“How Couples Meet” Chart | Hacker News Reader

“How Couples Meet” Chart

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29 pointsdankohn113 comments

How was this collected?

The twitter thread seems to suggest that current couples were asked what year they met and how they met, and the chart was filled out from there. If so, isn’t there some strong survivorship bias to these data, i.e., there’s a preference for longer lasting couples having met certain ways?

What's really interesting to me is the temporary flattening in "met online" around 2000 - 2005. What caused that?

My theory: it's the transitional period between online dating as a novelty, and online dating as an obvious default for youth who grew up online.

Dotcom crash made online-anything less attractive?

It's a plateau, not a drop. Nothing became less attractive; the shift from offline to online dating just stalled for a few years.

I think you’re mostly right, but there’s more nuance to it. I think traditional dating sites like match.com started to plateau around then, in part due to lack of innovation, but also due to the rising popularity of social networking eating into the market. Then in the later 2000s you start to get more innovative sites in the space like OkCupid, as well as, more niche-catered sites, and as a result people started moving back into more explicitly dating oriented sites. Finally, post 2010 you start to see the proliferation of mobile-oriented dating apps (and mobile social apps in general) which is why you see things really take off then.

It makes sense that 'coworkers' went down. Merely asking a girl out in the office is now considered 'harassment'.

No it's not. Being creepy and not building up a proper rapport is going to be harassment. Trying to use your status as leverage is harassment. Unsolicited comments or blowing up on someone after a rejection are harassment.

Yes, but "being creepy" is roughly equivalent to "being rejected". You can't determine if your behavior would be creepy without risking the possibility of being creepy.

The exact same behavior, from two different people, will be considered creepy from an undesirable person but non-creepy from a desirable person.

Being creepy is not at all equivalent to being rejected. People who can't tell the difference need to practice reading body language, and develop an understanding of social cues and norms. It's possible, and I'd say normal, to ask someone out, get rejected, and not be seen as creepy as long as you do it in a mature, adult fashion.

Also, it's a given that an advance from an attractive person, in isolation, might not be creepy, but one from a less attractive person would be. The issue is the ugly person has failed to accurately evaluate their own personal dating market worth, which is a negative social signal.

Apps like Tinder seem to helped broker your market worth really well. However in the era of IRC you had to build rapport first. Similarly it’s much easier to fall in love with colleague purely because you spend so much time talking together. Sadly you don’t get that depth in dating apps.

If that was actually the case, you would expect the number to decrease slower (my guess being that online dating would still be increasing at the expense of all others). After all, being creepy or being rejected were already off the marriage numbers anyway, so it wouldn't affect this graph.

It is clear (both through data and through basic anecdotal observation) that dating at work became dangerous to your career, specially if you are a men. So even the cases were it was done in a polite and non creepy way, are rapidly disappearing.

I'm actually surprised it isn't the opposite. I met my girlfriend at work and many of my friends and co-workers have done the same. Its one of the few places (college is another example) that you can build a rapport with someone on a daily basis. If you are around someone you have good chemistry with on a day-to-day basis for months or years, eventually you will get together (no matter what the company policies are).

In western europe at least dating coworkers is a total no go, expect for low skilled workers.

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