Couples who met online, for example through social media, appear to enjoy more stable marriages, according to a study that analyzed data from 19,000 Americans who married between 2005 and 2012.
The study shows that people who prefer the Internet for dating tend to be slightly older, wealthier and more educated.
In this group, 94% of marriages were still valid when the survey ended in 2012, compared to 92% in the offline group. The difference is small, but it remained statistically significant even after factors such as age, income, religion and income were taken into account.
The study was funded by online dating company eHarmony, but the data were analyzed by independent biostatisticians at Harvard, who made it a condition of publishing all the study data even if it negatively affected the company. The research is published in the peer-reviewed American journal PNAS.
“We were surprised to find that online dating was associated with better [marriage] outcomes,” John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, eHarmony’s scientific advisor and first author of the paper, told Nature.com.
"The effects we found are small, but the surprising thing is that we found such effects," he commented.
However, given that the research was based on volunteers who agreed to complete an online questionnaire, and may not constitute a representative sample of the general population, the study's conclusions cannot be considered definitive.
But it's certainly interesting: Of the 19,000 volunteers, 35% reported meeting their spouse online. That may seem like a relatively small percentage, but it's more than meeting through friends, school, and work combined.
Only 45% of the volunteers in the online group met their spouse through online dating services (eHarmony, Match, Plenty of Fish, Yahoo Personal and others) while the rest had met on social networks such as Facebook, or even through online games, blogs and chat rooms.
The study shows that online dating is at least as successful as dating through traditional means.
However, it is not enough to prove that it is preferable to choose the Internet. The differences identified may be due to the fact that people who prefer the Internet tend, for some unrelated reason, to remain faithful to their marriage.
The biggest limitation of the study, however, is that it was based on online questionnaires that relatively few users agreed to complete. Who knows? Perhaps people who are willing to fill out questionnaires on online dating services are also more willing to participate in online surveys.
