The majority of Americans still meet their spouse offline — say, at work, school, or through friends. But as any single can attest, online dating is rapidly becoming the norm. In fact, one-third of marriages in the U.S. now begin online, according to a 2013 study commissioned by eHarmony.
That’s good advertising fodder for dating sites — but how do those relationships fare after online profiles have been deactivated and reality sets in?
To answer this, study author Adita Paul analyzed data from a nationally representative survey of 4,002 people, called “How Couples Meet and Stay Together.” Her goal: to determine whether the couples’ meeting venue affected their odds of success.
As it turns out, the way you meet your partner may influence whether you part company down the road. Over the course of the study, eight percent of married couples who met online either separated or divorced, versus just two percent of those who met offline. And the online-dating effect was even stronger for courting couples: Nearly a third of dating couples who’d met online split in the year after the survey, versus 23 percent of people in relationships that blossomed offline.