Consider this: at least in the bar you have your chance to make a good impression. In online dating you're one click away from being ignored forever.
Hm. So, how come average and below-average looking people with good personalities have stable and happy long-term relationships after thirty, when gorgeous and sexy party animals and drama queens (of any gender and sexual orientation) keep marrying, divorcing, and end up being mostly single after 40?
That's exactly my point, so I'm surprised that you phrase your comment as if you're arguing with me.
The article is not about how hot people find eternal stable relationships, but how they have more chances to get into relationships.
That you noticed them often break an older relationship and get into a new one corroborates the article, doesn't negate it.
And if we take away the stigma of divorce, which is supposed to mean some kind of personal failure, that's good for them.
It could also entail "ugly" people also wanting to divorce/play around more, but as they fear not having the same chances, they play it safe (and miserably).
So, yeah, it might not be that a less attractive person will "know no one ever" (absolute), but it will probably be that they'll have limited chances to get to know other people, and when they do, they'll tend to stick with them.
There's some observational bias at play. You notice the cases where the guy (usually) has "outkicked his coverage" and you may notice the very attractive singles and wonder about it. You don't notice the plain singles or the perfectly matched couples, but you notice the woman in the red dress from the Matrix.
Second, some people make a conscious decision to have a stable relationship. I'm not saying it's 100% choice, but it's well over half IMO. I sought [and found] a partner who came from a stable family, who was educated and valued education, who wanted kids, and who wanted a stable relationship. Did that contribute to me being one of "those people"? Probably.
Since there are two sides to the transaction, the number of people marrying more attractive people is exactly equal to the number marrying less attractive people.
I didn't cover ugly w difficul personality and beautiful w good personality, hence the disparity.
HuffPo, so take with a grain of salt, but still a reasonable summary: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/21/more-sexual-partner...
A physics analogy would be that no matter how strong the theoretical argument, its widely observed that over many human accessible orders of magnitude in mass of the object, gravity makes things fall at the same rate. Leading to the (actually inaccurate) theory that the force of gravity has no correlation with the masses of the objects.
Given that there's observationally no correlation between two variables and not much theory either, then observed variation in one variable is by the above, unsurprisingly not correlated to the other variable.