Does Online Dating Make It Easier to Date?

Source: Photo by Yogas Design on Unsplash

One of the things many people find appealing about the idea of online dating is that there is a much bigger pool of potential partners available online. In other words, you have the opportunity to meet people you might never otherwise encounter in person.

So does this necessarily mean that online dating leads people to have a much larger number of sexual and/or relationship partners? Not necessarily.

Is Online Dating an Efficient Way to Meet People?

It turns out that online dating might not be as efficient as you think. This conclusion comes from a recent study of Tinder users, which found that matching with a large number of people actually translates to surprisingly few in-person dates.

In this study, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science, researchers surveyed 269 young adults (average age of 22) in Norway who were either current or former users of the online dating app Tinder. Participants were asked about the number of matches, meet-ups, hook-ups, and long-term relationships they have experienced through the app.

The average number of matches reported by men and women thus far was relatively high: 111 and 124, respectively. (Note that these numbers were not significantly different across gender.) However, current users of the app who reported being single had even more matches: 148 for men and 177 for women, on average.

Despite having so many matches, the average number of Tinder meet-ups reported was just 2 for men and women alike. Even when looking only at current users who were single, the average number of meet-ups was 3.

How Many Matches Does It Take to Get One Hookup or Date?

In terms of hookups, just 1 in 5 reported having at least one sexual hookup. Put another way, 80 percent of users never had sex with anyone they met on Tinder. Of those who did hook up, 65 percent reported one partner, 15 percent had 2 partners, and 20 percent had more than 2. As for relationships, just 1 in 4 reported having met someone they were potentially interested in having a long-term relationship with.

The overall pattern was such that for every 57 matches, there was just 1 meet-up (put another way, less than 2 percent of matches resulted in an in-person meeting). For about every 5 meet-ups, 1 hookup or romantic relationship developed. If you do the math, you'll see on average that 285 online matches occur for each in-person sexual/romantic relationship. No wonder so many people report finding online dating to be exhausting.

It’s also worth noting that the researchers found that most people who had hookups through Tinder were also having hookups outside of the app—and, for the majority of them, Tinder only added one extra partner. So even for people who were successful hooking up offline, going online didn’t necessarily translate to that much more sex.

Takeaways

Of course, there are some important limitations of this research. One is that it only explored one app (Tinder) and we know that there are many, many others—and it’s possible that different apps might have different hit rates. Also, this work only looked at young adults and the researchers did not look at potential differences across sexual orientation. Rates of hooking up might look very different if, for example, researchers were to compare gay men on Grindr to heterosexual men on Tinder.

That said, these results will be somewhat surprising to many people in that they challenge the popular idea that online dating/hookup apps necessarily lead to substantial increases in sexual behavior.

The authors of this study conclude, "Dating apps such as Tinder are merely a new arena for evolved short-term sexual behavior, rather than a facilitator of new sexual behaviors. Given the current results, we suggest that Tinder indeed seems to provide new sexual opportunities, but mostly for a very small minority … For those who are most successful outside of Tinder, Tinder adds few extra short-term sexual encounters.”