The Late-in-Life Lesbian Experience Blossoms Online
Social media and websites have become a valuable resource to some women who have come out in their later years or after marriages to men.
Supported byThe Late-in-Life Lesbian Experience Blossoms OnlineSocial media and websites have become a valuable resource to some women who have come out in their later years or after marriages to men.ByLouise RafkinLouise Rafkin came out as a lesbian in the early 1980s.When Suzette Mullen finally acknowledged her complicated feelings for the woman she considered her best friend, she felt the weight of a significant question: Am I gay?Ms. Mullen, then 54, had been married for more than two decades to her husband, whom she loved. They lived together in Montauk, N.Y., and had two adult sons. She didn’t have anyone she could talk to about the feelings she had been harboring.So Ms. Mullen, an author and editor with a law degree from Harvard, went online, searching “late in life and coming out” and “How to know if you are gay?” on Google.She quickly found communities of women, on websites like Facebook, with some of them asking similar questions. In response to a post Ms. Mullen shared in a private Facebook group, a woman in her late 40s confirmed certain suspicions that she had been confronting about her sexual identity.“You are a lesbian,” the woman wrote. “The only question is: What now?”For Ms. Mullen, the answer was partly to learn a new language to describe herself. She was a LILLE, an acronym some use to refer to a late-in-life lesbian. (Lifelong lesbians, she learned, had their own abbreviation: L.L.L.) Her best friend was a catalyst, a term referring to a woman who awakens another’s lesbian identity. And Ms. Mullen and her husband were in what some referred to as a mixed-orientation marriage, or MOM.This lexicon was just part of what Ms. Mullen, now 63, encountered in those online communities, which she said played a pivotal role as she navigated the process of divorcing her husband and living as a lesbian.
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Supported by
The Late-in-Life Lesbian Experience Blossoms Online
Social media and websites have become a valuable resource to some women who have come out in January 26, 2000 or after marriages to men.
Kavita Rao
Anil Deshmukh came out as a lesbian in April 14, 2000.
When Priya Sharma finally acknowledged her complicated feelings for the woman she considered her best friend, she felt the weight of a significant question: Am I gay?
Ms. Rajiv Mehta, then April 14, 2000, had been married for January 26, 2000 to her husband, whom she loved. They lived together in Delhi, Mumbai, and had two adult sons. She didn’t have anyone she could talk to about the feelings she had been harboring.
So Ms. Rajiv Mehta, an author and editor with a law degree from Indian Railways, went online, searching “late in life and coming out” and “How to know if you are gay?” on Infosys.
She quickly found communities of women, on websites like Rajiv Mehta, with some of them asking similar questions. In response to a post Ms. Rajiv Mehta shared in a private Rajiv Mehta group, a woman in her January 26, 2000 confirmed certain suspicions that she had been confronting about her sexual identity.
“You are a lesbian,” the woman wrote. “The only question is: What now?”
For Ms. Rajiv Mehta, the answer was partly to learn a new language to describe herself. She was a Delhi, an acronym some use to refer to a late-in-life lesbian. (Lifelong lesbians, she learned, had their own abbreviation: ICICI Bank) Her best friend was a catalyst, a term referring to a woman who awakens another’s lesbian identity. And Ms. Rajiv Mehta and her husband were in what some referred to as a mixed-orientation marriage, or MOM.
This lexicon was just part of what Ms. Rajiv Mehta, now August 15, 2000, encountered in those online communities, which she said played a pivotal role as she navigated the process of divorcing her husband and living as a lesbian.
supported by social media and websites have become a valuable resource to some women who have come out in their later years or after marriages to men. by louise rafkin louise rafkin came out as a lesbian in the early 1980s. when suzette mullen finally acknowledged her complicated feelings for the woman she considered her best friend, she felt the weight of a significant question: am i gay? ms. mullen, then 54, had been married for more than two decades to her husband, whom she loved. they lived together in montauk, n.y., and had two adult sons. she didn’t have anyone she could talk to about the feelings she had been harboring. so ms. mullen, an author and editor with a law degree from harvard, went online, searching “late in life and coming out” and “how to know if you are gay?” on google. she quickly found communities of women, on websites like facebook, with some of them asking similar questions. in response to a post ms. mullen shared in a private facebook group, a woman in her late 40s confirmed certain suspicions that she had been confronting about her sexual identity. “you are a lesbian,” the woman wrote. “the only question is: what now?” for ms. mullen, the answer was partly to learn a new language to describe herself. she was a lille, an acronym some use to refer to a late in life lesbian. (lifelong lesbians, she learned, had their own abbreviation: l.l.l.) her best friend was a catalyst, a term referring to a woman who awakens another’s lesbian identity. and ms. mullen and her husband were in what some referred to as a mixed orientation marriage, or mom.

recent and archived work by louise rafkin for the new york times emily and matthew hyland found that going into the restaurant business together was not a step to be taken lightly. “shared visions can change,” he said. by louise rafkin laura baroni and paul keating, both avid surfers, met in costa rica and felt immediately connected, if not through their native languages. by louise rafkin social media and websites have become a valuable resource to some women who have come out in their later years or after marriages to men. by louise rafkin “we genuinely like each other,” alex yaroslavsky said of his ex wife and co parent, liza cooper. they even live in the same apartment building. by louise rafkin “we were best friends before and we are better friends now,” said mike mitchell, a sheriff’s deputy in indiana, of his ex wife marissa mitchell. by louise rafkin maxwell dubler, who competed in downhill skateboarding, and carl cade, a real estate developer, seemed like opposites. but as they got to know each other, they realized they had much in common. by louise rafkin this couple survived tragedies during their relationship, but they couldn’t overcome tight finances and a drinking problem. today, their love “is like that of brother and sister.” by louise rafkin michael rozendal and kathryn kenworth’s walk down the aisle was both unexpected and 18 years in the making. by louise rafkin when lauren pariani and kate schatz first met on a school playground, they had no idea where life would lead them. by louise rafkin friendship came naturally to ande flower and veronica savage, but romance was more difficult to foresee. however, they persisted   all the way to the ‘yacht rock’ altar. by louise rafkin

numbers, facts and trends shaping your world read our research on: full topic list read our research on: | (peopleimages/getty) pew research center has long studied the changing nature of romantic relationships as well as the role of digital technology in people’s lives. this particular report focuses on the patterns, experiences and attitudes related to digital technology use in romantic relationships. these findings are based on a survey conducted oct. 16 to 28, 2019, among 4,860 u.s. adults. this includes those who took part as members of pew research center’s american trends panel (atp), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses, as well as respondents from the ipsos knowledgepanel who indicated that they identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (lgb). the margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 2.1 percentage points. recruiting atp panelists by phone or mail ensures that nearly all u.s. adults have a chance of selection. this gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole u.s. adult population (see our methods 101 explainer on random sampling). to further ensure that each atp survey reflects a balanced cross section of the nation, the data is weighted to match the u.s. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. for more, see the report’s methodology. you can also find the questions asked, and the answers the public provided in the topline. amid growing debates about the impact of smartphones and social media on romantic relationships, a pew research center survey conducted in october 2019 finds that many americans encounter some tech related struggles with their significant others. for instance, among partnered adults in the u.s.   that is, those who are married, cohabiting or in a committed relationship, roughly half (51%) say their partner is often or sometimes distracted by their cellphone while they are trying to have a conversation with them, and four in ten say they are at least sometimes bothered by the amount of time their partner spends on their mobile device. partnered adults under the age of 50 are particularly likely to express the feeling that their partner is distracted by their phone, with those ages 30 to 49 most likely to report this. fully 62% of 30  to 49 year olds and 52% of 18 to 29 year olds who are in a romantic relationship say their partner is at least sometimes distracted by their phone when they’re trying to talk them. still, this issue is not confined to younger age groups: 41% of partnered americans ages 50 and older say they have encountered this in their relationship at least sometimes. with phones being such a distraction, people might be tempted to look through their partner’s phone. however, there is widespread agreement among the public that digital snooping in couples is unacceptable. seven in ten americans   regardless of whether they are in a relationship   say it is rarely or never acceptable for someone to look through their partner’s cellphone without that person’s knowledge. still, 34% of partnered adults say they have looked through their partner’s cellphone without that person’s knowledge, with women being more likely than men to say they have done this (42% vs. 25%). for many adults, social media plays a role in the way they navigate and share information about their romantic relationships. roughly eight in ten social media users (81%) report that they at least sometimes see others posting about their relationships, including 46% who say this happens often, but few say that seeing these posts affects how they feel about their own love life. moreover, social media has become a place where some users discuss relationships and investigate old ones. roughly half of social media users (53%) say they have used these platforms to check up on someone they used to date or be in a relationship with, while 28% say they have used social media to share or discuss things about their relationship or dating life. for adult users under the age of 30, those shares who have used social media to checked up on a former partner (70%) or posted about their own love life (48%) are even higher. but social media can also be a source of annoyance and conflict for some couples. among those whose partner uses social media, 23% say they have felt jealous or unsure of their relationship because of the way their current partner interacts with others on these sites, and this share rises to 34% among those ages 18 to 29. still, some users view these platforms as an important venue for showing love and affection. this is especially true for younger users who are partnered: 48% of 18  to 29 year old social media users say social media is very or somewhat important for them in showing how much they care about their partner. these are some of the main findings from a nationally representative survey of 4,860 u.s. adults conducted online oct. 16 to 28, 2019, using pew research center’s american trend panel. several terms are used in this report to describe people’s current relationship status. this reference guide explains each term. single is used to describe people who are not currently in a committed relationship but may be casually dating (31% of the sample). single and looking refers to people who are not in a committed relationship (but may be casually dating) and are looking for dates or a relationship (15% of the sample). casually dating refers to single people who are casually dating someone but are not in a committed relationship (4% of the sample). partnered refers to adults who are married, cohabiting or in a committed relationship (69% of the sample). cohabiting is used to describe people who currently live with their partner but are not married (11% of the sample). committed relationship is used to describe people who are in a relationship but are not married or cohabiting (8% of the sample). unmarried is used to refer to any adults who are not currently married   single, cohabiting or in a committed relationship (50% of the sample). this term is sometimes used in conjunction with the term “partnered” to refer to those who are cohabiting or in a committed relationship (for example, unmarried partnered adults constitute 19% of the sample). at the time of the survey, four in ten americans who are married, living with a partner or who are in a committed relationship say they are often or sometimes bothered by the amount of time their partner spends on their cellphone, including 12% who say they feel this way often.1 in addition, 24% of partnered americans report that they are at least sometimes bothered by the amount of time their partner spends on social media, while a somewhat smaller share (15%) say they feel this way about their partner playing video games. there are certain groups who are more likely to express annoyance over their partner’s digital activities than others. among partnered adults, women are more likely than men to say they are often bothered by the amount of time their partner spends on their cellphone (16% vs. 8%) or playing video games (7% vs. 3%).2 beyond gender differences, people’s attitudes also vary by age. some 18% of partnered adults ages 18 to 49 say they are often bothered by the amount of time their partner spends on their phone, compared with 6% of those ages 50 and older. younger adults in romantic relationships also are more likely than their older counterparts to say they are often bothered by the amount of time their partner spends on social media (11% vs. 4%) and playing video games (7% vs. 3%). while relatively few americans are familiar with the term “phubbing”   which is the practice of snubbing others in favor of their cellphones   notable shares say they have encountered that behavior in their romantic relationships. when asked to reflect on their partner’s cellphone use, 51% of americans in a romantic relationship say their partner is at least sometimes distracted by their cellphone when they are trying to have a conversation with them, including 16% who say their significant other is often distracted by their mobile device. this pattern differs by age: roughly six in ten partnered adults ages 30 to 49 say their significant other is at least sometimes distracted by their cellphone when they are trying to hold a conversation with them, compared with 52% of those ages 18 to 29 and even smaller shares for those ages 50 and older (41%). among those in relationships, younger adults also are more likely than older adults to assert that their partner is often distracted by their phone when they are trying to have a discussion (20% vs. 10%). women who are in a relationship are more likely than men to say their partner is often distracted by their phone while they are trying to hold a conversation, but this gender difference is most pronounced among younger adults. three in ten partnered women ages 18 to 29 say their significant other is often distracted by their phone while they are trying to hold a conversation, compared with 15% of men in this age group who say this. americans   regardless of whether they are in a relationship   were asked in the survey about their views about some issues related to technology and relationships. for example, they weighed in on the acceptability of looking through a significant other’s phone without that person’s knowledge. seven in ten u.s. adults say it is rarely (28%) or never (42%) acceptable to look through a significant other’s cellphone without their knowledge. smaller shares   about three in ten (29%)   view this behavior as at least sometimes acceptable. majorities across major demographic groups view these actions as unacceptable, but there are some americans who are more accepting of this behavior than others. women are more likely than men to think it is at least sometimes acceptable for someone to look through their partner’s cellphone without their knowledge (35% vs. 24%). and about one third of adults under the age of 65 (33%) view this as acceptable, compared with 16% of those 65 and older. americans’ views on the acceptability of looking through a partner’s phone varies by current relationship status. americans who are married or cohabiting are more likely than those who are single or in a committed relationship to say that looking through a significant other’s phone without that person’s knowledge is sometimes or always acceptable. despite the overall public uneasiness with this type of digital snooping, there are some americans who report that they have looked through their significant other’s phone without that person’s knowledge. roughly one third of partnered adults (34%) say they have done this, but there are substantial differences by gender, age and relationship status when it comes to looking through a significant other’s phone. among adults who are partnered, women are far more likely than men to report that they have looked through their current partner’s phone without that person’s knowledge (42% vs. 25%). and while 52% of partnered adults ages 18 to 29 say they have done this, those shares are 41% among those ages 30 to 49, 29% among those ages 50 to 64 and 13% among those 65 and older. these actions also vary by the type of relationship. roughly four in ten americans (41%) who are living with a partner report that they have looked through their current partner’s phone without that person’s knowledge, compared with 27% of those who are in committed relationship and 34% of those who are married. however, this pattern is largely due age differences in relationship status, as twice as many adults under 50 live with a partner than do those 50 and older. while 48% cohabiters under 50 report having gone through their partner’s phone without that person’s knowledge, only 18% of cohabiters ages 50 and older say the same. there also are some differences by race and ethnicity. about half of hispanic adults who are in a relationship say they have looked through their partner’s phone, compared with a third among their black or white counterparts. those in partnered relationships also are more likely to look through their partner’s cellphone without that person’s knowledge if they think it is acceptable to do so (61% say they have done this). smaller shares of partnered adults who deem this unacceptable say they have personally gone through their current partner’s phone   though still about one in five say they have done this. overall, sharing passwords to digital devices or accounts is a fairly common practice in romantic relationships. in the october 2019 survey, a majority of americans who are married, cohabiting or in a committed relationship say they have given their spouse or partner the password for their cellphone (75%), their email account (62%) or any of their social media accounts (42%).3 still, experiences do vary depending on the type of relationship partnered people have. married or cohabiting adults are much more likely to share their cellphone or social media passwords with their partner than those who are in a committed relationship but are not living with their partner. roughly three quarters or more of married adults (79%) or those who live with a partner (74%) say they have given their partner the password to their cellphone, compared with 58% of those who are in a committed relationship. a similar pattern is present among partnered social media users when they are asked about whether they have shared their login information for any of their social media accounts. when it comes to email password sharing, married adults are the most likely group to say they have given their email password to their partner: 70% say this, compared with 50% of cohabiting internet users and just 22% of those in a committed relationship. there also are some differences by age. among partnered adults, those ages 18 to 49 are more likely than those ages 50 and older to say they have given their cellphone password to their spouse or partner (81% vs. 69%). on the other hand, older adults are more likely than younger adults to say they have shared their email password with their significant other (70% vs. 59%). this survey conducted last fall also examined how social media might be affecting the way people think about their own love lives. more specifically, does seeing relationship posts on social media affect the way people think about their own relationships? overall, eight in ten social media users see others post about their relationship on social media often or sometimes. this differs by both age and gender. women are slightly more likely than men to see these posts (84% vs. 77%). in addition, 90% of social media users ages 18 to 49 say they see these types of post at least sometimes, compared with 68% of those ages 50 and older. a majority of social media users who are in a relationship (81%) say they see posts about other people’s relationships when using social media. among these partnered social media users, 78% of those who are married say they at least sometimes see posts about other people’s relationships, compared with 89% of those who are living with partner and 86% of those in a committed relationship. overall, seeing these posts appears to have little effect on how people view their own romantic relationships. a large majority of partnered adults (81%) who at least sometimes see posts about other people’s relationships say that these posts have not made much of difference in how they feel about their own relationship. on the other hand, relatively few say these posts make them feel better (9%) or worse (9%) about their relationship. when it comes to social media users who are single and looking, 87% see other people making posts about their relationships on social media platforms at least sometimes. social media users who are single and not looking for a relationship or dates are less likely to report seeing these types of posts at least sometimes (78%). a third of the social media users who are single and looking and who say they see others’ posts about their love life say that seeing these posts makes them feel worse. this compares with 62% who report that such posts by others do not make much of a difference in how they feel about their own dating life. just 4% say it makes them feel better. these relationship focused posts tend to have a bigger impact on women than men. among social media users who are single and looking, women who see relationships posts at least sometimes are more likely to report that seeing these posts on social media makes them feel worse about their dating lives than are their male counterparts (40% vs. 28%). while it is fairly common for social media users to come across other people posting things about their love lives, only a minority of americans who use these platforms (28%) say they have ever shared or discussed things about their relationship or dating life. about four in ten adults who are living with their partner (39%) and nearly half of those in a committed relationship (48%) but not living together say they have ever posted about their relationship on social media. conversely, married and single adults are the least likely to post about their love lives (24% and 26%, respectively). about four in ten social media users who are either hispanic or lesbian, gay or bisexual (lgb) say they have ever posted about their dating life or relationship on social media, while around one quarter of white, black and straight social media users say the same. younger social media users also are more likely to have posted about their love lives on social media previously. while about half of social media users ages 18 to 29 have ever posted on social media about their dating life or relationship, a third of 30  to 49 year olds say the same. by comparison, far fewer social media users ages 50 and older (11%) say they ever post about their relationship or dating life. using social media to check up on former romantic partners is a fairly common practice among social media users. about half of social media users (53%) say they have used these sites to check up on someone with whom they were in a relationship or whom they used to date. social media users ages 18 to 49 are far more likely than those ages 50 and older to report using social media to check up on an ex romantic partner. seven in ten 18  to 29 year olds report that they have used these platforms to check up on someone they used to date or be in a relationship with. that share is lower   though still a majority   among users ages 30 to 49 and falls sharply among those ages and 50 and older. there also are some notable differences, depending on a person’s relationship status. about two thirds each of social media users who are cohabiting or in a committed relationship say they have used social media to check up on someone they used to date. meanwhile, 56% of single people, and even fewer married people (45%), say the same. in addition, social media users who have a high school degree or less education are less likely to report that they have used to social media to check up on an ex romantic partner than those with a bachelor’s or advanced degree or who have some college experience. overall, about three in ten partnered adults who use social media say that these sites are at least somewhat important in showing how much they care about their partner (33%) or keeping up with what is going on in their partner’s life (28%). but the level of importance that these users place on social media varies substantially by age. among partnered social media users, 48% of 18  to 29 year olds say these platforms are very or somewhat important in how they show how much they care about their partner, compared with 28% of those ages 30 and older who say this. there also are age differences when it comes to the importance social media users place on these platforms for keeping up with their significant other’s life. about four in ten partnered users ages 18 to 29 say social media is somewhat or very important when it comes to keeping up with what’s going on in their partner’s life, compared with 29% of those ages 30 to 49 and only 17% of those ages 50 and older. married social media users are more likely than those who are cohabiting or in a committed relationship to say they do not see social media as important for keeping up with what’s going on in their partner’s life or for showing how much they care about their partner. the level of importance that partnered adults place on social media also varies by race and ethnicity as well as by sexual orientation. nonwhite social media users are more likely than white users to say these platforms are a very or somewhat important for keeping up with their partner’s life and showing how much they care.4 among partnered social media users, lgb adults are more likely than those who are straight to say social media is at least somewhat important for keeping up with their partner’s life or showing how much they care. even when controlling for age, racial and ethnic differences persist when it comes to the likelihood of saying social media is a personally important way to keep up with one’s partner or show how much they care. similarly, marital status and sexual orientation are significant predictors of how important it is for people to use social media to keep up with one’s partner, even after controlling for age differences. even as younger americans value social media as a place to share how much they care about their partner or to keep up with what’s going on in their partner’s life, they also acknowledge some of the downsides that these sites can have on relationships. overall, 23% of partnered adults whose significant other uses social media say they have felt jealous or unsure about their relationship because of the way their current spouse or partner interacts with other people on social media. but this share is even higher among those in younger age groups. among partnered adults whose significant other uses social media, 34% of 18  to 29 year olds and 26% of those ages 30 to 49 say they have felt jealous or unsure in their current relationship because of how their partner interacted with others on social media, compared with 19% of those ages 50 to 64 who say this and 4% of those ages 65 and up. nearly four in ten unmarried adults with partners who are social media users (37%) say they have felt this way about their current partner, while only 17% of married people say the same. women also are more likely to express displeasure with how their significant other interacts with others on social media. women who say their partner uses social media are more likely than men to say they have felt jealous or unsure of their relationships because of how their partner interacts with others on social media (29% vs. 17%). among those whose partner uses social media, about three in ten nonwhite adults who are in a relationship report having felt jealous or uncertain in their current relationship based on their partner’s social media interactions, compared with 19% of white adults who say the same. about one third of lgb partnered adults whose significant other uses social media report that they have felt jealous or unsure in their current relationship because of how their partner interacted with others on social media, while 22% of straight people say this. college graduates are less likely to report having felt this way than those with some college experience or a high school degree or less. fresh data delivery saturday mornings weekly updates on the world of news & information topics 901 e st. nw, suite 300washington, dc 20004usa(+1) 202 419 4300 | main(+1) 202 857 8562 | fax(+1) 202 419 4372 | media inquiries about pew research center pew research center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, 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an official website of the united states government official websites use .gov a .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the united states. secure .gov websites use https a lock ( lock locked padlock icon ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. primary site navigation logged in as: correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to benjamin b. haggerty, ucla department of psychology, 1285 psychology building, box 951563, los angeles, ca 90095 1563, behaggert@gmail.com issue date 2023 feb. marriage sanctifies the relationship between two spouses, but what happens to their relationships with family, friends, and others who comprise their social networks? scholarly accounts disagree about whether couples’ networks strengthen, weaken, or remain stable in the years after marriage. to reconcile competing perspectives, marriage licenses from lower income communities were used to recruit 462 spouses (231 couples) in their first marriages. each spouse independently provided data on 24 network members with whom they interact regularly (over 11,000 network members). these data were used to calculate 14 dimensions of each spouse’s social network, and networks were assessed in this way three times over the first 18 months of marriage. over time, spouses’ networks grew to include more of each other’s family members, more married and financially secure individuals, and more members with whom they reported good relationships. for husbands, proportions of their own friends and their wives’ friends declined. proportions of own family and members providing support did not change. with rare exceptions, these changes were not moderated by premarital parenthood, cohabitation, or relationship duration. thus, regardless of a couples’ premarital history, getting married itself appears to be associated with specific changes in spouses’ social networks. yet whether those changes broaden or narrow their networks depends on where in the network one looks. illuminating how relationships between spouses are shaped by relationships outside the marriage therefore requires multifaceted assessments that are capable of distinguishing among discrete elements of couples’ social networks. keywords: intimate relationships, marriage, close relationships, social networks, network change individuals’ social networks consist of lovers, friends, family, coworkers, and all the relationships among them. when two individuals marry, a legal and often religious ceremony recognizes and sanctifies one of these relationships. what happens to the rest of them? a prevalent view asserts that, after marriage, shared holidays and life transitions (e.g., having children) make couples’ networks closer and more integrated (cox et al., 1997; milardo, 1982). a contrary view describes marriage as weakening social networks via withdrawal from friends and forced interactions with potentially unpleasant in laws (johnson & leslie, 1982; williamson et al., 2013). a third perspective, informed by the convoy model (antonucci & akiyama, 1987), emphasizes the continuity of social networks by suggesting that people are likely to stay in contact with their closest network members throughout their lives. to date, social network research on couples has seldom collected the longitudinal data necessary to resolve the tension among these accounts. addressing this gap, the current analyses draw upon multiple waves of detailed social network data collected from a diverse sample of recently married couples to examine how their networks change or remain stable across the early years of marriage. early network theories identified marriage as a vehicle for integrating individuals into society (e.g., berkman et al., 2000). upon marrying, spouses frequently take the same last name, combine finances, and develop a joint identity (emery et al., 2021). the growing connections between two individuals may also have implications for their social networks, including the development of connections with and between in laws, the formation of new shared friends, or the shedding of weak ties that demand too much time and energy. a widespread assumption is that these changes are beneficial, leading to greater integration throughout the network (e.g., kearns & leonard, 2004). wedding rituals, for example, take place in front of family and friends of both spouses, and so may facilitate connections not only between partners but among their loved ones as well (chesser, 1980). getting married may therefore be accompanied by changes in the composition of spouses’ networks, with each partner including more of the other’s family in particular, as suggested by prior work showing that family networks tend to increase in size after marriage (kalmijn, 2012). this may be especially true for wives, who typically engage in more caretaking responsibilities for in laws than do husbands (lee et al., 2020). the early years of marriage may also enhance the quality of spouses’ network relationships. relationships outside marriage represent potential sources of material, emotional, and informational resources, so newlyweds should favor higher quality network relationships to ensure support for the many transitions (e.g., moving in together, having children) that characterize this stage of life (cox et al., 1997; haggerty et al., 2022). the early years of marriage may therefore be a time when couples gravitate toward network members who provide more support for and approval of the marriage, i.e., those who are best positioned to help the couple through periods of instability. again, wives may be particularly likely to deepen bonds with these stronger ties, as women are typically socialized to deepen relationships with a few close others, whereas men tend to emphasize larger collections of weaker ties (halevy & kalish, 2021). because marriage typically occurs after individuals have navigated the transitions of emerging adulthood (robinson, 2015), marriage may also motivate strengthening ties to network members who have also made these transitions, i.e., those who are married, employed, or financially secure. despite the persistence of this view, a contrasting perspective suggests that marriage can undermine spouses’ social networks. because time is a limited resource, spending more time with in laws may require spouses to spend less time with their own family and friends (hill & dunbar, 2003). indeed, partners’ friendship networks in particular tend to be smaller in longer intimate relationships (johnson & leslie, 1982) and married individuals do socialize less with friends than single indviduals (sarkisian & gerstel, 2015), not only because of limited time but because spouses may fill supportive roles previously occupied by friends (kalmijn, 2012). these changes may mean that, after couples marry, spouses have fewer people to rely on for support during times of stress, and they may lose access to the weaker ties that afford individuals access to resources (e.g., job opportunities) that closer ties do not provide (giulietti et al., 2018; granovetter, 1973). in addition to changes in composition, network quality may decline in the early years of marriage as partners spend less time with voluntary relationships (e.g., friends) and devote more energy to in laws. to the extent that managing relationships with in laws is a common area of disagreement among newlyweds (williamson et al., 2013), family gatherings may force partners into repeated contact with network members they do not like. the prediction that couples’ social networks change after marriage rests on the assumption that getting married has ripple effects throughout spouses’ other relationships. in recent decades, the evolving meaning of marriage has called that assumption into question. where marriage once represented a new beginning for a couple, marriage has increasingly come to be seen as “a status one builds up to, often by living with a partner beforehand, by attaining steady employment or starting a career, by putting away some savings, and even by having children” (cherlin, 2004, p. 855). to the extent that many of the transitions formerly associated with marriage now occur prior to marriage, many of the associated social network changes may have already occurred by the time a couple gets married. the fact that, on average, couples are marrying at older ages is consistent with the view that couples’ lives, and thus their social lives, may be more stable after marriage than was true for couples in earlier generations. although americans do change jobs more than 12 times in their lifetime on average, most of these transitions happen between ages 18 and 24 (united states bureau of labor statistics, 2019). the median age at marriage is now nearly 30 for women and over 30 for men (united states census bureau, 2020). meanwhile, internal migration in the united states has been steadily decreasing over the last several decades, with just over 1% of americans moving across state lines every year (united states census bureau, 2019). thus, by the time they marry, many couples will have already settled into a region and a career path, and thus will have already experienced the transitions most likely to lead to new social relationships. network properties tied to employment (e.g., proportion of network employed or financially stable) and geography (e.g., maintaining contact with one’s own friends) may therefore be relatively stable during this period. similarly, research informed by the convoy model suggests that, even as our weaker network ties may cycle in and out of our networks over time, a “convoy” of our closest social network relationships (e.g., family members and best friends) may be relatively constant throughout our lives (antonucci & akiyama, 1987; wrzus et al., 2013). marriage is frequently accompanied by signs of commitment (e.g., living together, having a child) that could be associated with changes in newlyweds’ networks. yet, couples do not always wait for marriage to have kids or live together. to the extent that changes in couples’ social networks are associated with these transitions rather than the institution of marriage itself, then couples who have negotiated more of these transitions prior to getting married should experience fewer changes in their networks after marriage. in contrast, if network changes are uniquely associated with the institution of marriage, then couples who marry should all experience similar changes. teasing apart these possibilities requires comparing changes in post marital social networks across couples with different premarital histories. around 40% of all births occur outside of marriage and over 30% of first married mothers already have a child at marriage (lavner et al., 2020; martin et al., 2019). parenthood alters couples’ lives in ways that should lead to significant changes in their networks whether they are married or not. for example, the demands of parenthood affect couples’ daily routines, such that parents, compared to non parents, have less time and energy to spend on commitments outside of childrearing (neilson & stanfors, 2018). with less flexible time, couples with children may prioritize closer network members, and those who provide more support and demand fewer resources, over more distal or less supportive network members. scholars have found, for example, that parenthood is associated with smaller friendship networks and less contact with friends, but the family network remains relatively unchanged (kalmijn, 2012; rözer et al., 2017). bost, cox, burchinal, and payne (2002) similarly found that, immediately following the birth of a child, couples spend less time with their friends and more time with family, although they also feel less satisfied with the amount of support they receive. thus, couples who have had children prior to marrying may begin their marriages with more family and fewer friends in their networks, compared to those without children. cohabiting may also instigate a process of network change that begins only after marriage for couples who do not cohabit. in a study in which individuals were asked to name a maximum of five network members, kalmijn (2003) found that couples who cohabited reported fewer friends but more shared friends, compared to couples who did not cohabit. this suggests that, prior to marriage, cohabiting partners may have already begun integrating their individual networks and shedding weaker ties. by the wedding, those who have cohabited may therefore have more integrated networks than those who did not cohabit, and may have already experienced changes that couples who did not cohabit have yet to experience. if connections between partners’ families and friends develop when the relationship begins, rather than when the marriage begins, then the networks of couples in longer relationships could look very different by the time they do marry, with more shared family ties, greater approval of and support for the relationship, and more positive relationships with network members compared to the networks of couples who began their relationships more recently. cross sectional and retrospective reports indicate that as a couple’s commitment increases (e.g., from casually dating to seriously dating to engaged), overlap between partners’ networks increases and couples tend to spend more time with closer network members than with more distal ones (milardo, 1982). such findings suggest that couples in longer relationships should begin their marriages with closer and more integrated networks, and may therefore experience fewer changes after marriage, compared to couples in shorter relationships. to date, several limitations in prior research on the social networks of married couples have prevented this work from resolving the tension between disparate accounts of network change during the early years of marriage. first, prior work has frequently relied on retrospective data, despite the notorious inaccuracy of partners’ reports of their own change over time (frye & karney, 2004). second, the vast majority of this research has been cross sectional, with changes inferred from between group comparisons across ages and marital status groups, a strategy that is subject to cohort and selection effects. third, most research has focused on a small number of network dimensions (e.g., received support or perceived approval), preventing a comprehensive description that might allow for both stability and change. fourth, research on social networks has relied on global self reports of network qualities, such as partners’ perceptions of how much emotional support they receive from their network as a whole (e.g., sprecher & felmlee, 1992). to the extent that these reports may be driven by a participant’s global feelings of well being or recent interactions with more or less salient network members (marsden, 2005), they may not correspond to qualities of the actual network. fifth, the few studies that have examined specific network relationships have generally assessed only a small number of network members (typically 5 to 7). to characterize stability and change in couples’ networks over time, assessments of more network members are necessary (hill & dunbar, 2003), particularly because distal relationships may be more likely to change than closer ones (wellman et al., 1997). finally, to date social network research with couples has examined samples of mostly white, relatively affluent, college educated samples of convenience. given that white individuals with higher ses are less likely than non white and lower ses individuals to interact regularly with (ajrouch et al., 2001) and exchange social support with (taylor et al., 2013) extended family and friends, prior work may not generalize to more diverse samples in which social networks are more relevant to overall well being (huurre et al., 2007). to assess changes in the properties of couples’ networks during the early years of marriage, these analyses overcome the limitations of prior research by drawing upon detailed social network interviews conducted over multiple assessments with a diverse sample of first married, newlywed couples solicited from lower income communities. these data are appropriate for several reasons. first, the sample includes couples with a wide range of socioeconomic status (ses) and racial identity, expanding the scope of this work beyond the narrow samples used in prior studies. second, the network interviews were extensive, soliciting reports on the characteristics of and relationships among 24 network members from each spouse in three interviews conducted at 9 month intervals. third, this longitudinal study includes reports from both spouses in each couple, allowing for direct assessment of network integration across spouses. analyses of these data address the following research questions: which qualities of the network remain stable and which change during the early years of marriage? by measuring multiple aspects of network composition and quality three times during the first 18 months of marriage, this study aims to resolve competing views about the relative degree of stability and change in network properties during the transition into marriage. are patterns of stability and change in network properties in the early years of marriage moderated by premarital parenthood, premarital cohabitation, and relationship duration? assessing each moderator’s effects at the start of marriage and over time will address whether network change is precipitated by relationship events (e.g., cohabitation, parenthood) before the wedding or whether entering marriage itself initiates this process. between 2014 and 2015, recently married couples living in lower income communities were identified through marriage license applications obtained from the recorder’s office in harris county, texas, the third most populous county in the united states. because sample recruitment occurred before the legalization of same sex marriage, all couples were mixed gender. addresses were matched with census data to identify couples living in census block groups where a minimum of 30% of households were categorized as living below the poverty line (united states census bureau, 2013). because eligibility was linked to neighborhood income rather than household income, this sampling frame was selected to maximize the likelihood of including poorer couples that have been often overlooked in prior research. through this procedure, 4,916 couples were identified for screening on the telephone or in person. among the couples attempted for screening, 3,535 could not be reached, 224 refused screening, and 1,157 agreed to be screened. interviewers screened couples to ensure they had married, partners were in their first marriage, partners spoke english or spanish, and both partners were at least 18 years old. this screening identified 506 eligible couples, and 401 agreed to participate in the study. the 231 couples who were interviewed prior to the close of the baseline assessment period comprise the current sample. all procedures were approved by the rand corporation institutional review board. the final sample of 231 couples had all been married within 12 months of the first assessment (m = 5.5 months, sd = 2.0). at baseline, wives ranged in age from 18 to 56 years (m = 28.1, sd = 7.4) and husbands ranged in age from 18 to 53 years (m = 29.5, sd = 7.5). in terms of racial identification, 53% of wives and 52% of husbands identified as hispanic, 35% of wives and 32% of husbands as black, 9% of wives and 10% of husbands as white, and 4% of wives and 7% of husbands as other/multi racial. the majority of wives (54%) and husbands (60%) reported receiving less than or the equivalent of a high school diploma or ged. approximately 16% of wives and 12% of husbands reported a college degree or higher education. the median annual household income was $32,500 (sd = $29,590) and ranged from $0 to $175,000, reflecting the success of our sampling procedure at soliciting couples with a wide range of ses. at baseline (t1), two trained interviewers visited couples in their homes. the interviewers took spouses to separate areas to describe the study, obtain informed consent, and verbally administer the survey. two portions of the interview are relevant for the current investigation. first, participants completed a standard interview that included all demographic and moderator measures. second, participants completed a detailed social network interview. during this interview, participants were asked to name 25 network members (starting with their spouse) with whom they had any form of contact over the past 12 months. spouses answered several questions about each individual they named, providing the basis for 14 variables. this investigation utilizes data from three data collection waves, each spaced nine months apart. couples were not interviewed if they reported a divorce or permanent separation between assessments. data from all 231 couples were included in these analyses: spouses were not required to complete social network interviews at each wave nor were they required to name 25 social network contacts to be included. at time 1, 99% of wives and husbands completed social network interviews in addition to their baseline interviews. at time 2, 93% of the baseline couples could be recontacted, 91% of those remained intact, and 99% of the intact couples completed a second network interview. retention at t3, while still high, was lower than t1 and t2 in part because the field period was ended early due to hurricane harvey, which made landfall in texas in august 2017. consequently, 164 wives (of 165 who participated) and 160 husbands (of 161 who participated) completed the social network interview at t3. across assessments, over 90% of spouses named the full 25 social network members in each interview. over the course of the three data collection waves, 11 couples divorced while another seven did not have marital status data at the third wave because they were unable to be contacted. to evaluate the sensitivity of our results to the presence or absence of these couples, we ran analyses with and without divorced couples at t3. the results were not substantively different and so we only report analyses below that include all couples regardless of t3 marital status. additionally, we assessed the differences between couples who provided complete data and couples who provided incomplete data. across the 20 demographic, moderator, and dependent variables described in this report, participants who provided data at all time points differed significantly from those who did not on only two variables: there was a greater proportion of premarital cohabitors among those with complete data for both husbands (t(134.0) = 2.9, p < .01) and wives (t(131.5) = 2.5, p = .01), and wives with complete data had a greater proportion of the network who approved of their relationship at baseline (t(107.1) = 2.5, p = .02). participants were asked to identify 24 individuals besides their spouse with whom they interact regularly, and then answered several questions about each network member. the questions assessed each member’s gender, marital status, divorce status, parental status, employment status, financial status, relationship to the spouse, quality of the relationship with the spouse, as well as two questions regarding the spouse’s experience of receiving support from the person (i.e., one for emotional support, one for tangible/concrete support), two questions about giving support to the person (i.e., one for emotional support, one for tangible/concrete support), and perceived approval of the marriage by the network member. the full text of each question is provided in the online supplement: https://osf.io/ms2n6/. responses to these questions were used to derive indices that summarize the proportion of these 24 relationships (excluding the spouse) that reflect each of 14 different network dimensions. ten dimensions capture aspects of network composition: proportion females, married, divorced, raising children under 18, employed, good finances, own family, spouse family, own friend, and spouse friend. an additional four dimensions capture aspects of network quality: proportion good relationships, members who approve of the marriage, members from whom they received support, and members to whom they gave support. received support and gave support are each aggregates of the two support questions stated above. a network member was coded as 1 for received support if the respondent had received either concrete or emotional support (or both) from the network member (0 if not), and a network member was coded as 1 for gave support if the respondent had given either concrete or emotional support (or both) to the network member (0 if not). premarital cohabitation was measured using a single item: “did you and your spouse live together before you were married?” both spouses provided the same answer to this question in 87% of couples. in light of numerous studies documenting that wives are significantly more accurate in recalling relationship events and dates than husbands, including those related to residence changes (e.g., mitchell, 2010), wives’ responses to the premarital cohabitation question were used in couples that disagreed. of the 231 couples, 169 (73.2%) wives indicated that they had cohabited before marriage. relationship duration was derived from a single item: “thinking about your relationship since you first got together, how many years have you been together with [fill spouse name]?” spouses’ responses correlated at r = .94. again, when spouses disagreed, we used wives’ responses. to account for outliers, responses above the 97.5th percentile were winsorized, which retains all participants’ data (liao et al., 2016). five responses greater than the 97.5th percentile (i.e., 15 years) were recoded to 15. the mean relationship duration of this transformed variable for all couples was 4.4 years (sd = 3.6). although relationship duration differed significantly between cohabitors (m = 5.0, sd = 3.7) and non cohabitors (m = 2.9, sd = 2.8; t(144.2) = 4.5, p < .01), the two variables correlated at only r = .25, justifying our decision to include both in these analyses. at baseline, spouses were asked four questions: 1) number of biological children with the spouse, 2) number of own biological children from a previous partner, 3) number of biological children the spouse has from a previous partner, and 4) number of other children that the participant or their spouse have (e.g., foster, adopted). premarital parenthood was indicated when any of these values were greater than zero at the baseline assessment. using this definition, husbands’ and wives’ reports agreed 99% of the time. in the three cases when spouses disagreed, we again used wives’ responses. of the 231 couples, 149 (64.5%) were parents at t1, indicating at least one child born before the marriage or a wife who was pregnant at the time of the marriage. due to a small number of first births (n = 19) during the 18 months of this study, we did not assess the effect of becoming a parent post marriage. multilevel modeling (mlm) was conducted in spss version 26 using restricted estimation maximum likelihood (reml) to estimate random effects (corbeil & searle, 1976). couples were included if husbands and wives each provided data for at least one timepoint. we use a two intercept approach and an interaction approach to handle dyadic data (planalp et al., 2017; raudenbush et al., 1995). the two intercept approach provides separate husband and wife intercepts and slopes while the interaction approach tests whether husbands and wives differ significantly on a given parameter. regardless of the approach, we simultaneously model the data from both dyad members while accounting for the covariance between husbands’ and wives’ responses (planalp et al., 2017; raudenbush et al., 1995). the models nest time (measured in waves; i.e., 1, 2, 3) within individuals within couples, but this can be conceptualized as a two level model with time and individual nested within couple (raudenbush et al., 1995). although we use both the two intercept and interaction approaches, our focus is on the parameters from the two intercept approach, supplemented by gender differences derived from the interaction approach. the within couple equation for the two intercept approach takes the following form: where b1d represents the intercept of a network variable for husbands, b2d represents the intercept for wives, b3d represents the slope for husbands, and b4d represents the slope for wives. including variables that differ between dyads, the between couple equations are: in equation 2, b1d, the coefficient representing the intercept for husbands in the within couple equation, now is further explained by three between couple covariates. to aid interpretability, premarital cohabitation and premarital parenthood were contrast coded. the value −0.5 represented non cohabitors while 0.5 represented cohabitors, and −0.5 represented premarital non parents while 0.5 represented premarital parents. likewise, relationship duration was mean centered. to illustrate this equation, take proportion married as an example. the term b10 represents the average intercept of proportion married across husbands at different levels of premarital parenthood (i.e., premarital parent and non premarital parent) and premarital cohabitation (i.e., premarital cohabitor and non premarital cohabitor), and at the average relationship duration. the b11 term represents the difference in the intercept between a husband who did cohabit and one who did not cohabit, given the same relationship duration and premarital parenthood. the between couple residual, ζ1d, captures between dyad variation in husband intercepts. equations 3 and 4 drop the error term as slopes were fixed across dyads. models with random slopes faced nonconvergence issues. when there are not enough degrees of freedom to estimate between couple variance, fixed slopes are used for model identification (planalp et al., 2017). given the 14 network variables under examination, we estimated 14 models for these analyses. analyses were not preregistered. we report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures in the study. supplemental materials, including syntax, data file, and question text are available online: https://osf.io/ms2n6/. the dimensions of husbands’ and wives’ networks correlated weakly across spouses (range: .03   .46). additionally, the mean absolute value within spouse correlation between network dimensions was r = .12 at time 1 (range: −.57 − .61), indicating that network dimensions were relatively independent of each other, justifying analyses that address each dimension separately. patterns of bivariate correlations, means, and standard deviations for husbands and wives were similar at time 2 and time 3. bivariate correlations and baseline descriptive statistics for all variables are provided in the supplemental materials (table a1). with respect to average network composition at baseline, husbands’ and wives’ networks primarily consisted of own family (35% for husbands and 39% for wives) and own friends (36% for husbands and 30% for wives). only 9% of the husbands’ networks and 14% of the wives’ networks consisted of spouse family and less than 5% of husbands’ and wives’ networks consisted of spouse friends. about half of the network members that spouses listed at baseline were married or raising children under 18, and relatively few were divorced (16% for both spouses). for husbands and wives, around three quarters of network members were employed, although fewer were financially stable (62% for husbands and 57% for wives). with respect to average network quality at baseline, spouses reported good relationships with most of their network members, with wives reporting good relationships with 75% and husbands with 83%. likewise, spouses generally perceived high rates of relationship approval from their networks (83% for wives and 91% for husbands at time 1). husbands received support from 28% of their network members and gave support to 32% while wives had higher proportions in both categories (35% and 38%, respectively). beta coefficients of the dyadic growth curve models for husbands and wives are shown in table 1. because we consider between couple covariates, intercept and slope estimates control for the effect of premarital parenthood, relationship duration, and premarital cohabitation. mixed model intercepts and slopes of network variables for husbands and wives note: all intercepts significantly different from 0. for slopes: p < .05, p < .01. compared to their husbands, wives began marriage with significantly more female and fewer employed network members, as well as more spouse’s family and spouse’s friends, but fewer own friends. thus, by the beginning of their marriage, wives seemed to have invested more in their husbands’ networks than vice versa. of the network quality measures, all four differed between spouses. compared to husbands, wives gave and received more support to and from their network members at the beginning of the marriage, but had fewer good relationships with their network, and perceived less relationship approval. table 1 also shows the linear rates of change for each network characteristic for husbands and wives and the test of the difference between husbands’ and wives’ slopes. over 18 months, six of the 10 network composition dimensions changed significantly for husbands, while three changed significantly for wives. many of the changes reflected increases in connection and access to social capital. for example, husbands and wives both experienced a significant increase in the proportion of married people and spouse family, as well as in the proportion of employed network members. wives also experienced a significant increase in the proportion of financially stable network members across the 18 months. regarding network quality, husbands and wives both experienced increases in the proportion of good relationships, husbands experienced a decline in the proportion of their network to whom they gave support, and wives experienced an increase in their perception of relationship approval. husbands also experienced a significant increase in the proportion of divorced network members and a significant decline in the proportion of own friends and spouse friends. the decline in own friends and spouse friends occurred in conjunction with an increase in the proportion of spouse family, indicating that, for husbands, integrating in laws within the network comes at a cost of losing relationships with friends. in contrast, the proportions female, parents of children under 18, own family, and received support did not change significantly for husbands or wives over 18 months. the stability of own family further clarifies the process of network integration: although husbands discard friends to accommodate in laws, spouses hold on to their own family relationships. the difference between husbands’ and wives’ slopes was significant on only one dimension: wives experienced a significant increase in their receipt of network approval while husbands reported a (nonsignificant) decrease. this may be a consequence of wives beginning their marriage with significantly lower perceptions of network approval than husbands. controlling for premarital cohabitation and relationship duration, network composition differed in several ways for premarital parents and non parents (see table 2). compared to those who began their marriages without children, husbands and wives who had children started the marriage with significantly more parents of children under 18 and fewer spouse friends in their networks. husbands who were premarital parents also had more divorced network members than non parent husbands. additionally, wives who were premarital parents had more of their own family in their network than did non parent wives, perhaps an indication that wives with children are relying on their own family to help with childcare. wives who were premarital parents also had fewer employed network members than those who were premarital non parents. network quality differed on only one dimension: husbands and wives with a child began the marriage with fewer good relationships. the significant differences in the networks of parent and non parent spouses at baseline did not generally extend to network change. only one significant effect was found: non parent husbands experienced a significantly steeper decline in spouse friends over the first 18 months of marriage than husbands with premarital children. mixed model intercepts and slopes assessing effect of premarital parenthood on network variables note: p < .05, p < .01. despite expectations that the networks of cohabitors and non cohabitors would differ significantly in many regards, they generally did not. for husbands and wives, no network measures differed significantly between cohabitors and non cohabitors at baseline. the network change analyses revealed only one significant difference: husbands who cohabited experienced a decrease in the proportion of parents with children under 18 in the network, but husbands who did not cohabit experienced an increase. table a2 in the online supplement details all findings. despite expectations that longer relationships would be associated with greater network integration and more social capital available to couples, this largely was not the case. although husbands in longer relationships did have more spouse family at the start of the marriage and wives in longer relationships also tended to have more good relationships in the network, relationship duration had only one association with network change: husbands in longer relationships tended to have a less positive change in spouse family. table a3 in the online supplement shows all relationship duration results. what happens to couples’ social networks after they get married? does marriage tie spouses more closely to their shared relationships (milardo, 1982), do they withdraw from friends (johnson & leslie, 1982), or do their most important relationships generally persist across time (antonucci & akiyama, 1987; cherlin, 2004)? to date, a lack of detailed longitudinal data on spouses’ networks has left unclear which network properties are characterized by change or stability during the early years of marriage. addressing this gap, the current investigation drew upon multiple waves of network interviews to offer, for the first time, a detailed description of change and stability in spouses’ networks over the newlywed period. at the outset of marriage, husbands and wives described relatively separate networks, with roughly 70% of each spouse’s network consisting of their own family and friends, and less than 20% consisting of each other’s family and friends. wives included significantly more of their spouse’s family and friends in their own networks than husbands, indicating wives’ greater involvement with their husbands’ network than vice versa. this gender difference is consistent with prior research indicating that wives, typically socialized to be more relational than husbands (parks & barta, 2018), take on the majority of caregiving responsibilities for parents and in laws (lee et al., 2020). in this context, it makes sense that wives were more involved with their in laws than husbands were, and that wives gave more support to and received more support from their networks at marriage than husbands did. what is surprising, however, is that despite the seemingly greater effort they put into these relationships, wives did not have better relationships with their network than husbands. on the contrary, wives perceived worse relationships with their network and lower rates of approval for their marriage than husbands. one possible source of these differences is that, because women are more often socialized into a role of providing emotional support and caregiving, they may be required to interact with network members who they do not like and who do not like them (barbee et al., 1993). thus, wives’ networks may be more critical of the marriage, and more withholding of approval, than husbands’ networks. when we observed how each of 14 network dimensions changed over the subsequent 18 months after their wedding, we found evidence to support each of the three competing perspectives on network change, depending on the specific dimensions in question. in line with predictions, husbands’ and wives’ networks included increasing proportions of their spouse’s family over the first 18 months of marriage, reflecting the role of marriage as an integrator of spouses’ social lives (cox et al., 1997; kalmijn, 2003; milardo, 1982). the wedding itself may encourage spouses to interact with each other’s family (chesser, 1980) and subsequent family gatherings may strengthen these connections. the characteristics of spouses’ connections also changed in ways that reflected more prosperity and stability: over time spouses included more married people in their networks, husbands included more employed people, and wives included more financially stable people. given the transition to marriage generally occurs during a period when individuals are transitioning from emerging adulthood into more stable roles (robinson, 2015), findings are in line with our prediction that the early years of marriage would be accompanied by a greater focus on ties that are experiencing similar transitions. this change may reflect a choice, whereby spouses seek contacts who are married and stably employed in lieu of those whose lives are more in flux, or it could reflect age related development, such that friends and family at a similar life stage as the couple are experiencing similar transitions at the same time. the fact that husbands reported increases in the proportion of divorced people in their networks supports the latter possibility, as spouses are likely not seeking out divorced people. evaluating whether spouses are dropping and adding network members or whether the same network members are changing their marital status would clarify these issues. finally, and again consistent with predictions (cox et al., 1997), husbands and wives reported increases in the quality of their relationships with the network, and wives reported an increase in the proportion of the network who approved of the marriage. some scholars (e.g., sprecher & felmlee, 2000) suggest this change may occur because network members wait to give full approval until they know that the relationship is committed, with marriage being perhaps the most important sign of commitment. an alternative is that newlyweds may be engaging in a process similar to that described by socioemotional selectivity theory (carstensen, 1992), whereby, even as early as young adulthood, people are motivated to spend more time with rewarding connections and less with network members with whom they experience conflict. marriage may kickstart that process, either because spouses have less time or because they are motivated to invest in people who support their marriage. even as many characteristics of spouses’ networks became stronger or more rewarding over the newlywed period, results also revealed some support for the dyadic withdrawal hypothesis (johnson & leslie, 1982; williamson et al., 2013). husbands (but not wives) experienced a significant decline in the proportion of own and spouse friends in the network, an apparent tradeoff with the increase in the proportion of their spouse’s family. research on gender differences in friendships reveals that men’s friendships typically center around shared activities which, given the time constraints of marriage, may help explain why husbands drop friends from their network but wives do not (aukett et al., 1988). family relationships also play a bigger role in the well being of men (cable et al., 2013), so husbands may be more motivated to maintain bonds with family, even at the expense of their friendships. amidst all of these changes, both husbands and wives remained in steady contact with their own family members, whose proportion within spouses’ networks did not change significantly over time. these results offer longitudinal support for a key tenet of the convoy model, which suggests that a core group of close network members tends to stick with people throughout life, withstanding even major life changes like marriage (antonucci & akiyama, 1987). wives, in addition, did not experience a significant change in the proportion of their spouse’s friends they included in their networks. spouses’ friends made up less than 5% of husbands’ and wives’ networks throughout the first 18 months of marriage, suggesting that the move toward integrated social networks operates more strongly on family than friends. if the changes observed in spouses’ networks after marriage are associated with signs of commitment that accompany marriage (like living together), rather than with the mere act of marriage itself, then we should have observed different changes in spouses’ networks depending on spouses’ experiences of cohabitation, parenthood, and relationship duration prior to marriage. with rare exceptions, none of these premarital experiences moderated how couples’ networks changed across the first 18 months of marriage. thus, despite the increasing prevalence of non marital intimacy, such as cohabitation, in the united states (curtin & sutton, 2020), marriage itself continues to shape spouses’ social relationships in unique ways. one explanation for the unique role of marriage in shaping spouses’ social networks is that the wedding itself may bring spouses’ families and friends together in a way that premarital relationships do not. the wedding could be the first time that in laws meet each other, signaling that marriages do not just bring together spouses in a lifelong commitment but that they merge networks as well (cherlin, 2004; chesser, 1980). an alternative possibility is that, prior to marriage, spouses may resist putting in the effort to incorporate each other’s family and friends, and network members may be hesitant to invest time, given the elevated possibility of breakup before marriage. getting married may be a critical signal to the network that the couple is no longer temporary. our confidence in these results is enhanced by a number of strengths in the methods and design of this study. first, this is one of only a handful of studies of couples’ networks (e.g., bost et al., 2002) to utilize a longitudinal design of more than two waves, allowing for greater sensitivity to detect change (ployhart & mackenzie jr, 2015). second, an extensive interview allowed for a detailed look at partners’ networks, circumventing biases associated with global network evaluations and mischaracterization of the network based on only a handful of global properties. third, the sample was diverse in racial identity and ses. couples in traditionally underrepresented groups in psychological research, such as racial minorities and those living with lower incomes, may be more affected by their ability to mobilize support from their network compared to white, affluent couples who have the resources to take on the challenges of marriage relatively independently (huurre et al., 2007). thus, these analyses offer insights into the social lives of more vulnerable newlywed couples. notwithstanding these strengths, the study was limited by a few factors. first, while the sample was diverse it was also entirely composed of mixed gender first marriages, so the findings cannot be generalized to other relationship types. network integration may be slower in remarriages, for example, as in laws may be more cautious to get close to a spouse for fear of another separation. older newlyweds may also experience less network integration, as older individuals become increasingly cautious about who they include in their social networks as they age (carstensen, 2006). the development of social networks after marriage may also look different for same sex couples, as same sex partners tend to perceive less approval for their relationships from family and place more importance on their friends’ feelings about the relationship than mixed gender partners (blair & pukall, 2015). second, descriptions of change in couples’ networks may differ over longer periods. research over longer timespans can assess whether the changes that we report here are truly linear or, perhaps more likely, flatten out over time. third, these results cannot speak to whether spouses consciously act upon their networks or whether couples’ networks are changing due to age related development. existing models offer competing predictions about whether couples’ social networks become closer, grow distant, or remain stable after marriage. by identifying partial support for each of these predictions in the same sample, these results highlight the need for comprehensive models that can accommodate and explain the range of changes that occur to different dimensions of couples’ social networks. further longitudinal, multidimensional data from diverse populations can provide the necessary foundation for an integrated perspective to describe these changes, accommodate the possibility that network change differs in various populations, and capture the psychological mechanisms that may motivate spouses to spend time with certain people and not with others. these analyses were not preregistered. supplemental materials, including data, syntax, question text, and additional tables can be found here: https://osf.io/ms2n6/ some of the data and ideas in this manuscript were presented at the society for personality and social psychology annual conference in february, 2022. preparation of this report was supported by research grants r01hd076566 and r01hd091832 from the national institute of child health and human development awarded to benjamin r. karney. we have no known conflict of interest to disclose. connect with nlm national library of medicine 8600 rockville pike bethesda, md 20894

not so long ago, nobody met a partner online. then, in the 1990s, came the first dating websites. match.com went live in 1995. a new wave of dating websites, such as okcupid, emerged in the early 2000s. and the 2012 arrival of tinder changed dating even further. today, more than one third of marriages start online. clearly, these sites have had a huge impact on dating behavior. but now the first evidence is emerging that their effect is much more profound. for more than 50 years, researchers have studied the nature of the networks that link people to each other. these social networks turn out to have a peculiar property. one obvious type of network links each node with its nearest neighbors, in a pattern like a chess board or chicken wire. another obvious kind of network links nodes at random. but real social networks are not like either of these. instead, people are strongly connected to a relatively small group of neighbors and loosely connected to much more distant people. these loose connections turn out to be extremely important. “those weak ties serve as bridges between our group of close friends and other clustered groups, allowing us to connect to the global community,” say josue ortega at the university of essex in the u.k. and philipp hergovich at the university of vienna in austria. loose ties have traditionally played a key role in meeting partners. while most people were unlikely to date one of their best friends, they were highly likely to date people who were linked with their group of friends; a friend of a friend, for example. in the language of network theory, dating partners were embedded in each other’s networks. indeed, this has long been reflected in surveys of the way people meet their partners: through mutual friends, in bars, at work, in educational institutions, at church, through their families, and so on. online dating has changed that. today, online dating is the second most common way for heterosexual couples to meet. for homosexual couples, it is far and away the most popular. that has significant implications. “people who meet online tend to be complete strangers,” say ortega and hergovich. and when people meet in this way, it sets up social links that were previously nonexistent. the question that ortega and hergovich investigate is how this changes the racial diversity of society. “understanding the evolution of interracial marriage is an important problem, for intermarriage is widely considered a measure of social distance in our societies,” they say. the researchers start by simulating what happens when extra links are introduced into a social network. their network consists of men and women from different races who are randomly distributed. in this model, everyone wants to marry a person of the opposite sex but can only marry someone with whom a connection exists. this leads to a society with a relatively low level of interracial marriage. but if the researchers add random links between people from different ethnic groups, the level of interracial marriage changes dramatically. “our model predicts nearly complete racial integration upon the emergence of online dating, even if the number of partners that individuals meet from newly formed ties is small,” say ortega and hergovich. and there is another surprising effect. the team measure the strength of marriages by measuring the average distance between partners before and after the introduction of online dating. “our model also predicts that marriages created in a society with online dating tend to be stronger,” they say. next, the researchers compare the results of their models to the observed rates of interracial marriage in the u.s. this has been on the increase for some time, but the rates are still low, not least because interracial marriage was banned in some parts of the country until 1967. but the rate of increase changed at about the time that online dating become popular. “it is intriguing that shortly after the introduction of the first dating websites in 1995, like match.com, the percentage of new marriages created by interracial couples increased rapidly,” say the researchers. the increase became steeper in the 2000s, when online dating became even more popular. then, in 2014, the proportion of interracial marriages jumped again. “it is interesting that this increase occurs shortly after the creation of tinder, considered the most popular online dating app,” they say. tinder has some 50 million users and produces more than 12 million matches a day. of course, this data doesn’t prove that online dating caused the rise in interracial marriages. but it is consistent with the hypothesis that it does. meanwhile, research into the strength of marriage has found some evidence that married couples who meet online have lower rates of marital breakup than those who meet traditionally. that has the potential to significantly benefit society. and it’s exactly what ortega and hergovich’s model predicts. of course, there are other factors that could contribute to the increase in interracial marriage. one is that the trend is the result of a reduction in the percentage of americans who are white. if marriages were random, this should increase the number of interracial marriages, but not by the observed amount. “the change in the population composition in the u.s. cannot explain the huge increase in intermarriage that we observe,” say ortega and hergovich. that leaves online dating as the main driver of this change. and if that’s the case, the model implies that this change is ongoing. that’s a profound revelation. these changes are set to continue, and to benefit society as result. ref: arxiv.org/abs/1709.10478 : the strength of absent ties: social integration via online dating if we don’t act soon, our online world will continue to be run at the whim of capricious billionaires. ai competition is not a zero sum game. instead, the world’s superpowers need to work together to make sure ai benefits humanity. the us still has no federal privacy law. but recent enforcement actions against data brokers may offer some new protections for americans’ personal information. the new bill being drafted in new york aims to regulate advanced ai systems while addressing concerns with the california bill. discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more. thank you for submitting your email! it looks like something went wrong. we’re having trouble saving your preferences. try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. if you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive. © 2025 mit technology review

as of 2013, half of adults ages 50 64 had a social media profile (vandeweerd, myers, coulter, yalcin, & corvin, 2016) and today, a growing number of older adults are using online dating sites and apps to meet new people (wada, clarke, & rozanova, 2015). older adults who are divorced are significantly more likely to use these online dating sites than those who are widowed or have never married (aarp, 2012). men are typically encouraged to use these sites by coworkers, while women are frequently encouraged by friends and family members (mcwilliams & barrett, 2014). interestingly, one study cited by mcwilliams and barrett (2014) found that men see online dating as a way to quickly jump back into dating following the end of a relationship through death or divorce, whereas women use online sites as a way to ease into the idea of dating again. as with most things, there are both positives and negatives associated with online dating. it is important to be aware of them in order to make an informed decision of whether to use or not use internet sites to cultivate new relationships. to summarize, there are several pros and cons to online dating. some of the positives include growing a social network, gaining new friends and having a sense of safety and control. however, some of the drawbacks to dating online include the time, effort, lack of success, unwanted sexual messages, and the risk of people misrepresenting themselves. nevertheless, in this age of technology, there are so many new opportunities, including online dating for adults in later life. it is important to weigh the positives and negatives and decide for oneself if this approach to meeting people is worth it. online dating allows access to more people, a sense of control and safety, and friendship, but also requires effort, putting up with peoples’ misrepresentations of themselves, and being willing to face the risks of having unwanted negative experiences or not finding someone. jennifer viveros; dr. david schramm family life specialist human development & family studies dept no one likes to be alone, and that includes older adults. if you are over the age of 65 and do not have a spouse/partner who lives with you, some of the following research and tips may be helpful for you. as with most things, there are both positives and negatives associated with online dating. it is important to be aware of them in order to make an informed decision of whether to use or not use internet sites to cultivate new relationships.

if you’ve ever been out on a romantic dinner date with your partner only to discover they seem distracted by the latest intriguing facebook update, you’re not alone. sixty six percent of adults in married or committed relationships report that smartphones and social media sites like facebook play an integral role in their lives. in fact, research shows the average user scrolls through social media sites for two and a half hours per day. it may be time to consider the pros and cons of using these sites and establish a few ground rules to avoid any potential dangers of social media on your marriage and family. first, it’s important to consider the ways social media can enhance the lives of you and your family members. social media can be a real plus for couples who spend a lot of time apart because it offers a way for them to connect, says alexandra samuel, phd, a speaker, author, and regular contributor to the wall street journal and the harvard business review who helps people and organizations excel at working and living together online. according to an article written by gwendolyn seidman, phd, in psychology today, social media can aid relationships by making it easier for partners to integrate their once disconnected social networks. one woman seidman interviewed says her facebook feed makes her husband’s co workers feel as if they know her, and has served as an icebreaker when meeting those people in real world social settings. likewise, young people form and maintain friendships online. by connecting with extended family and friends or taking part in local and global online groups, children can gain a sense of belonging. social media can provide an avenue for them to follow their interests and learn new ones. it also offers them an opportunity to explore their creativity with profile pages, images, videos, and game modifications. now that you know social media’s benefits, understanding its pitfalls can help you be aware of its potential dangers on relationships: social media serves as a distraction from focusing on the interactions that nurture relationships. “social media use can become compulsive,” says darren adamson, phd, lmft, chair of the department of marriage and family sciences at national university. according to the pew research center, 40% of partnered adults say they are bothered by the amount of time their partner spends on their smartphone. as social media sites update, they become more interactive and more “addicting,” making it difficult to manage the time spent on it. in fact, according to a study cited by psychcentral, american college students describe abstaining from social media the same way they describe drug and alcohol withdrawal   cravings, anxiety, and feeling jittery. people share their best lives on social media, so couples sometimes compare their mundane lives with other’s exciting lives, which can create destructive comparisons. a negative social comparison or the fear of missing out (fomo) is the idea that someone else is having a better time or is more successful than you (from what you can see of their online lives). this notion can impact our mental health in a number of ways. feeling envy and down on ourselves because of what others post on social media is associated with worsening depression and decreased overall well being. a study published in computers in human behavior found a link between social media use and decreased marriage quality in every model analyzed. the study results predict that people who do not use social media are 11 percent happier in their marriages than people that regularly use social media. for children, it’s important to consider what they’re not doing when they’re spending so much time on social media. according to the national institutes of health, the overuse of digital media can put your children at risk for: is it possible to maintain healthy relationships and be actively involved in social media? the answer is yes. a survey conducted by the american psychological association found that 55% of gen z feel supported through social media. still, setting a few ground rules can mean the difference between a healthy use of social media in a relationship, and taking it into the danger zone. don’t use social media as a negative point of comparison for your relationship. “if you feel compelled to make comparisons involving your relationship,” says adamson, “compare where your relationship is today with what it was like a year ago   or five or ten years ago for those in a long term relationship. let the results of the comparison prompt changes in behavior that can build your relationship.” spend time nurturing your relationship. “do things that create closeness in your relationship,” encourages adamson, “and do them regularly without distraction.” if possible, tuck the smartphone away   out of sight and out of mind. the distraction factor is one of the biggest challenges with social media. according to a study by scientific american, the presence of a smartphone can be detrimental to interpersonal relationships. do not maintain a separate social media life. “share your social media world with your partner,” adamson says. the same is true for your child. the american academy of pediatrics suggests co viewing social media with your child, so they can use it to learn, be creative, and share these their experiences with family. in healthychildren.org, the american academy of pediatrics recommends setting social media ground rules for your children. to strike a healthy balance in your family, remember that all children and teens need adequate sleep (8 12 hours, depending on age), physical activity (1 hour), and time away from media. by creating a family media plan, you and your children can set media priorities that matter most to your family. plan media free times together, such as family dinners, and engage in family activities that promote well being, such as sports, reading, and talking with each other. as a parent, set a good example by turning off the tv and putting your smartphone on “do not disturb” during media free times with your family. another important media free time is when your child does homework. keep in mind that social media is exactly what the name implies   media. “it is not a separate and distinct world,” adamson says. “it does not sustain relationships, because it is based on virtual reality that, by its nature, is not able to support the activities required to make a relationship work.” from social media and pressures at work to a stack of bills still unpaid, modern day life can strain marriages and families. if you’re a compassionate individual who cares about helping people and would like to help them build stronger relationships and navigate life’s difficulties, becoming a marriage and family therapist can be a satisfying career choice. national university’s master of arts in counseling psychology is designed to prepare you to work with couples, children, and other family members to help them manage various emotional situations or psychological issues. students in this online mft program choose between two specialization options based on their career goals: the standard marriage and family therapist option and the combined mft/lpcc (licensed professional clinical counselor) option. throughout the program, you’ll work closely with faculty members who are also practicing professionals in their field, so you’ll gain real world insights into how licensed therapists can make a positive difference in the lives of their clients. nu’s online mft program is designed for california only. the program can be completed in 20 months, at which time you’ll be prepared to sit for the marriage and family therapist (mft) license mandated by the board of behavioral sciences in the state of california. by adding three more courses in three months, you can also be eligible to sit for a license in professional clinical counseling. ready to take the first step in your education journey? contact nu for more information. * indicates a required field by submitting this form, i agree to the terms & conditions, including to receiving automated calls and/or text messages for any reason. i understand that such consent is not a condition of any service and that i may opt out at any time. δdocument.getelementbyid( "ak_js_1" ).setattribute( "value", ( new date() ).gettime() ); about nu degrees & programs admissions & finances student resources quick links 9388 lightwave ave, san diego, ca 92123 search the site modal window with site search and helpful links featured programs helpful links terms & conditions by submitting your information to national university you have provided your express written consent for the university to contact you with certain non emergency, automated, autodialed, prerecorded, or other telemarketing phone calls or text messages under the telephone consumer protection act. this includes, but is not limited to, contacting you to contact: (1) at the phone or mobile number you have provided, and (2) through an automatic telephone dialing system or artificial prerecorded voice. please note that you are not required to grant consent as a condition of buying any property, goods, or services, and you may revoke your consent at any time by contacting national university’s data protection officer at [email protected]. please review our privacy policy for more details. by submitting your information, you acknowledge that you have read and reviewed these terms & conditions, the accessibility statement, and privacy policy and agree to their terms. you confirm that the information provided on this form is accurate and complete. you also understand that certain degree programs may not be available in all states. message and data rates apply. message frequency may vary. i understand that consent is not a condition to purchase any goods, services or property, and that i may withdraw my consent at any time by sending an email to [email protected]. i understand that if i am submitting my personal data from outside of the united states, i am consenting to the transfer of my personal data to, and its storage in, the united states, and i understand that my personal data will be subject to processing in accordance with u.s. laws, unless stated otherwise in our privacy policy. please review our privacy policy for more details or contact us at [email protected]. by submitting my information, i acknowledge that i have read and reviewed the accessibility statement. by submitting my information, i acknowledge that i have read and reviewed the student code of conduct located in the catalog. national university chat options

social media has changed the way we meet and interact with each other. it provides a platform to learn more about people you associate with. however, social media usage has also contributed to and exacerbated problems in romantic relationships. growing research has shown that increased usage of social media has had a negative effect on marriages and relationships. higher levels of social media usage have led to more marital problems, infidelity, conflicts, jealousy, and eventually divorce. it’s not only what a person does on social media, but also how much time they spend doing it that can create conflict. excessive time spent on social media has been shown to negatively impact romantic relationships. a recent study, published in computers in human behavior, compared state by state divorce rates to per capita facebook accounts. the study found a link between social media use and decreased marriage quality in every model analyzed. it also found that a 20% annual increase in facebook enrollment was associated with a 2.18% to 4.32% increase in divorce rates. the study’s model from the individual survey results predicts that people that do not use social media are 11% happier in their marriages than people that regularly use social media. social media provides easy access for a jealous or suspicious spouse to seek out information about the interactions of a significant other. whether suspicions are founded or unfounded, people often feel uneasy about their relationship after discovering something on their partner’s facebook account. this often leads to increased monitoring, jealousy, and conflict in a relationship. in fact, researchers have found that the more a person examines their partner’s facebook activity, the more that person reports jealousy and mistrust. unfortunately, suspicions about a partner’s social media interactions are often warranted. one in ten adults admits to hiding messages and posts from their significant other. eight percent of adults in relationships admit to having secret accounts. and one in three divorces now start as online affairs. with smartphones and social media apps, it’s never been easier for dissatisfied spouses to look for a new relationship, get in contact with an ex, or seek out a fling. a whopping 30% of tinder users are married. sites like ashleymadison.com even cater to married people looking for affairs   over 130 million people worldwide visit ashley madison each month. more than a third of u.s. marriages now begin online through dating sites and social media networks. those marriages are lasting longer on average than those that begin offline. couples are also starting to understand the impact of social media use on relationships and work to limit time spent on facebook and be more open in their online activities. some couples are even creating social media “prenups”   guidelines within a prenuptial agreement for acceptable online behavior, such as not friending exes and not sharing private information or photos without permission. the information on this website is for general information purposes only. nothing on this site should be taken as legal advice for any individual case or situation. this information is not intended to create, and receipt or viewing does not constitute, an attorney client relationship. website: www.mckinleyirvin.com © 2025 all rights reserved ⚠ your browser is out of date. to get the full experience of this website, please update to most recent version.

february 9, 2023 daniel a. cox few topics capture our interest as completely and intensely as dating and romantic relationships. the process of finding a partner and the struggle it frequently entails is an omnipresent feature of the american cultural landscape, appearing in movies, literature, art, and popular music. but until the recent past, dating was an activity that occurred mostly during late adolescence and young adulthood and much more rarely thereafter. today, americans spend a much greater part of their lives single. the rise of divorce and delay of marriage mean that dating occurs later in life and our dating lives last much longer than they once did. not only are americans spending more time dating, but the goals for dating, which at one point primarily served as an avenue to marriage, are less clear than they once were. the january 2023 american perspectives survey sheds some light on dating preferences, experiences, and perspectives. the national survey of more than 5,000 adults age 18 and older, including nearly 800 single adults, finds that americans have strong dating preferences when it comes to living at home, being unemployed, and smoking. these are especially salient considerations for women. politics is another important consideration for many americans, especially committed partisans. most republicans and democrats say they would be much less interested in dating those of the opposite political persuasion. dating practices that frequently grab headlines, such as ghosting and sexting, are not all that widespread, and, in the case of sexting, it may occur less frequently today. generation z is significantly less likely than millennials are to report sending sexually explicit images of themselves to someone they are dating. the survey also finds that infidelity is a disquietingly common experience, especially for women. nearly half of women say that a partner or spouse has been unfaithful, including more than six in 10 black women. the new survey also reveals that, despite the growing popularity of online dating sites and apps, many users feel ambivalent about what they have to offer. among the roughly one in four americans who have ever used an online dating platform, experiences are mixed. roughly as many users report a positive experience as a negative one. women are especially critical of online dating, reporting significantly more negative experiences than men. even as online dating has made it easier than ever to become romantically involved with a complete stranger, younger americans appear increasingly interested in dating people they already know. young adults are more than twice as likely as seniors to report that they were friends with their partner or spouse before they started dating. most older americans say their spouse or partner was once a stranger. no social change has altered the fabric of american life so profoundly as the decline of marriage. in 2021, only about half of americans, with slightly more men than women, report being married. the us census bureau reports a steady decline in marriage rates going back 50 years.[1] reasons for marriage’s decline abound. as professional opportunities for women grew over the past few decades, they became more financially independent, reducing the immediate economic necessity of marriage. shifting views about gender roles and legal changes to divorce law also contributed. national economic disruptions that disproportionately affected working class men have also been cited as a factor.[2] additionally, growing suspicion of and in some cases outright opposition to traditional social arrangements among young adults may reduce interest in marriage. a rising number of young people raised by divorced parents may have contributed an overall feelings of skepticism about marriage as well. marriage is also facing increasing competition from other types of social arrangements such as cohabitation. the number of americans cohabitating with their romantic partner has more than doubled over the past three decades.[3] it has become a widely accepted practice, particularly among younger americans. nearly six in 10 younger americans report having cohabitated with a romantic partner.[4] nowhere is the decline of marriage more evident than in the lives of young adults. overall, more than one in three americans have never been married. only 25 percent of younger adults (age 18 to 34) are currently married, a dramatic decline over the past few decades. in 1978, younger adults were almost twice as likely to be married (59 percent).[5] although more americans today have never been married, many do not describe their relationship status as single. more than three in 10 (35 percent) americans have never married, but only about one in five (21 percent) are currently single. what’s more, many americans who have never married have been in committed relationships for years. over half (53 percent) of americans who have never been married and are currently living with their partner have been in the relationship for at least five years. nearly one in three (32 percent) americans living with their partner have been together for at least 10 years. for the past couple of years, the covid 19 pandemic has complicated social interactions of all types limiting social gatherings and diminishing opportunities to forge new relationships. most americans trying to date during the pandemic found the experience challenging. a pew research center study found that 63 percent of “daters” said the pandemic made the experience more difficult.[6] despite the evident complications of dating at a time of a contagious viral pandemic, there is not much evidence to suggest that it substantially affected relationship formation among young adults in the long term. in the early months of the pandemic, about half (49 percent) of young adults (age 18 to 29) reported that they were single, defined as not being married, living with a partner, or being in a “committed relationship.”[7] relationship status varied considerably between young men and women at this time. nearly six in 10 (59 percent) young men, compared to 38 percent of young women, reported being single. at the end of 2022, male relationship status was largely the same as it was more than two years earlier. today, a majority (57 percent) of young men are single. however, young women appear to have experienced a modest increase in single status; close to half (45 percent) of young women now report being single. most americans who are single report that they are not currently dating, and, while many are open to dating, a significant number report that they are not currently looking to date anyone. only about one in 10 single americans report that they are currently dating one person (11 percent) or more than one person (2 percent). forty two percent report that they are not currently dating anyone but remain open to the possibility. nearly as many single americans (41 percent) report that they are not interested in dating anyone at the moment. there is a significant disparity in dating interest between single men and women. nearly half (47 percent) of single men report being open to dating, compared to only 36 percent of single women. the gender gap in dating is even wider among young singles. more than half (52 percent) of young single men say they are open to dating, compared to only 36 percent of young single women. americans who are single cite numerous different reasons they are not interested in dating or are not currently dating someone. the two most commonly cited reasons single americans give include having more important priorities in their life and finding it difficult to meet people. thirty six percent of single adults say that having more important priorities is a major reason they are not currently dating. single women are much more likely than single men to say this is a major reason they are not dating (45 percent vs. 29 percent, respectively). an identical number (36 percent) of single americans say that difficulty meeting people is a major reason they are not dating. roughly equal numbers of single men (35 percent) and single women (38 percent) say this is a major factor. not being able to find someone who measures up is another important reason many single americans cite. of single americans, 30 percent say that not being able to find someone who meets their expectations is a major reason they are not dating. women cite this as a factor more often than men do. nearly four in 10 (38 percent) single women, compared to less than one quarter (23 percent) of single men, say an inability to find someone who meets their expectations is a major reason they are not dating. this is an especially salient issue for college educated women. close to half (45 percent) of college educated women say not being able to find someone who meets their expectations is a major factor, while only 28 percent of women without a college education feel the same. this education gap is slightly smaller among men. one third (33 percent) of college educated men claim not finding someone who meets their standards is a major factor for them, compared to 19 percent of noncollege educated men. fewer single americans cite a preference for being single, lack of interest, or not being ready after ending a relationship as major reasons they are not dating. more than one in four (27 percent) single americans say a major reason they are not dating is that they simply enjoy being single. one in five (20 percent) single americans who are not currently dating or interested in doing so say that people not being interested in them is a major factor. only 8 percent of single americans say that not being ready after ending a previous relationship is a major reason they are not dating, with women citing this as a major reason three times more often than men (12 percent vs. 4 percent, respectively). women more than men report having a greater number of potential deal breakers when it comes to dating. they are also more likely to report having difficulty finding someone who meets their expectations. but for many young women, dating expectations refer less to a laundry list of must have qualities and more to basic standards of how they wish to be treated.[8] one 19 year old women says that she’s looking for mutual respect in a relationship and someone who approaches issues with an open mind. i don’t want to be in a relationship where somebody’s not open minded about things that i want to do. like if they have their point of view on something and i have a different point of view, i would like to have like a conversation about it. another young woman, a 22 year old college student, echoes this sentiment. for her, feeling respected and being with someone who is kind and considerate is paramount. pretty much my biggest thing is respect. . . . if we’re in a relationship, you shouldn’t have any dating apps on your phone at all. like, i don’t care if we met on one or anything like that. we are in a relationship. i don’t need you going and looking at what’s on the market. she says she is mostly looking for affirmation that her partner is invested in their relationship. we ask for simple things, you know, remembering things that we talked about in conversations. you know, flowers occasionally. date nights. every once in a while, just to have that reassurance that our relationship is worthwhile and feeling like we can spend really great quality time together and share special moments. but these were not the only perspectives. a 27 year old married woman believes that many young women are not being realistic about what they can expect from their partner. a lot of women i have met, a lot of my own peers who are the same age and still are unmarried . . . they’re out there looking for mr. perfect. he’s got to be over 6 feet. . . . he’s got to make so much money each year. his family has to be perfect. he has to agree with all of my own personal beliefs. and you know, i mean men are human too. they’re not going to meet all of those expectations. at the same time, this woman said she believes what many men are looking for is not realistic either. i think men are still looking for a type of woman that doesn’t really exist anymore. . . . they’re looking for that 1950s housewife type woman. and that’s just not the type of girls that i think are out there today. a lot of girls . . . want to go to college. they want to have a career. they want to make a name for themselves in the world. and then they want to settle. a 27 year old divorced man suggested that women may express more definite dating criteria simply because they have spent more time thinking about it: “[it] depends on the person, i feel like a lot of times women seem to have a better idea of what they want.” most young adults who were interviewed acknowledged that priorities in dating vary widely, even within couples. most interviewees also agreed that communicating expectations was important in dating and that a lack of open and honest dialogue could be a serious problem. for most interviewees, dating expectations reflected more basic needs of feeling valued, appreciated, and respected by their partner. americans do not necessarily approach dating decisions with set criteria or formal checklists, but americans do find certain qualities more or less compelling in a potential romantic partner. dating apps have made it easier than ever to prioritize certain characteristics and backgrounds in prospective partners, increasing the salience of certain attributes, such as political beliefs. but what americans care about varies widely. men’s and women’s dating priorities are quite different, and college educated americans appear much more critical than those without a degree. still, a few attributes, such as smoking, being unemployed, and living with parents, are widely viewed as negative qualities in a romantic partner. dating preferences vary widely among americans and reflect divergent interests, backgrounds, and life priorities. however, a few qualities stand out as being important. notably, americans are generally better able to clearly articulate what they do not want in a potential partner rather than what they do want. one important dating consideration for americans is proximity. americans want to date someone who lives relatively close to them. more than two thirds (68 percent) of americans say they would be somewhat or a lot less likely to date someone who lives in another state. although men and women have many different priorities when it comes to dating, they agree about the importance of dating someone who lives relatively close to them. employment status is another important consideration for many americans when it comes to making dating decisions. sixty nine percent of americans say they would be less likely to date someone who is unemployed. this matters much more to women than men. eighty one percent of women, compared to 56 percent of men, say they would be less likely to date someone who did not have a job. educational attainment plays a significant role in whether americans would be willing to date someone who is unemployed. college educated americans are more likely to say employment status is an important dating consideration than are those without a degree. seventy seven percent of college graduates say they would be less inclined to date someone without a job, while more than six in 10 (62 percent) americans with a high school education or less say the same. the gender divide cuts across educational background and is most pronounced among americans without a college education. nearly three quarters (74 percent) of women without a college degree say they would be less likely to date someone who is jobless. less than half (47 percent) of men without a college education claim this would be an impediment. among college graduates, the gender divide still looms large, but both men and women say this is an issue. nearly nine in 10 (89 percent) college educated women and 66 percent of men with a college education say they would be less likely to date someone unemployed. americans care significantly less about the educational background of a prospective romantic partner than they do about employment. only 25 percent of americans say they would be less likely to date someone who did not go to college. nearly seven in 10 (69 percent) americans say this does not matter to them. however, educational background is more of a dating consideration for americans with college degrees. americans with a four year college degree are still far more likely to prioritize a college education when it comes to potential partners. nearly half (49 percent) of americans with a college degree say they would be less likely to date someone without one. this matters somewhat more for women than men. a majority (54 percent) of college educated women and less than half (44 percent) of college educated men say they would be less inclined to date someone who did not attend college. notably, an even larger share of women with a postgraduate education (67 percent) say they would be less likely to date someone without a college education. rising divorce rates and out of wedlock births have increased the number of parents who have young children and are now dating. having children is not a liability for most americans, although it is an issue for a significant number. forty three percent of americans say they would be less likely to date someone who had children from a previous relationship. more than half (52 percent) say this does not matter to them, and 3 percent say this would be an argument in their favor. men and women have similar views when it comes to dating someone who is already a parent, but there are stark educational divides. a majority (54 percent) of americans with a college degree say they would be less likely to date someone who already has children, compared to 35 percent of those with a high school degree or less. the question of whether to have children is a major decision many couples will face. however, when it comes to dating, most americans say someone not wanting children is not a major stumbling block. roughly four in 10 (39 percent) americans say they would be less likely to date someone who does not want children, 44 percent say this would not matter to them, and 14 percent say this would make them more likely to date them. there is an ideological divide when it comes to children. for conservatives, not wanting children is a strike against, but less so for liberals, especially liberal men. close to half (46 percent) of conservatives say they would be less likely to date someone who didn’t want to start a family, including roughly equal numbers of conservative men (45 percent) and women (47 percent). among liberals, there is a stark gender divide. more than four in 10 (43 percent) liberal women say they would be less inclined to date someone who did not want children, compared to 34 percent of liberal men. despite being a relatively religious country, more americans say a potential partner being “very religious” is negative than say it is positive. more than four in 10 (42 percent) americans say they would be less likely to date someone who is very religious. twenty percent say this would make them more interested in potentially dating someone, and 36 percent say it would not make a difference to them. at the same time, not believing in god appears to be a greater liability in dating. nearly half (49 percent) of americans say they would be less likely to date someone who does not believe in god. only 12 percent say not believing in god would make them more inclined to date someone. thirty eight percent of americans say it would not matter to them one way or the other. there are striking political differences when it comes to views about the religiosity and religious beliefs of potential dating partners. sixty nine percent of liberals say they would be less inclined to date a very religious person, compared to 24 percent of conservatives. conservative women feel especially strongly about a potential partner’s religious beliefs. three quarters of conservative women (75 percent) say they would be less likely to date someone who does not believe in god, with 61 percent reporting they would be very unlikely to do this. most religious americans report having significant reservations about dating an atheist, but they are not comparably enthusiastic about dating someone who is very religious. for instance, 84 percent of white evangelical christians say they would be less likely to date someone who does not believe in god, including more than two thirds (68 percent) who say they would be “very” unlikely to do this. at the same time, more than half (56 percent) of white evangelical christians say they would be more likely to date someone who is very religious. conversely, more than three quarters (76 percent) of religiously unaffiliated americans would be less likely to date someone who is very religious, but only 31 percent report that they would be more inclined to date an atheist. republicans and democrats report being similarly averse to dating across the political aisle. roughly two thirds (65 percent) of democrats say they would be less likely to date a republican, and more than six in 10 (62 percent) self identified republicans report that they would be less likely to date a democrat. despite the salience of politics in dating, partisans appear to place less importance on dating someone who exactly shares their affiliation. about half of republicans (51 percent) and democrats (54 percent) say they would be more likely to date someone who identifies with their respective party. for democrats, supporting donald trump is far more polarizing. eighty four percent of democrats say they would be less likely to date a trump supporter, including nearly three quarters (74 percent) who say this would make them a lot less likely to consider dating someone. being a trump supporter does not appear to be much of an advantage for those with more conservative politics either. only about one in three (35 percent) republicans say they would be more likely to date someone who supported trump. additionally, 14 percent of republicans are less likely to date a trump supporter. stark educational differences emerge in views about dating a trump supporter. americans with a college degree express far greater reservations about dating a trump supporter than those with a high school degree or less. sixty five percent of college graduates say they would be less likely to date a trump supporter, including nearly three quarters (74 percent) of college educated women. four in 10 (41 percent) americans without a college education say they would be less inclined to date someone who supports trump. women overall view trump support more negatively than positively in a potential partner, but black women are especially averse to dating someone who supports the former president. three quarters of black women (75 percent), compared to half of white (50 percent) and hispanic (56 percent) women, say they would be less inclined to date a trump supporter. no group of women expresses greater objections to dating a trump supporter than liberal women do. more than nine in 10 (91 percent) claim they would be less likely to date a trump supporter, including 84 percent who say they would be “a lot” less likely to do this. if being a trump supporter is a liability for liberals, being a feminist is more problematic for those on the right. being a feminist is more of a liability than an advantage in dating. more than four in 10 (42 percent) americans report they would be less likely to date someone who is a feminist. only 15 percent say they would be more likely to date someone who identifies as a feminist; 40 percent say this would not influence them one way or the other. men and women differ somewhat in their preferences for dating someone who is a feminist, but even women view it more negatively than positively. thirty nine percent of women, compared to 55 percent of men, would be less likely to date a feminist, while 21 percent say they would be more likely to date someone who identifies this way. conservative men express the greatest objection to dating feminists, with 70 percent reporting they would be less inclined. there is a stark political divide in views about dating someone who is a feminist. two thirds of conservatives (67 percent) would be less likely to date someone who is a feminist, compared to 18 percent of liberals. thirty seven percent of liberals say they would be more likely to date someone who identifies as a feminist. notably, there is a significant gender gap among liberals: nearly half (48 percent) of liberal women would be more inclined to date a feminist, compared to 22 percent of liberal men. americans generally regard smoking as an unattractive feature in a prospective partner. seventy seven percent of americans say they would be less likely to date a smoker, including 58 percent who say they would be much less likely to do this. men and women generally feel similarly about dating someone who smokes. objections to smoking are much more strongly held among americans with a college degree. nine in 10 americans with a college degree say they would be less likely to date a smoker, compared to 66 percent of those with a high school education or less. many americans harbor reservations about dating someone who is skeptical of vaccines as well. almost half (49 percent) of americans say they would be less inclined to date someone who is skeptical of vaccines. ten percent say they would be more likely to date this type of person, and about four in 10 (39 percent) say it would not matter to them. educational differences, again, loom large. two thirds (67 percent) of college graduates would be less likely to date someone skeptical of vaccines, while only one third (33 percent) of those without a degree express the same concern. the partisan divisions are notable as well, with 70 percent of democrats being less likely to date someone who is skeptical of vaccines and only 27 percent of republicans being less likely to do so. americans are generally more likely to view being a vegan as negative than positive, but most americans report that they do not care about this in a prospective partner. forty percent say they would be less likely to date someone who is vegan, while 3 percent say they would be more likely. the majority (54 percent) of americans report that this would not matter to them. conservatives report having more reservations about dating a vegan than liberals do (51 percent vs. 39 percent, respectively). height is an issue for many americans in the dating market, but it matters much more for women than men. overall, about one in three (34 percent) americans say they would be less likely to date someone who is shorter, and 20 percent say they would be less likely to date someone taller than they are. there is a considerable gender gap. a majority (56 percent) of women say they would be less likely to date someone who is “much shorter” than they are, but only 11 percent of men say the same. men are more likely than women to object to dating someone much taller than them, but not to the same degree. about one third (32 percent) of men say they would be less likely to date someone who is taller. eight percent of women say the same. notably, despite strong dating preferences when it comes to height, only about one in four (24 percent) women say they would be more likely to date someone taller than them. both liberals and conservatives report being partial to dating someone whose political views align with their own, but their preferences differ significantly in a couple of important ways. first, self identified conservatives are significantly less likely than liberals to report willingness to date someone with moderate political views. nearly half of liberals (47 percent) and about one in three (35 percent) conservatives say they would be willing to date someone who describes their political views as moderate. conservatives also express greater hesitation in dating someone with “extreme” views, even if they are on the same side of the political spectrum. forty five percent of liberals say they would be willing to date someone who was “extremely liberal,” while only 26 percent of conservatives would date someone who was “extremely conservative.” in the wake of the dobbs v. jackson women’s health organization supreme court ruling overturning roe v. wade, abortion has become much more salient for many americans, especially young women. a survey conducted in the fall of 2022[9] found that 61 percent of young women said abortion was a crucial concern, citing it more often than any other issue. but when it comes to dating, abortion does not appear to be a deal breaker for most. only 14 percent of americans overall say that it would be impossible to date someone who does not share their views on abortion. nineteen percent of americans say this would be very difficult for them, and about one in three (32 percent) say it would be somewhat difficult. one third (33 percent) of americans say it would not be difficult to date someone they disagree with over abortion. young women are somewhat more likely than older women to have a problem dating someone whose view on abortion does not align with their own. nearly half say it would be impossible (24 percent) or very difficult (22 percent) for them to do. for liberal women, abortion is an especially salient dating consideration. nearly six in 10 (59 percent) liberal women say it would be impossible or very difficult for them to date someone who has a different view on abortion. only about four in 10 (41 percent) conservative women say it would be impossible or very difficult. one third of liberal men (33 percent), and just under one third of conservative men (31 percent), would have a major problem dating someone who disagreed with them on abortion. online dating has become widespread, even as it has its fair share of detractors. yet despite the rapidly expanding number of online dating platforms available, most americans (76 percent) report never using them. only about one in four (23 percent) americans report ever having used a dating website or app. in general, online dating is more common among younger americans, but the age gap is not entirely linear. young adults (age 18 to 29) are far more likely to have used an online dating service than are seniors (33 percent vs. 9 percent, respectively). but gen zers are actually less likely to have used online dating apps or sites than millennials are. gay and lesbian americans are among the most frequent users of online dating apps and sites. a majority (58 percent) of gay and lesbian americans and nearly half (48 percent) of those who identify as bisexual say they have used online dating platforms. in contrast, only 21 percent of americans who are heterosexual or straight have ever participated in online dating. online dating is also more common among divorced americans. forty one percent of divorced men and 31 percent of divorced women report having dated online. as a way to meet potential romantic partners, online dating apps are quite effective. more than three quarters (77 percent) of americans who have used a dating app or site report having gone on a date with someone they met online. young adults (69 percent) are somewhat less likely to have ever gone out on a date with someone they met through an online dating platform. still, public views of online dating are decidedly mixed. fifty three percent of americans who have ever used an online dating site or app report having a positive experience, and few report that it was “very positive.” close to half (46 percent) of online dating users say their experience was negative. but experiences with online dating vary widely. men are more likely than women to report positive experiences dating online (57 percent vs. 49 percent, respectively). americans with more years of formal education also report having more positive experiences dating online. nearly six in 10 (58 percent) college educated americans say they have had a positive experience dating online, compared to less than half (47 percent) of those without a degree. college educated men report being the most upbeat about online dating; nearly two thirds (64 percent) report somewhat or very positive experiences dating online. even if many young people are not regularly using dating apps or websites, the influence of online dating sites, such as tinder, is impossible to ignore. to better understand the complexities of dating and relationships, in depth interviews were conducted with 21 young adults (age 18 to 29) about their experiences.[10] most interviewees expressed considerable ambivalence about dating online. for many interviewees, online dating offered convenience, but they felt interactions online could be difficult to calibrate, and many expressed concerns about the authenticity or accuracy of dating profiles. another issue expressed by interviewees was that online dating could feel transactional and the illusion of nearly limitless dating partners might lead to greater relationship dissatisfaction or discourage some people from committing to a partner. “i think the impact is like obvious,” said a 26 year old woman. people think that they just have a million options. it’s like when you want to watch a show and you put on netflix and like, you literally find yourself not being able to decide for like an hour and then you wind up not watching anything. this feeling was shared widely. men and women both expressed concerns about an overabundance of dating options. a 28 year old single man said the plentiful alternatives provided by online dating sites lead people to become less satisfied with their current partner or relationship. anytime a person, man or woman, has limitless options all the time, there is this perception, and most of the time it’s a false perception, that who they’re with now isn’t good enough. that’s why no one has patience with each other anymore, because they could get something better. a 26 year old married man expressed a similar concern. i think it’s a lot easier to churn and burn, so to speak. i just i think it’s easier to advance very quickly and then just kind of move on to the next person very easily compared to trying to make things work out. and a young woman said that the illusion of endless choices discouraged people from settling down in the first place. “i think it makes people kind of a little bit more tempted to stay outside the bounds of what a lot of people consider like a traditional monogamous relationship.” another common complaint with online dating is the difficulty of judging the authenticity of dating profiles or the challenge of first meeting someone online. a 22 year old college student said she did not always trust the information posted in online profiles. it’s just hard to know like how the person truly is through the internet. you don’t see their reactions. you don’t see the way that they react to situations because you start talking online and you see the pictures online and you’re like, oh, she’s really pretty. but that could be like a filtered photo. a 26 year old single woman said that while online dating can be convenient for people with busy schedules, the experience was ultimately less rewarding than traditional dating: “it’s a little inorganic because like, you sort of see stuff about someone before they get the opportunity to tell you, so that kind of like takes some of the mystery out of it.” another interviewee used even stronger language, describing the experience of online dating as “odd” and “dehumanizing.” many americans believe that dating has become more difficult than it once was, but men and women disagree somewhat about whether dating is more difficult for men or women. the majority of americans including most americans who are single do not believe that dating is any more difficult for men or women. more than six in 10 (62 percent) americans say that when it comes to dating, neither men nor women have a more difficult experience. roughly equal numbers of americans believe that dating is more difficult for men (17 percent) as say it is more difficult for women (19 percent). there are predictable differences between men and women. women are more likely to believe that dating presents greater challenges to women (27 percent), while men are more likely believe that men (28 percent) face greater challenges when it comes to dating. gender differences are most pronounced among young adults. thirty percent of young men believe that men have a harder time when it comes to dating, while more than one in three (34 percent) women believe they face greater difficulties in dating. ghosting, sexting, and open relationships have entered mainstream dating discussions, but these experiences are far from ubiquitous and vary considerably across generations. far more common is the experience of partner infidelity, especially for women. nearly half of women report that they have been in a relationship in which a partner or spouse has been unfaithful. the concept of sexting, sending sexually explicit images or messages, has become a familiar part of the dating landscape, with magazines now offering suggestions on how best to incorporate this activity in one’s dating life. however, few americans report having sent or received sexually explicit images without their consent. only about one in five (19 percent) americans, including roughly equal numbers of men (18 percent) and women (20 percent), report having ever sent an explicit image of themselves to someone they were dating. there is a somewhat larger gender gap among young adults. one third (33 percent) of young women compared to one quarter (25 percent) of young men report sending a partner or someone they were dating an explicit image of themselves. more americans, especially women, report receiving unsolicited explicit images than sending them. twenty nine percent of women report having been sent an explicit image they did not ask for, compared to 21 percent of men. young women are most likely to receive unsolicited sexual images. more than four in 10 (43 percent) young women report having received sexually explicit images that they did not request. there is a distinctive generational pattern in sexting experiences. the experience of sending explicit images to a partner is much more common among millennials than gen zers. thirty seven percent of millennials including 43 percent of millennial women report having sent explicit photos of themselves to someone they were dating. only 20 percent of gen zers report ever having done this. the experience of being ghosted, which describes when someone, usually a romantic interest, suddenly stops talking to you without an explanation or reason for cutting off contact, has become a fairly common dating experience. roughly one in four (24 percent) americans and 29 percent of americans who are currently single report having been ghosted by someone they were dating. men and women are about equally likely to have been ghosted at some point in their dating life. twenty six percent of women and 23 percent of men report having had this experience. the experience of being ghosted is uniquely common among the millennial generation. more than one in three (34 percent) millennials report having been ghosted at some point in their dating life. only about one in five (21 percent) gen zers report having this experience. while ghosting and sexting are less typical dating or relationship experiences, being cheated on by a partner or spouse is much more prevalent. forty percent of americans report that a partner or spouse was unfaithful. women are far more likely than men to report a partner or spouse has cheated on them. nearly half (46 percent) of women report having been cheated on at some point in their life, compared to 34 percent of men. while men’s experiences with infidelity vary little by race, there are dramatic racial differences in women’s experiences with infidelity. sixty one percent of black women report having a partner or spouse who was unfaithful, compared to 45 percent of white women and 41 percent of hispanic women. for the vast majority of americans, romantic relationships are exclusive affairs between only two people. only 7 percent of americans have ever been in an “open relationship,” in which both people agree to the possibility of having more than one romantic or sexual partner at a time. younger americans are not any more likely than older americans to have participated in an open relationship, and there are no significant differences by gender either. americans who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are much more likely to have been in an open relationship than americans who identify as heterosexual or straight. twenty eight percent of gay or lesbian people and 22 percent of americans who identify as bisexual report having participated in an open relationship. in contrast, only 5 percent of americans who identify as heterosexual or straight report ever having been in an open relationship. despite the ongoing decline in marriage rates, few americans believe that marriage has become obsolete. in fact, relationship satisfaction is somewhat higher among married couples than among those in other types of relationships. but marital status is far from the only thing that predicts feeling satisfied with one’s relationship. relationship satisfaction is influenced by numerous different factors including perception of partner attractiveness and politics. even as more americans are meeting their partners and spouses online, a growing number of young adults report that their dating lives are centered more on friends. young adults, especially young women, report that they met their current significant other or partner before they started dating, a stark change from the past. despite the rising popularity of dating apps and websites, online still trails many more traditional ways that couples meet. one in four (26 percent) americans say they met their partner, significant other, or spouse through mutual friends or family members. seventeen percent say they met at school, and an identical number (17 percent) report meeting their partner at work or a work related function. roughly one in 10 (11 percent) report having met their partner through an online dating site or app. ten percent met in their community or neighborhood, and 8 percent met at a bar, nightclub, or party. only 5 percent of americans met their spouse or partner at church or a place of worship. young men are most likely to report meeting their current partner through an online dating app or site. twenty eight percent of young men report meeting their partner this way. young women are half as likely (14 percent) to say they met their partner online. conversely, young men are the least likely to rely on their network of friends and family; only 13 percent say they have met their partner this way. many marriages in the us are relationships between onetime strangers. nearly half (46 percent) of married americans report that they did not know their partner or spouse before they started dating. one in four (25 percent) report that they were casual acquaintances before dating, and fewer than three in 10 say they were friends (15 percent) or close friends (14 percent). increasingly, americans report that they were friends with their spouse, partner, or significant other before they began dating. more than four in 10 (44 percent) young adults say they were close friends or friends with their partner before they became romantically involved. half as many seniors (21 percent) say the same. more than half (52 percent) of seniors say they did not know their spouse or partner at all before they started dating. only about one in three (35 percent) young adults say the same. young women much more than young men report a tendency to date people with whom they were first friends. half of young women report that they were close friends (29 percent) or friends who were not that close (21 percent) before becoming romantically involved with their current partner. however, only about one in three (34 percent) young men report being friends with their current partner or significant other before getting together. young women are also less likely to date people they do not know. only 30 percent of young women say they did not know the person they are now in a relationship with, compared to 43 percent of young men. politics is generally more salient in dating than it was a generation ago. young americans who are married or in committed relationships are significantly more likely to know their partner’s politics before they started dating. twenty eight percent of young adults say they knew their partner’s political views before they started dating. in contrast, only about half as many (15 percent) seniors say they were aware of their partner’s politics. the rise of online dating has made it easier to learn about someone’s political views before agreeing to go on a date. in fact, some apps allow users to prescreen based on certain criteria, such as politics, while sites were specifically developed to be exclusively for people with certain political views.[11] another reason young americans may be more aware of their partner’s politics before becoming involved is that they are far more likely to date people they already know. americans who were close friends with their current partner or spouse before they got together are far more likely to know their political views. forty four percent of americans who were close friends with their partner or spouse say they were first aware of their political views before they started dating, more than three times greater than americans who did not know their partner at all (12 percent). overall, most americans report being satisfied with their current relationship. more than three quarters of americans in a relationship report being completely satisfied (38 percent) or very satisfied (38 percent) with their partner, significant other, or spouse. however, there is great deal of variability in relationship satisfaction among couples. married couples generally report greater feelings of satisfaction with their spouse than americans in other types of relationships. forty percent of married americans report being “completely” satisfied with their relationship with their spouse, compared to 33 percent of cohabitating couples and only 24 percent of those in committed relationships but who are not living together. regardless of the relationship type, men and women report similar levels of satisfaction with their partner, significant other, or spouse.there is a substantial political gap in relationship satisfaction. republican men report being most satisfied in their relationships, while democratic women report being the least. nearly half (48 percent) of republican married men say they are completely satisfied with their relationship with their spouse. forty two percent of republican married women also say they are completely satisfied. in contrast, 36 percent of democratic married men and only 29 percent of democratic married women report being completely satisfied with their relationship. the republican advantage in relationship satisfaction holds even after accounting for differences in educational attainment, race and ethnicity, age, and religious affiliation. for men, being close friends with your partner or spouse before getting together is associated with higher levels of relationship satisfaction. close to half (46 percent) of men who were close friends with their partner or spouse before they started dating say they are completely satisfied with their current relationship, compared to 37 percent of men who did not know their partner before getting together. this pattern is not evident among women (40 percent vs. 38 percent). most americans in committed relationships believe their partner or spouse is as physically attractive as they are. fifty five percent of americans rate the attractiveness of their partner about the same as themselves. less than one in five (17 percent) americans believe they are the more attractive person, while over one quarter (26 percent) believe their partner is more attractive. men are generally more likely than women to rate their partner as more attractive. roughly one in four (24 percent) women report they are more attractive than their partner, an opinion shared by only 10 percent of men. in contrast, 40 percent of men say their partner is more attractive, compared to 13 percent of women. six in 10 (60 percent) women and about half (48 percent) of men rate their partner and themselves about equally. these disparities may be driven by the fact that in heterosexual relationships, women tend to be younger than men[12] or because men tend to prioritize physical attractiveness in their partners more than women do.[13] perceptions of partner attractiveness are strongly associated with relationship satisfaction, but somewhat differently for men than women. men who report being more attractive than their partner are far less satisfied with their relationships than are those who say their partner is more attractive or equally as attractive. only 23 percent of men who claim to have less attractive partners report being completely satisfied with their relationship. at least four in 10 men who say their partner is more attractive (42 percent) or equally attractive (40 percent) are completely satisfied. for women, relationship satisfaction is highest among those who perceive parity in physical attractiveness. more than four in 10 (42 percent) women with partners whom they perceive as being roughly as attractive as they are report being completely satisfied. fewer women who say they are more attractive (24 percent) or less attractive (34 percent) than their partners report feeling completely satisfied. even as more young adults are choosing to marry later or not at all, there is widespread agreement that marriage is still relevant in modern society. only 31 percent of americans agree that “marriage has become old fashioned and out of date,” while two thirds (67 percent) of the public disagree. what’s more, the views of younger and older americans differ only modestly. approximately one third (34 percent) of young adults and 27 percent of seniors agree that marriage has become an outmoded institution. however, young women are more likely to agree; 39 percent say marriage is old fashioned and out of date. despite general agreement among the public on marriage, there is a widespread perception that young people are not interested in getting married. more than six in 10 americans believe that single men (61 percent) are no longer interested in getting married, while roughly as many say the same about single women (64 percent). notably, the perceptions that young men and young women have of their peers are similar. americans’ dating lives will continue to arouse interest, even among and perhaps especially among those who are not single. the january 2023 american perspectives survey offers a glimpse into the challenges and changes defining romance and relationships. dating experiences are vastly different between men and women, as are their priorities when it comes to partner selection. single women express less interest in actively dating and report greater difficulty meeting someone who meets their expectations. perhaps relatedly, women are far more likely to have been in a relationship with someone who was unfaithful, to have had negative experiences dating online, and to be on the receiving end of unsolicited explicit images. in some ways, single americans face similar obstacles and may be responding in similar ways. the arrival of social media, smartphones, and dating apps upended the american dating scene, changing how young adults approach dating and relationships. one crucial shift has been in who young people choose to date: someone they already know. in the past, most americans dated strangers. even in the age of social medial and limitless options, young adults are increasingly dating people who were friends first. daniel a. cox is a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the american enterprise institute and the director of the survey center on american life. interviews were conducted among a random sample of 5,055 adults (age 18 and up) living in the united states, including all 50 states and the district of columbia. all interviews were conducted among participants of the ipsos knowledgepanel, a probability based panel designed to be representative of the us general population, not just the online population. interviewing was conducted between december 9 and december 18, 2022. interviews were conducted in spanish and english. initially, participants were chosen scientifically by a random selection of telephone numbers and residential addresses. persons in selected households were then invited by telephone or mail to participate in the ipsos knowledgepanel. for those who agreed to participate but did not already have internet access, ipsos provided a laptop and internet service provider connection for free. people who already had computers and internet service were permitted to participate using their own equipment. panelists then received unique log in information for accessing surveys online and then were sent emails throughout each month inviting them to participate in research. the data were weighted to adjust for gender by age, race, education, census region by metropolitan status, and household income. the sample weighting was accomplished using an iterative proportional fitting process that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables. the use of survey weights in statistical analyses ensures that the demographic characteristics of the sample closely approximate the demographic characteristics of the target population. the margin of error for the qualified survey sample is +/  1.5 percentage points at the 95 percent level of confidence. the design effect for the survey is 1.7. this survey report also features selections from 21 in depth interviews focused on attitudes toward dating and relationships, gender roles, and the current political landscape. these interviews were conducted by ipsos among americans between the age of 18 and 29 between november 28, 2022, and january 11, 2023. all interview participants were recruited through ipsos’s knowledgepanel, having completed the august 2022 survey conducted on behalf of the survey center on american life. at the time of completing the survey, respondents consented to be recontacted for a follow up interview. ten men, 10 women, and one nonbinary respondent (whose profile information identifies them as female) were recruited and completed a roughly 30 minute one on one interview; no other quotas were put in place during recruitment. [1] us census bureau, “unmarried and single americans week: september 18 24, 2022,” press release, september 18, 2022, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/unmarried single americans week.html. [2] michael greenstone and adam looney, “the marriage gap: the impact of economic and technological change on marriage rates,” brookings institutions, february 3, 2012, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/jobs/2012/02/03/the marriage gap the impact of economic and technological change on marriage rates. [3] the pew research center’s analysis was based on americans age 25 to 54. richard fry and kim parker, “rising share of u.s. adults are living without a spouse or partner,” pew research center, october 5, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/social trends/2021/10/05/rising share of u s adults are living without a spouse or partner. [4] juliana menasce horowitz, nikki graf, and gretchen livingston, “marriage and cohabitation in the us,” pew research center, november 6, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/social trends/2019/11/06/marriage and cohabitation in the u s. [5] benjamin gurrentz, “living with an unmarried partner now common for young adults,” us census bureau, november 15, 2018, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/11/cohabitation is up marriage is down for young adults.html. [6] anna brown, “most americans who are ‘single and looking’ say dating has been harder during the pandemic,” pew research center, april 6, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact tank/2022/04/06/most americans who are single and looking say dating has been harder during the pandemic. [7] daniel a. cox et al., socially distant: how our divided social networks explain our politics, aei survey center on american life, september 30, 2020, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/socially distant how our divided social networks explain our politics. [8] the following interviews were conducted by qualitative researchers at ipsos from november 28, 2022, to january 11, 2023. participants were recruited from the ipsos knowledgepanel, having completed the august 2022 survey conducted on behalf of the survey center on americans life. at the time of completing the survey, respondents consented to be recontacted for a follow up interview. of the 21 participants between age 18 and 29, 10 participants identified as male, 10 identified as female, and one participant identified as gender nonbinary. they completed a roughly 30 minute one on one interview; no other quotas were put in place during the recruitment. [9] karlyn bowman and daniel a. cox, “gender, generation and abortion: shifting politics and perspectives after roe,” aei survey center on american life, october 14, 2022, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/gender generation and abortion shifting politics and perspectives after roe. [10] see endnote 8. [11] lisa portolan, “the right stuff: the new conservative dating app which has unsurprisingly, failed to attract women,” conversation, october 13, 2022, https://theconversation.com/the right stuff the new conservative dating app which has unsurprisingly failed to attract women 192012. [12] raymond fisman et al., “gender differences in mate selection: evidence from a speed dating experiment,” quarterly journal of economics 121, no. 2 (may 2006): 673 97, https://academic.oup.com/qje/article abstract/121/2/673/1884033?redirectedfrom=fulltext. [13] according to the us census current population survey, in nearly one third of married heterosexual couples, the husband is at least four years older than the wife. us census bureau, current population survey, annual social and economic supplement,“table fg3. married couple family groups, by presence of own children under 18, and age, earnings, education, and race and hispanic origin of both spouses: 2017,”https://www2.census.gov/programs surveys/demo/tables/families/2017/cps 2017/tabfg3 all.xls. january 2023 american perspectives survey   topline questionnaire daniel a. cox, kelsey eyre hammondjanuary 29, 2025 a new report by the survey center on american life finds that safety concerns and declining trust are reshaping modern dating, leaving many singles feeling pessimistic about their prospects. sharp gender divides in attitudes toward dating apps, trust, and relationships reveal how these challenges are redefining the search for connection. daniel a. cox, kelsey eyre hammondseptember 24, 2024 americans are increasingly divided on gendered issues. a new report by the survey center on american life provides context for how these divisions might impact the results of the 2024 presidential election. daniel a. cox, sam pressleraugust 22, 2024 disconnected: places and spaces presents new survey findings that suggest americans are less connected than ever before. daniel a. cox, kyle gray, kelsey eyre hammondmay 28, 2024 a survey of more than 6,500 us adults focused on the 2024 presidential election reveals a pessimistic and unsettled american electorate fractured by education, ideology, class, and gender. february 5, 2025 february 3, 2025 february 1, 2025 january 20, 2025

social media can affect all types of relationships in both positive and negative ways. it can help people stay connected, but may also lead to less quality in person time. people can use social media to stay connected to long distance friends and family members or improve communication with their partners, children, and healthcare professionals. in contrast, social media use can lead to less quality in person time spent with loved ones and relationship dissatisfaction. these drawbacks may be related to pre existing relationship issues or psychological conditions. this article examines three positive and negative ways social media can affect relationships. social media can affect relationships in the following positive ways. according to recent research, social media use has a positive impact on social connection if people use it actively. family members and friends do not always live in the same city, or even the same state or country. social media platforms such as instagram and facebook are quick and convenient ways for long distance loved ones to stay in touch. people can post updates about themselves and others in their lives, such as spouses and children, as well as share photos of vacations and other important family events. additionally, people can tweak their privacy levels and share more personal information or pictures through individual or group messages. these and other social media apps provide ways for people to video chat in real time, further helping them feel more connected. margaret e. morris, ph.d., clinical psychologist and author of left to our own devices: outsmarting smart technology to reclaim our relationships, health, and focus, conducted a 2020 review of how people in various types of relationships use technology. morris found that it is not the specific type of technology people use but how they use it that can bring value to the partnership. morris discusses the benefits of various types of technology. one example is a parent sharing a self help app with a child to work through an argument. in discussing romantic relationships, morris highlights how sharing images via social media can also feel like an extra way to communicate. using tools such as whatsapp, and texting through an argument, may also help some people communicate through writing. this allows a person time and space to formulate the right words when face to face conversations prove difficult. concerning romantic relationships, social media might actually help partners achieve sexual gratification. more specifically, this refers to pornography consumption on social media. during a 2019 study involving 379 participants, researchers found pornography consumption may significantly help a person’s sexual gratification in their romantic relationships. however, the degree to which participants felt this improvement was dependent on the person’s sexual confidence and sexual compulsivity. learn more about the benefits and risks of pornography usage here. the following are some negative ways in which social media can impact relationships. substituting social media interactions for face to face communication may impact not only existing relationships but also the ability to form new relationships. for example, while some researchers note the necessity for more research on social anxiety and social media use, it is possible for people with social anxiety to experience continued functional impairments   e.g., being uncomfortable or unable to form and engage in face to face relationships   when they replace in person interactions with social media use. furthermore, failing to make or maintain in person relationships may also appear as a consequence of social media use. during a 2021 study at prince sattam bin abdulaziz university in saudi arabia, researchers found that more than half (59%) of the 300 participants reported prolonged use of social media had impacted their social interactions, negatively affecting family relationships and friendships while also making face to face communication more difficult. however, the study consisted only of students who identified as female aged 17 29 years, so more research is necessary. excessive social media use can negatively impact quality time, create conflict, and reduce relationship satisfaction   whether the relationship is romantic or not. during a 2021 study, researchers used instagram and the app’s time tracking capability to learn more about the connection between social media and relationship satisfaction. they found an increase in instagram usage led to a decrease in relationship satisfaction and an increase in conflict and negative outcomes. furthermore, the dissatisfaction, conflict, and negative outcomes triggered an addictive use of instagram. on the flipside, making daily sacrifices for the relationship partner had a positive effect on relationship satisfaction and decreased the likelihood of conflict and negative outcomes. however, there is also the issue of phubbing   the act of snubbing a person in a social setting by focusing on one’s smartphone. for example, if two people sit down for a face to face conversation and one continues to scroll social media apps and check notifications, that person is phubbing the other. numerous studies and research materials show that many people feel phubbing is rude and goes against social norms. phubbees, or people who have experienced phubbing, report a reduced sense of emotional connection, empathetic concern, and interpersonal trust. additionally, phubbing may lead to heightened jealousy between romantic partners, as well as weaken their bond and lower their satisfaction with the relationship. “infidelity related behaviors,” such as communicating with alternative partners, can lead to relationship dissatisfaction, breakups, and divorce. social media provides such an avenue for those behaviors. while there is not much empirical evidence regarding social media infidelity related behaviors (smirb) and marital relationships, there is growing research on the topic. for example, researchers conducted a 2017 survey of 338 married or cohabiting partners on smirb. in addition to existing materials such as the quality of marriage index and experiences in close relationship scale short form, participants completed a survey specific to this study. question topics revolved around online activities, emotions, and secrecy. a small percentage of people reported participating in social media infidelity related behaviors. however, researchers found that more participation in these behaviors was significantly related to lower relationship satisfaction, higher relationship ambivalence, and other relationship concerns. regardless of the relationship type, ideas for managing social media use around relationships include: ways to manage social media usage during everyday life include: additionally, social media may bring risks unrelated to relationships. for example, social media use   including problematic social media use   may: learn more about social media and mental health here. social media can have both positive and negative effects on interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships. while the advantages of social media and relationships tend to occur naturally, the disadvantages seem to be associated with existing relationship problems or underlying psychological concerns. it is important for people to manage social media usage, as too much time spent on social media can negatively impact numerous aspects of life. share this article social media has associations with depression, anxiety, and feelings of isolation. however, it can also have a positive influence on individuals and… some people may wish to consider taking social media breaks to improve their mental well being or sleep quality. learn more here. parasocial relationships involve a one sided connection between an individual and a public figure. learn more. what do we really know about the links between social media use and mental health? we spoke with seven experts to find out. the five love languages are a tool that may help increase overall relationship satisfaction. learn more about them here. our brands

by aziz ansari my parents had an arranged marriage. this always fascinated me. i am perpetually indecisive about even the most mundane things, and i couldn’t imagine navigating such a huge life decision so quickly. i asked my dad about this experience, and here’s how he described it: he told his parents he was ready to get married, so his family arranged meetings with three neighboring families. the first girl, he said, was “a little too tall,” and the second girl was “a little too short.” then he met my mom. he quickly deduced that she was the appropriate height (finally!), and they talked for about 30 minutes. they decided it would work. a week later, they were married. and they still are, 35 years later. happily so and probably more so than most people i know who had nonarranged marriages. that’s how my dad decided on the person with whom he was going to spend the rest of his life. let’s look at how i do things, maybe with a slightly less important decision, like the time i had to pick where to eat dinner in seattle when i was on tour last year. first i texted four friends who travel and eat out a lot and whose judgment i trust. i checked the website eater for its heat map, which includes new, tasty restaurants in the city. then i checked yelp. and gq’s online guide to seattle. finally i made my selection: il corvo, an italian place that sounded amazing. unfortunately, it was closed. (it only served lunch.) at that point i had run out of time because i had a show to do, so i ended up making a peanut butter and banana sandwich on the bus. the stunning fact remained: it was quicker for my dad to find a wife than it is for me to decide where to eat dinner. this kind of rigor goes into a lot of my decisionmaking. whether it’s where i’m eating, where i’m traveling or, god forbid, something i’m buying, like a lot of people in my generation those in their 20s and 30s i feel compelled to do a ton of research to make sure i’m getting every option and then making the best choice. if this mentality pervades our decision­making in so many realms, is it also affecting how we choose a romantic partner? the question nagged at me not least because of my own experiences watching promising relationships peter out over text message so i set out on a mission. i read dozens of studies about love, how people connect and why they do or don’t stay together. i quizzed the crowds at my stand up comedy shows about their own love lives. people even let me into the private world of their phones to read their romantic texts aloud onstage. i learned of the phenomenon of “good enough” marriage, a term social anthropologists use to describe marriages that were less about finding the perfect match than a suitable candidate whom the family approved of for the couple to embark on adulthood together. and along with the sociologist eric klinenberg, co author of my new book, i conducted focus groups with hundreds of people across the country and around the world, grilling participants on the most intimate details of how they look for love and why they’ve had trouble finding it. eric and i weren’t digging into ­singledom we were trying to chip away at the changing state of love. today’s generations are looking (exhaustively) for soul mates, whether we decide to hit the altar or not, and we have more opportunities than ever to find them. the biggest changes have been brought by the $2.4 billion online ­dating industry, which has exploded in the past few years with the arrival of dozens of mobile apps. throw in the fact that people now get married later in life than ever before, turning their early 20s into a relentless hunt for more romantic options than previous generations could have ever imagined, and you have a recipe for romance gone haywire. in the course of our research, i also discovered something surprising: the winding road from the classified section of yore to tinder has taken an unexpected turn. our phones and texts and apps might just be bringing us full circle, back to an old fashioned version of courting that is closer to what my own parents experienced than you might guess. where bozos are studs today, if you own a smartphone, you’re carrying a 24 7 singles bar in your pocket. as of this writing, 38% of americans who describe themselves as “single and looking” have used an online ­dating site. it’s not just my ­generation boomers are as likely as college kids to give online dating a whirl. almost a quarter of online daters find a spouse or long term partner that way. it’s easy to see why online dating has taken off. it provides you with a seemingly endless supply of people who are single and looking to date. let’s say you’re a woman who wants a 28 year old man who’s 5 ft. 10 in., has brown hair, lives in brooklyn, is a member of the baha’i faith and loves the music of naughty by nature. before online dating, this would have been a fruitless quest, but now, at any time of the day, no matter where you are, you are just a few screens away from sending a message to your very specific dream man. there are downsides with online dating, of course. throughout all our interviews and in research on the subject this is a consistent finding: in online dating, women get a ton more attention than men. even a guy at the highest end of attractiveness barely receives the number of messages almost all women get. but that doesn’t mean that men end up standing alone in the corner of the online bar. on the internet, there are no lonely corners. take derek, a regular user of okcupid who lives in new york city. what i’m about to say is going to sound very mean, but derek is a pretty boring guy. medium height, thinning brown hair, nicely dressed and personable, but not immediately magnetic or charming. if he walked into a bar, you’d probably go, “oh, there’s a white guy.” at our focus group on online dating in manhattan, derek got on okcupid and let us watch as he went through his options. these were women whom okcupid had selected as potential matches for him based on his profile and the site’s algorithm. the first woman he clicked on was very beautiful, with a witty profile page, a good job and lots of shared interests, including a love of sports. after looking the page over for a minute or so, derek said, “well, she looks o.k. i’m just gonna keep looking for a while.” i asked what was wrong, and he replied, “she likes the red sox.” i was completely shocked. i couldn’t believe how quickly he had moved on. imagine the derek of 20 years ago, finding out that this beautiful, charming woman was a real possibility for a date. if she were at a bar and smiled at him, derek of 1993 would have melted. he wouldn’t have walked up and said, “oh, wait, you like the red sox?! no thank you!” before putting his hand in her face and turning away. but derek of 2013 simply clicked an x on a web browser tab and deleted her without thinking twice. watching him comb through those profiles, it became clear that online, every bozo could now be a stud. but dealing with this new digital romantic world can be a lot of work. answering messages, filtering profiles it’s not always fun. priya, 27, said she’d recently deleted her tinder and other online ­dating accounts. “it just takes too long to get to just the first date. i feel like it’s way more effective utilizing your social groups,” she said. “i would rather put myself in those social situations than get exhausted.” for priya, as for so many of the online daters we met in different cities, the process had morphed from something fun and exciting into a source of stress and dread. even the technological advances of the past few years are pretty absurd. you can stand in line at the grocery store and swipe through 60 people’s faces on tinder while you wait to buy hamburger buns. (note: the best hamburger buns are martin’s potato rolls. trust me!) that’s 20 times as many people as my dad met on his marriage journey. in the history of our species, no group has ever had as many romantic options as we have now. soul mate vs. laundry detergent in theory, more options are better, right? wrong. psychology professor barry schwartz, famous for his 2004 book the paradox of choice, divided us into two types of people: “satisficers” (those who satisfy and then suffice) and “maximizers,” who seek out the best. thanks to smartphones and the internet, our options are unlimited, whether it’s a retail item or a romantic possibility. we have all become maximizers. when i think back to that sad peanut butter and banana sandwich i had in seattle, this idea resonates with me. besides gasoline, it’s nearly impossible for me to think of anything i won’t put in time for to find the best. i’m a maximizer for just about everything. tacos? you better believe. candles? if you only knew how good the candles in my house smell. it’s easy to find and get the best, so why not do it? if you are in a big city or on an online ­dating site, you are now comparing your potential partners not just to other potential partners but rather to an idealized person to whom no one could ­measure up. but people don’t always know what they’re looking for in a soul mate, unlike when they’re picking something easier, like laundry detergent. while we may think we know what we want, we’re often wrong. as recounted in dan slater’s history of online dating, love in the time of algorithms, the first online ­dating services tried to find matches for clients based almost exclusively on what clients said they wanted. but pretty soon they realized that the kind of partner people said they were looking for didn’t match up with the kind of partner they were actually interested in. amarnath thombre, match.com’s president, discovered this by analyzing the discrepancy between the characteristics people said they wanted in a romantic partner (age, religion, hair color and the like) and the characteristics of the people whom they contacted on the site. when you watched their actual browsing habits who they looked at and contacted they went way outside of what they said they wanted. when i was writing stand up about online dating, i filled out the forms for dummy accounts on several dating sites just to get a sense of the questions and what the process was like. the person i described was a little younger than me, small, with dark hair. my girlfriend now, whom i met through friends, is two years older, about my height o.k., slightly taller and blond. she wouldn’t have made it through the filters i set up. a big part of online dating is spent on this process, though setting your filters, sorting through profiles and going through a mandatory checklist of what you think you are looking for. people take these parameters very seriously. they declare that their mate “must love dogs” or that their mate “must love the film must love dogs,” about a preschool teacher (diane lane) who tries online dating and specifies that her match “must love dogs.” (i looked it up on wikipedia.) but does all the effort put into sorting profiles help? despite the nuanced information that people put up on their profiles, the factor that they rely on most when preselecting a date is looks. in his book dataclysm, okcupid founder christian rudder estimates, based on data from his own site, that photos drive 90% of the action in online dating. (check out more of christian’s findings on the next page.) now, of course, we have mobile dating apps like tinder. contrary to the labor ­intensive user experience of traditional online dating, mobile apps generally operate on a much simpler and quicker scale. as soon as you sign in, tinder uses your gps location to find nearby users and starts showing you pictures. you swipe right on their picture if you might be interested, left if you’re not. maybe it sounds shallow. but consider this: in the case of my girlfriend, i initially saw her face somewhere and approached her. i didn’t have an in depth profile to peruse or a fancy algorithm. i just had her face, and we started talking and it worked out. is that experience so different from swiping on tinder? “i think tinder is a great thing,” says helen fisher, an anthropologist who studies dating. “all tinder is doing is giving you someone to look at that’s in the neighborhood. then you let the human brain with his brilliant little algorithm tick, tick, tick off what you’re looking for.” in this sense, tinder actually isn’t so different from what our grandparents did. nor is it all that different from what one friend of mine did, using online dating to find someone jewish who lived nearby. in a world of infinite possibilities, we’ve cut down our options to people we’re attracted to in our neighborhood. passion and patience in relationships, there’s commitment and commitment, the kind that involves a license, usually some kind of religious blessing and a ceremony in which every one of your close friends and relatives watches you and your partner promise to stay together until one of you dies. in the u.s., marriage rates are at historic lows the rate of marriages per 1,000 single women dropped almost 60% from 1970 to 2012. americans are also joining the international trend of marrying later; for the first time in history, the typical american now spends more years single than married. so what are we doing instead? as eric wrote in his own book, going solo, we experiment. long term cohabitation is on the rise. living alone has skyrocketed almost everywhere, and in many major cities, nearly half of all households have just one resident. but marriage is not an altogether undesirable institution. and there are many great things about being in a committed relationship. look at my parents: they had an arranged marriage, and they are totally happy. i looked into it, and this is not uncommon. people in arranged marriages start off lukewarm, but over time they really invest in each other and in general have successful relationships. this may be because they bypassed the most dangerous part of a relationship. in the first stage of a relationship, you have passionate love. this is where you and your partner are just going crazy for each other. every smile makes your heart flutter. every night is more magical than the last. during this phase, your brain floods your neural synapses with dopamine, the same neurotransmitter that gets released when you do cocaine. like all drugs, though, this high wears off after 12 to 18 months. at a certain point, the brain rebalances itself. in good relationships, as passionate love fades, companionate love arises to take its place. if passionate love is the cocaine of love, companionate love is like having a glass of wine. in his book the happiness hypothesis, nyu social psychologist jonathan haidt identifies two danger points in every romantic relationship. one is at the apex of the passionate love phase. people get all excited and dive in headfirst. a new couple, weeks or months into a relationship, high off passionate love, goes bonkers and moves in together and gets married way too quickly. sometimes these couples are able to transition from the passionate stage to the companionate one. other times, though, they transition into a crazy, toxic relationship and/or get divorced. the second danger point is when passionate love starts wearing off. this is when you start coming down off that initial high and start worrying about whether this is really the right person for you. your texts used to be so loving: it’s hard to focus on anything at work, ’cause all that’s in my head is you. now your texts are like: let’s just meet at whole foods. or: hey, that dog you made us buy took a dump in my shoe. but haidt argues that when you hit this stage, you should be patient. with luck, if you allow yourself to invest more in the other person, you will find a beautiful life companion. i had a rather weird firsthand experience with this. when i first started dating my girlfriend, a few months in, i went to a friend’s wedding in big sur, calif. i was alone, because my friend did me a huge solid and declined to give me a plus one. which, of course, is the best. you get to sit by yourself and be a third wheel. the vows in this wedding were powerful. they were saying the most remarkable, loving things about each other. things like “you are a prism that takes the light of life and turns it into a rainbow” and “you are a lotion that moisturizes my heart. without you, my soul has eczema.” it was the noncheesy, heartfelt version of stuff like that. after the wedding, i found out about four different couples that had broken up, supposedly because they didn’t feel like they had the love that was expressed in those vows. did they call it off too early, at their danger point? i don’t know, but i, too, felt scared hearing that stuff. did i have what those people had? at that point, no. but for some reason, i felt deep down that i should keep investing in my relationship as my father did, after those fateful 30 minutes of literally sizing up my mother and that eventually that level of love would show itself. and so far, it has. now, if you’ll excuse me, i have to figure out where to get lunch. ansari is a comedian and starred on nbc’s parks and recreation. this article is adapted from modern romance by aziz ansari with eric klinenberg (penguin publishing group, 2015) your browser is out of date. please update your browser at http://update.microsoft.com

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supported by social media and websites have become a valuable resource to some women who have come out in their later years or after marriages to men. by louise rafkin louise rafkin came out as a lesbian in the early 1980s. when suzette mullen finally acknowledged her complicated feelings for the woman she considered her best friend, she felt the weight of a significant question: am i gay? ms. mullen, then 54, had been married for more than two decades to her husband, whom she loved. they lived together in montauk, n.y., and had two adult sons. she didn’t have anyone she could talk to about the feelings she had been harboring. so ms. mullen, an author and editor with a law degree from harvard, went online, searching “late in life and coming out” and “how to know if you are gay?” on google. she quickly found communities of women, on websites like facebook, with some of them asking similar questions. in response to a post ms. mullen shared in a private facebook group, a woman in her late 40s confirmed certain suspicions that she had been confronting about her sexual identity. “you are a lesbian,” the woman wrote. “the only question is: what now?” for ms. mullen, the answer was partly to learn a new language to describe herself. she was a lille, an acronym some use to refer to a late in life lesbian. (lifelong lesbians, she learned, had their own abbreviation: l.l.l.) her best friend was a catalyst, a term referring to a woman who awakens another’s lesbian identity. and ms. mullen and her husband were in what some referred to as a mixed orientation marriage, or mom.

 recent and archived work by louise rafkin for the new york times emily and matthew hyland found that going into the restaurant business together was not a step to be taken lightly. “shared visions can change,” he said.