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Abstract
This article explores how the efficiency of Internet search is changing the way Americans find romantic partners. We use a new data source, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey. Results show that for 60 years, family and grade school have been steadily declining in their influence over the dating market. In the past 15 years, the rise of the Internet has partly displaced not only family and school, but also neighborhood, friends, and the workplace as venues for meeting partners. The Internet increasingly allows Americans to meet and form relationships with perfect strangers, that is, people with whom they had no previous social tie. Individuals who face a thin market for potential partners, such as gays, lesbians, and middle-aged heterosexuals, are especially likely to meet partners online. One result of the increasing importance of the Internet in meeting partners is that adults with Internet access at home are substantially more likely to have partners, even after controlling for other factors. Partnership rate has increased during the Internet era (consistent with Internet efficiency of search) for same-sex couples, but the heterosexual partnership rate has been flat.
Keywords
couples, dating, Internet, search, thin markets
One underappreciated problem in the scholarly understanding of mate selection is the problem of search. Simply, how do people actually find mates and romantic partners? Many millions of adults in the United States are single, and presumably seeking a romantic partner. Of these millions of single adults, any one adult can only ever personally know some small number, a tiny fraction of the pool of available single persons. Even in a local neighborhood, most potential mates would be unknown to any individual unless the population density of the neighborhood was very low.
In the classic economic and game theoretic models of partner matching and mate selection (Becker 1991; Gale and Shapley 1962), the relative value of every potential mate is assumed to be already known or can easily be determined (Todd and Miller 1999).1 The actual way Americans search for and find romantic partners has been shrouded in mystery because of a lack of appropriate data. Recent studies on how couples meet have been done in France and Holland (Bozon and Heran 1989; Kalmijn and Flap 2001), but these...