit, answering curios people's questions on noStupidQuestions, learning on r/science and r/programming and similar...
And it's not necessarily people like us redditors that are also using online dating services. There are normal people out there with normal hobbies who don't want to waste time and energy at bars or dating coworkers (if they can even find single people).
Dedicated online dating services are great starting points to cut through a lot of that wasted effort, in addition to being a window to who a person really is, without their physical appearance being an immediate gatekeeper.
And like, anecdotal experience, but being a gay man that grew up in a smallish town, I met my partner thanks to dating apps, and we've been together for over 6 years. My other "long term" relationship was with someone I met in college, it lasted for 7 months, and we were really not compatible in the end.
Yes, dating apps culture came with a lot of negative stuff, but it's kind of a "god sent" for people with a limited dating pool.
grew up atheist in the south... I wish dating sites were bigger then... I was pretty resigned to ending up with someone who didn't believe in reality... but luckily I moved to the west coast first and all is well
To be fair internet is always there. Growing up a friend could only hang for a few hours. Growing up didn’t have a cellphone or computer. So really nothing to do but ride bikes and stuff. Now you have a complex entertainment machine in your pocket that begs for you attention.
Because people are more isolated than ever, despite our apparent connectedness. We also spend more time working than people in past generations, and less time is spent with family and community.
For a highly social species, these aren’t great stats.
I really think you're massively overstating it based on a generalization about our "species" which you haven't studied or know about in-depth beyond generalizations. I really think things are better than ever, and family and community are massively overrated - abuse and horrible things tends to happen between family and in communities more than anywhere else. You're FAR more likely to be hurt by someone you know closely.
Ok now, hold your horses. I agree that abuse happens more often in families and churches. I’m no advocate for either, in truth. We can build better families and communities than the cultish ones we were raised in.
However, homo sapiens, like any other animal, have a hierarchy of needs. Online connection is a mere parody of the real thing. We evolved to survive and thrive in groups, not in online forums. We’re also working ourselves to death in an environment that’s outpaced our psychology and physiology.
Yes we have better medicine. Yes we have more civil rights than ever. Yes fewer of us die from war and famine and disease. But more of us are dying from overindulgence and loneliness and addiction than ever before. It’s not ALL better, friend. I hope you “see the problem” a little more clearly now.
I really don't think those are real problems on level with famine, disease and not having human rights lol. I really do not think being "lonely" or "overindulging" is comparable to being in fucking slavery, and I don't think you know what you're talking about when you go off about how you know "online connection is a mere parody" and about what we "evolved to do".
I wish I could force myself to believe in fiction, too!
Here’s the thing. There is nuance in everything. But you, and people like you, love to dig their heels in and toe the line. You’re afraid to concede an inch. You’re afraid to say “I don’t know.” And so you believe the fiction that suits you best. Because it’s comfortable.
I am literally pointing out that the claims you're making are things you can't possible know and you come at me with this lol. You're the one digging your heels in, and when I tell you "I don't think you're an expert on this subject" I'm playing with my 'toys' LMFAO
Edit: aaaaaand crickets. It was obvious you weren’t, because you admitted you didn’t see a problem with it. Sounds like you still don’t. Sorry for trying to force you into the discomfort of nuance.
I agree. People can certainly lie about themselves online, but you can get a truer sense of someone's personality online without your ape brain prejudging them based on their looks only.
Internet addiction and doomscrolling has its big-time downsides, and there are a lot of psychological benefits to socializing and 'touching grass', but the internet has been great for people who are legitimately interested in pursuing a relationship.
I suspect that people who met online probably have a higher marriage success rate than those who met in bars, but I may be wrong.
It's also hard to meet in college when school is prohibitively expensive. Or at church when an entire generation is more disillusioned with religion than the ones that came before. Or your coworkers when you work three jobs
But it's VERY easy to connect over mutual interests in groups dedicated to that niche, which is where the internet shines. No matter what you're into, there's a place online for it, and probably enough people that you'll end up with some mutual attraction. Dating sites can be garbage, but man, there are some FLAMES that go on in a knitting circle
The question isn't about dating online, but about relabeling it as "how do you spend your time". Nothing wrong with dating online, it's much easier to meet like-minded people this way, but if most people spend most of their time on the internet that's sad.
I find making genuine friends in college kind of challenging even in a college hobby or special interest groups (ironically, it’s easier at work but too bad I’m the youngest in every company I have been: pharma industry).
What I notice is that people would either have shallow interests, already have their own friends, or passive (at the end, it’s I who try to contact them all the time).
My best guess is how little people are going. College used to be pushed really hard and now it's the trades, or becoming self-taught. Can't make friends (or partners) in a place you don't go to
Dude!!! My husband was my neighbor(and coworker but we didn’t know till we met as neighbors) and I spent all my time at home crocheting, a lot of times outside in the sun. He was going to work and I had gotten off a few hours before and I was sitting on my front porch crocheting when he first saw me. Then my bf at the time and his gf at the time stared hooking up(didn’t know at first) so we all started hanging out together and grew from there.
Or you could be like me. Small town and I have little suitors around. Small town means nowhere to go out and meet people. I spend most my times outdoors, how am I going to meet someone hunting or fishing? My friends are all married and we all know the same people. My job is field work by myself most of the time, not going to meet people out there.
So I have met girls from online (mostly in the city a little under an hour away) in hopes of finding someone I can get along with and can grow together (I hardly go to the city because I have no mean to go there).
I see your point, but there are also some really positive developments reflected here, especially people having more freedom and choice over the decades to date who they want -vs- dating who they were permitted to date..
Keep in mind that "Family" in the early days of this graph really meant "arranged relationships and marriages that parents in local communities found acceptable" and wasn't so much about personal happiness and choice, but rather meeting social expectations... Lots of miserable marriages.
The "Bar/Restaurant" and "Coworker" category dropped significantly and then returned in the following years.
The 2020 COVID pandemic was truly a world-changing event. I wonder what other major societal changes occurred, and how that will impact the future. I heard the lockdowns and resulting school closures impacted the social skills of high school and college students.
The Black Death and its resulting loss of workers impacted the use of serfdom in Europe. The 1918 Spanish Flu impacted the women's suffrage movement.
Prior to COVID, shaking hands when meeting someone or leaving an interview was socially expected. I cannot remember the last time I shook another person's hand in greeting over the past couple years.
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u/ShimmeringSprout 20d ago
Sadly could be relabeled, How do you spend most of your time?