Older Adults Turned to Online Options to Find Love, Marriage

According to a new national survey of 3,009 adults with romantic partners—reported in USA Today— the Internet has now overtaken all the ways people meet, with the exception of through their friends.

Alicia Cast, PhD, is not surprised. The Iowa State University associate professor of sociology and her graduate research assistant have been collecting data from approximately 175 central Iowa newlywed couples over a three-year period and learned that spouses from 25 of those couples first met online.

And they've found that it's the older adults who are actually turning to their computers to find love—largely because of the time constraints in their busy lives.

In preliminary analysis presented at the Midwest Sociological Society's annual meeting, the researchers reported that online subjects didn't differ significantly from offline couples in terms of self-esteem levels, attractiveness, intelligence and other personal characteristics. But they had structural constraints that set them apart.

"In many cases, there are some real structural forces that encourage the support and use of these technologies," says Cast. "And one of them is just structural constraints on people's time—such as people who have kids, or have full-time jobs, or work long or extensive hours. They might also be older and the majority of people who are in their pool of eligibles are already in relationships."

The research found that spouses who met online are older, less likely to be marrying for the first time, and have much shorter courtships—averaging 18.5 months of dating before getting married in comparison with 42 months for those who met in more traditional ways offline.

"There's an interesting contradiction there because the people who look online may not be perceived as being serious [by friends and family]," Cast says. "But the people who are doing the actual searching may look at it as a way to be incredibly serious about the process. And one of the things we found was that, indeed, their courtship periods are shorter."

— Source: Iowa State University