The Dating World of Tomorrow (article) | Christian Pundit

The Dating World of Tomorrow (article)

(Link): The Dating World of Tomorrow (article)

… If you look at Figure 1 in this 2012 paper on how Americans meet their mates, you basically see that many of non-collegiate modes of meeting a partner have been in free-fall since the 1990s. Here’s how the authors frame it:

From about 1960 to 1990 … neighborhood and church had a roughly steady influence over how heterosexual couples met, with about 10% of heterosexual couples meeting as neighbors and about 7% meeting in or through houses of worship.

After 2000, neighborhood and church went in to steep decline along with most of the other traditional ways of meeting romantic partners.

The post-1995 declines visible in Figure 1 for heterosexual couples in meeting through friends, meeting through coworkers, meeting through family, meeting in school, meeting in the neighborhood, and meeting in or through church are all statistically significant declines.

College has also dipped since 2000 as a place to meet, but only modestly; bars and restaurants have ticked upward, and the internet, predictably, has exploded.

This trend may not be a bad thing for marriage as an institution: So far, the data on unions formed online looks pretty encouraging, and it’s possible that the internet is helping to compensate for the eclipse of other forms of community, rather than contributing directly to those other forms’ eclipse.

But it seems fair to assume that there are still a lot of people who would prefer to meet their future spouse the old fashioned way — through initial flesh-and-blood encounters embedded in a larger pre-existing social network.

If that’s your preference, the university campus is one of the few flesh-and-blood arenas that seems to be holding its own as a place to form lasting attachments.

So for those Americans who do attend college, the case for taking advantage of its denser-than-average social landscape might actually get stronger as the non-virtual alternatives decline.

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http://christianpundit.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/the-dating-world-of-tomorrow-article/

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