Data is Beautiful

Married 35 years. Met online in the 80s. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, just like any other method.

It's interesting to follow each line and see how time has affected it. I noted the "Work" line and how it goes up as women move into the workplace. Also how "Family", "Neighbor", and "Grade School" drop some as it became more normal for people to move away from their hometowns for careers or college.

It could be that. I'm noticing now that the study I linked has a note about a sampling error they made:

Self-identified LGB adults were oversampled in HCMST 2017, and therefore remain oversampled in subsequent waves (2020, 2022). the weights (W1_WEIGHT_COMBO, W2_COMBO_WEIGHT, and W3_COMBO_WEIGHT) correct for this oversample.

So another possibility is that the data used for the graph is wrong because of a big correlation between sexual orientation and preference for online dating and it was made before this was corrected.

I don't think the figures are intuitively implausible, mostly I'm just bothered by the apparent lack of any way to confirm the authenticity of the graph and its relationship to the source material, or get an authoritative answer to the question of how prevalent online dating is.

One reason to doubt them though, the other article I linked says that as of 2022

About half of those under 30 (53%) report having ever used a dating site or app

Which is the demographic that uses them the most. So it doesn't make sense that more people would have met their current partner through a dating app than have ever used one.

I’d believe 60% of couples that met this year met online.

I think there's a question of denominator, rather than percentage, involved here.

What happens when you have a pre-online standard of 100 new interactions a year in a population of 100k single-and-looking-to-mingle daters. Then you introduce dating apps, and you've still got the base-load 100 new interactions happening normally, but now you've got apps which allow you to make thousands of interactions a month rather than a hundred a year.

Now a hundred of those power-users on Grinder all start meeting up and fucking online. 100 unique combinations gets you 4950 "couples that met" in a year. Yeah, the "met up" only lasted for the duration of a naked high-five, but its points on the board!

Compare that to 100 couples that meets outside the app, but are doing it at the more stately pace of once-a-month (so, 3 times in 100 days). rather than as fast as they can swipe through the app. 300 unique "met ups" by comparison. Kinda high by historical standards but infintessimal to the ass-slapping orgy of dating the online community allows.

As someone who watches friends on these apps go on dates two or three times a week, but never settle down (because the focus of these apps is hooking up, not settling down, and the system is engineered to keep you engaged and swiping) I put forward the hypothesis that "How Couples Met" isn't seeing a decline in non-app interactions but an enormous surge among a particular rarified group of power users milling their way through the library of potential hook-ups online.

I'd also posit that some number of these hook-ups are purely artificial (bot accounts, catfishing, onlyfans promotions, or other phony profiles) that exist purely to encourage lonely people to engage with the system and don't actually signify human-to-human interactions. As evidence of this, I'd point you to restaurants using dating apps to dupe users into becoming customers.

Unclear what study that is referencing, but it's notable that Michael Rosenfeld is also the first listed principle investigator in the study referenced in the OP, likely part of the same project, since they list updates for every few years (How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST) 2017, 2020, 2022, United States). Also unclear who compiled the graph or where it was originally published. I want to reiterate that this study itself seems to very much not line up with the graph, unless I'm misreading it very badly.

The BBC article is about a book, Modern Romance, and the book makes a claim that 35% of Americans met their spouses online ("respondents who married between 2005 and 2012"). This checks out with the cited source study, which makes an identical claim, though there's reason to be suspicious of it since it was funded by eHarmony. The scope there is a little different than "all couples", but it's still a very different number than what is in either this article's graph, or in the OP graph, which are very different from each other as well (saying the number reached 70% by 2009 vs saying it reached 60% by 2020. I would think that if these graphs are genuinely based on research by Michael Rosenfeld that they would at least check out with each other.

Here's what I think is probably going on here: people working for the marketing departments of dating apps fabricate bogus graphs, falsely attribute their source to real studies, and push them on social media to go viral. Then people writing articles like the one you linked about the subject copy paste those images without checking them, because it's just a fluff piece for a recently published book and they don't have much time to spend on it.

Where did you originally find the OP image?

This is for same sex couples which for a large variety of societal reasons likely wont reflect the dating scene among the average population, which skews heavily hetero.