2023 Dec
How couples meet
Every year or so a chart goes around showing how American couples met, decade by decade since 1950: online rising, everything else falling, and one other line, bars and restaurants, rising alongside it. I had seen it many times before I read the paper it came from.
The chart comes from How Couples Meet and Stay Together, the survey run at Stanford by Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben Thomas and Sonia Hausen, and it is landmark work. But on page eight the authors note something the picture never shows: the apparent rise in meeting at bars and restaurants after 2010 is, in their words, due entirely to couples who met online and then had their first in-person meeting at a bar. Exclude them, and bars have been declining as a place to meet since 1995. The caveat is in the text; the image is what travels.
So our relationship science team went back to the original survey data, 6,519 couples, and redrew the chart with the bar-and-restaurant category cleaned so that nobody who met online is counted twice. Eden Gibson did the work. Professor Rosenfeld kindly pointed us to the smoothing he had used: lowess for every category except online, which takes a five-year moving average so that the discontinuity of the graphical web in 1995 survives.
The corrected chart went to the front page of Reddit in December 2023 and has been copied around the internet every year since. Two reactions dominate: the future is depressing, and I am glad I met my partner before dating apps. It is rare to find such widely used products so widely disliked. I hope we can change that.