It's been trending this way for years, but seeing it graphed out like this is shocking.
What do you think are the effects of this drastic change?
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Originally r/DataisBeautiful
I think there's a question of denominator, rather than percentage, involved here.
What happens when you have a pre-online standard of 100 new interactions a year in a population of 100k single-and-looking-to-mingle daters. Then you introduce dating apps, and you've still got the base-load 100 new interactions happening normally, but now you've got apps which allow you to make thousands of interactions a month rather than a hundred a year.
Now a hundred of those power-users on Grinder all start meeting up and fucking online. 100 unique combinations gets you 4950 "couples that met" in a year. Yeah, the "met up" only lasted for the duration of a naked high-five, but its points on the board!
Compare that to 100 couples that meets outside the app, but are doing it at the more stately pace of once-a-month (so, 3 times in 100 days). rather than as fast as they can swipe through the app. 300 unique "met ups" by comparison. Kinda high by historical standards but infintessimal to the ass-slapping orgy of dating the online community allows.
As someone who watches friends on these apps go on dates two or three times a week, but never settle down (because the focus of these apps is hooking up, not settling down, and the system is engineered to keep you engaged and swiping) I put forward the hypothesis that "How Couples Met" isn't seeing a decline in non-app interactions but an enormous surge among a particular rarified group of power users milling their way through the library of potential hook-ups online.
I'd also posit that some number of these hook-ups are purely artificial (bot accounts, catfishing, onlyfans promotions, or other phony profiles) that exist purely to encourage lonely people to engage with the system and don't actually signify human-to-human interactions. As evidence of this, I'd point you to restaurants using dating apps to dupe users into becoming customers.
See, I will agree with you, though not because of your reasoning (which very well might be spotless), but because of the phrase "ass-slapping orgy".