Why Meeting Online May Lead to Less Loving Relationships

Over the last two decades, the way we meet new romantic partners has massively changed. While up to the 2000s, almost everyone would find their partners in real life (e.g., at work, at parties, while doing hobbies or sports), nowadays an ever-increasing number of people rely on online dating to find suitable partners. Psychological research has yet to keep up with this changing dating reality, and more research is needed on how online dating affects relationships.

A new study on the effects of meeting partners online

A new study entitled “Meeting partners online is related to lower relationship satisfaction and love: Data from 50 countries,” just published in the scientific journal Telematics and Informatics, now focuses on the question of whether meeting partners online affects relationship quality compared to meeting partners offline (Kowal and co-workers, 2025). The research team, led by scientist Marta Kowal from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Wrocław in Poland, analysed data from 50 different countries, including the U.S., Australia, all South American countries, and many African, Asian, and European countries. By including so many countries, the scientists solved a key problem of previous studies on how relationships start. Many of these studies only asked volunteers in one or a few Western countries, but did not create a representative worldwide database.

Overall, more than 6,600 people in relationships volunteered to participate in the study. The main question of the study was whether meeting a partner offline or online affects the intensity of experienced love and the overall satisfaction with the relationship. To this end, the scientists asked the volunteers who participated in the study to fill out several standardised psychological questionnaires. Moreover, some basic information about the volunteers, like age and gender, was collected.

What did the researchers find?

Overall, the volunteers were aged between 18 and 73 years, and roughly half of them were men and the other half women. 84% had met their partners in real life and 16% online. The fact that there were fewer people who found their partners online than people who found their partners offline was likely caused by the fact that the older volunteers may have found their partners at a time before online dating was common. Overall, individuals who met their partners offline reported higher relationship satisfaction and were more in love with their partners than those who met online. This effect was stronger in men than in women. The effect was strongest in people older than 33 years of age. The effects persisted even when the scientists used complex statistical models to control for all sorts of potential influence factors, showing that they are very robust.

Takeaway: Relationships that start online may be unhappier

Taken together, relationships that start online tend to be less happy and less loving than those that start offline, according to the study results. The scientists offer several explanations for this important finding. First, people who date online may be confused by choice overload and focusing too much on physical attractiveness and not on character, which may lead to bad partner choices. Also, people often lie about their age, height, and other factors in online dating. Starting a relationship based on lies may be a bad start, however. Last but not least, people who meet in real life may have more shared interests than those who meet online, since they often meet due to these interests in the first place.

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