No. 1: You can be more selective because you have a bigger group to select from. When you’re using online dating, and there’s the possibility of selecting on characteristics that you know you’re going to like, you’re going to know a lot more about people before a first date.
No. 2: There tends to be extensive communication before the first date. A lot the information-gathering that courtship is really about is sped up by the information you can gather from the profiles and from a person before actually meeting them.
If you look at the couples who stay together, about half of the couples who meet through online dating have transitioned to marriage by year four of the relationship. If you look at people who didn’t meet through online dating, the time frame is much longer – half of those couples transition to marriage by year 10 of the relationship. So there’s a substantial difference.
This is because there are couples who meet online who get married right away. I mean, that happens with people who meet offline, too. But when you look at the data, it’s just more common online. And I think that’s because online you do this big, calculated search for your soul mate, and find someone else who agrees and then transition to marriage much more quickly.
Is there also a bit of a self-selection process? Is it possible that people who meet online are marrying faster because they tend to be more marriage-driven from the start?
Yeah, I mean that certainly could be. I think it’s likely that people who look to online dating sites are more intent on finding a partner, especially those using sites like Match and eHarmony.
If we’re meeting perfect strangers in ways we weren’t before, is there anything to be said about online dating and the bringing together of people from different races, cultures, religions?
What’s interesting is that that kind of undermines the image that critics of the new technology try to put on the new technology, which is that online dating is all about hookups and superficiality. There are a lot of places you can go where people are looking for more long-term 
relationships, and there are a lot of places you can go where people are looking for something else.
It turns out that the Internet dating world replicates the offline dating world in a lot of ways, and even exceeds it in others
It’s not just superficiality that the Internet is about. If you’re looking for a life partner, online dating is pretty good for that.
The need for love, romance, relationships and sex – these are pretty basic human needs. And the ability to match people who would have otherwise not found each other is a powerful outcome of the new technology.
About 75 percent of the people who meet online had no prior connection. They didn’t have friends in common. They’re families didn’t know each other. So they were perfect strangers. And prior to the Internet, it was kind of hard for perfect strangers to meet. Perfect strangers didn’t come into contact in that intimate sort of way. One of the real benefits of Internet search is being able to find people you might have commonalities with but otherwise would never have crossed paths with.
One of the most interesting questions about the Internet as a sort of social intermediary is whether it brings different kinds of people together more than would have been brought together before. If you think about the traditional technology of family, which was the ily was very selective in terms of its reliance on introducing you to people of the same race, religion and class as potential partners. What’s more, if you were marrying young – at the age of 20 or younger – you really could only marry people from within your close network, from your neighborhood. These were the only people you knew, and they were probably very much like you.
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