Or ask yourself how cynical your own line of inquisition is?
Yes, church groups are probably going to be a bit more 'pro-marriage' than some others. I guess the 'anti-marriage' people?
And?
Everything in the press is presented by someone with some perspective they want to highlight.
And the link you referred us to states probably what to most of us a bit obvious - that celebrities divorce more often - but which is thoughtful to have in numbers.
And?
So, what specifically is wrong with the study in question?
Because I think it seems helpful.
I buy that online dating may not be quite as effective at forming 'long term relationships' as otherwise, and that it might be worth looking at in more detail. It could maybe be a matter of 'distance relationships'. Or possibly those individuals may have been less likely to be married in the first place?
I'll wager 5x more people are going to be interested in this issue than 'crypto currency' for example.
It's a group that took statistics from Wikipedia articles of famous people to then run the headline "rock and rollers twice as likely to divorce." That headline is misleading. They didn't study rock and rollers, they studied celebrities.
This older survey similarly has them playing fast and loose with the statistics to get a flashy headline. In their own data it's clear that online dating has cannibalized dating at bars, and shares a near identical divorce rate - 20% vs 19%. In other words the survey is a nothingburger. All it shows is a shift in dating channels. But that's not the headline they pushed.
If their clickbait strategy isn't clear to you yet, don't take it from me. They claim this is their goal on their own website: "Time and again our research department has injected reality and hard evidence into this debate with eye catching research which the media have broadcast."
The headline 'couples meet xxx ...' is absolutely not 'clickbait' moreover, the notion that 'bar dating' and 'online dating' might have some similarities is reasonable, but beyond requirement to include in a report a few sentences long especially given that it's nuanced.
Since most, even 'respected' journalism is a bit clickbaity, this is well within normative editorialization.
Hence the likely bigotry on the part of people ventilating about the origin of the data.
>The study controlled for the decade in which couples met, age, gender and occupation, and online couples were still more likely to divorce in the early years.
Something tells me that these controls weren’t enough to account for differences between the populations that use online dating platforms and those that are less likely to.
Agree, one easy additional control would be for whether someone has ever used an online dating platform (may be a meaningful difference within the non-online couples group).
This means almost nothing to me.
The rates are not terribly different. Perhaps couples that meet through friends and family feel more pressure to stay together due to social pressure of said friends and family - but are actually in an unhappy marriage.
> But after overcoming the first few rocky years that many marriages experience, the way couples initially met doesn't make much of a difference — at the workplace, online, at a bar or through family all have divorce rates hovering around 20%.
And this perhaps bolsters my first point.. perhaps it’s a good thing that the marriages end faster.
“Perhaps couples that meet through friends and family feel more pressure to stay together”
My first thought. When your support networks/social networks are intertwined there’s a big disincentive to split up, knowing it’s going to have a big and possibly damaging impact well beyond just splitting with a partner.
Also - bringing your families and friends together may add more friction if you wouldn’t have met offline.
Speaking personally, my relationships have lasted longer when a friendship evolves into more, than when I've jumped headlong into a relationship with a stranger I met online.
Any tips on navigating that? I’m always worried because I value the friendship so much and don’t want to ruin it… but if feelings develop they’re pretty undeniable. It’s high stakes when you don’t know if the feelings are reciprocated.
I have no advice for you, internet stranger, because every situation is different. In my experience, feelings that are reciprocated will make themselves known -- but I have always been sensitive to the emotions of others. Over the years, I've noticed when several pairs of friends were clearly smitten but aren't aware, and I've given them the nudge they needed. I've discretely asked a trusted friend of a friend and been told to not bother. I've declared my adoration and ruined a friendship -- which changed my cost/benefit analysis and now I find it easier to get over an unrequited crush. But I've also broached the topic and not blown up the relationship. You can't control how a person will react, but the better you know them, the better you can predict it.
On the other hand... I met my spouse online. We lived in different countries, so it was a while before we met. That was at least 13 or 14 years ago now.
The bigger difference between us and "online dating" was that we met playing a game - doing a shared activity. Everyone, online or not, is a stranger at some point.
1) online dating is more goal orientated. You are looking for a potential mate, possibly because (certainly years ago when these (ex) couples met) they feel the biological clock ticking and want to settle down have kids etc. So potentially these people are rushing into marriage quicker than say two people that met at uni?
2) background. My current partner and I met online. We have extremely different backgrounds[1]. If you meet someone irl, you probably share a job, an education, a hobby. You are likely to have more in common, and a similar cultural grounding.
[1]Shes Spanish, so maybe I'm extrapolating too much from that.
The dating apps have changed from intro - meet - evaluate - date - marry to swipe left | swipe right. It surprises they even last 3 years considering the attention span in swiping left and right.
I wish they would have controlled for children. If families started from dating apps are breaking up at a greater rate than normal then we should have a discussion about it.
I almost see this as a positive thing, if true / confirmed. Divorce is not by itself a bad thing. My life definitely improved in many ways after I divorced. I probably remained in a somewhat toxic environment longer than I should have because of social pressure.
Some of their other research: "Rock and rollers twice as likely to divorce" https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/rock-n-rollers-tw...
Hopefully next they will look into the impact the Devil's Lettuce has on marriage; or Harry Potter.