For subscribers
What really changed the marriage market
Hint: It’s not online dating. The goal of marriage today seems to be more about parity than about “marrying up”.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
If dating is looking for a needle in a haystack, then online dating is like sifting through a much bigger haystack, says the writer.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: PEXELS
Sarah Green Carmichael
Follow topic:
You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince – that’s the usual advice given to frustrated singles. One might assume that online dating, with all those algorithms and preferences, would help highlight the princes (and princesses) faster. But unfortunately, according to a working paper for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, the rise of dating apps has not made it any easier to find a soulmate.
That came as a bit of a surprise to the research team, economists Anton Cheremukhin, Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria and Antonella Tutino. They had expected to find that online dating would be a turbo-boost to assortative mating – the decades-long trend of similar people coupling up.
