How heterosexual couples met in the US

Many of our cities in north america don't have good access to third places anymore, due to both availability and cost.

I refuse to use online dating/friendship services so I struggle to meet friends and partners in the new citiy I moved to. Everyone at the local bar scenes is 15-30 years older than me, my outdoor local areas are homeless emcampments or riddled with needles and litter. I've met some people at my local climbing gym, but I find it difficult to get there between the cost of climbing and my physical labour job.

It almost feels like if you don't make the plans online you don't get to meet/hang out with people anymore and I'm not a huge fan of that.

Out of curiosity, why the refusal to use online dating?
- Not OP, but the usual reply I see is, because dating companies are incentivized to keep you on their app, not get you a happy relationship, so you need to go through hundreds of dates and thousands of rejections, which can be mentally taxing.
- Lots of bots too. Also texting online usually has a lot of shallow conversation or just pleasantries and everything fizzles out quickly. People get weirded out too if you try to date too quickly. Online dating sucks.

Online dating is so shit for the majority of hetero dudes. You're lucky if you match with somebody, luckier if you get to have some kind of discussion that doesn't end after a few messages, even luckier if it ends in a date, amazingly lucky if anything physical happens, and incredibly lucky if it turns into a relationship.

Men are expected to initiate, keep the discussion alive, ask out, keep the woman entertained, and be grateful they were chosen. It only gets worse online.

Don't forget rule #1: be attractive, or rule #2: don't be unattractive
- That's how I found out I might be a little attractive. Lots of stories about apps being ghost towns and it being hard to talk to people. I didn't struggle much to talk to people, went on dates and found my now fiancee that way.
- Even then dating apps are terrible. You have to pay extra just to essentially get the basic service. The free stuff basically doesn't do anything
Online dating is shit for everyone
-a trans lesbian
- Hey, wanna go out some time?
Thanks to Tinder I had the best and the worst first dates in my life.
But both long term girlfriends and soon-to-be-my-wife I met through friends
- Happy for all four of you
this power imbalance is bad for everyone as well, if you meet up with someone via these (if are not male presenting), there is a concerningly high chance that you get sexually assaulted, I am terrified how common this seems to be among the women I've talked to
- Male presenting? What does that mean?
This is partly because the apps suck (because of capitalism/profit motive) and partly because we all suck.
Many people of all genders won't do better than "hey". And then complain that they're not having good experiences. Sometimes it's garbage in, garbage out, my dudes.
I also get a lot of weird dead ends. Their profile will be like "I love elden ring". You'll be like "elden ring is a masterpiece! Did you play the new expansion yet?" They'll be like "no". End of messages. My dude. That's not how this works. In real life, fine, maybe you can give a short answer and see what they do, read some body language. But in an asynchronous text only communication? That's not pulling your weight. And if you're not actually interested, just unmatch. If you don't have time , don't reply at all. It's async. Come back later.
Maybe some of these people match with each other and are very happy with "what's up?" "nm u?" "Im good" forever.
To be fair, real-life dating is also shit.
- Through friends is the way to go.
How is this possible if 50% of the couples meet online? Are you in the US and using one of the major dating apps?
When you go to a friend's bday party, try not approaching any women and not striking a conversation. How many times will you be approached. Report us your results.

people have no friends anymore

All my friends are people I have known for 10+ years and mostly met through school.
And due to urban sprawl, everyone gets into their car in their garage, drives to work, then drives back to their garage. There's no room for walking to the neighborhood pub, convenience store, pharmacy, etc and bumping into neighbors on the way.
- I used to live downtown in a small town and it was like that. I had other terrible issues there but man did I miss the sense of community.
You don't know me!
- I do now! Hi friend!
All my friends are also alcoholics, and either asexual or married.
Damn, who are all these strangers I keep hanging out with!

This belongs in boringdystopia.

Friends 📉

You mean the tv show?

What is the definition of "online" for this chart? The first website wasn't even up until 1991, so how can the line start at 1980?

Grandpa was trolling DARPAnet for skanks.
- Soon to be a custard fist comic
- If I wanted to be called grandpa I’d of stayed with your mom.
BBS'es and Fidonet through modem were there before the web.
Don't think many found each other on BBS's but at least they could download low res porn.
- In the early 1980s, ASCII porn :) NSFW: GIRL82.TXT, ripped by Usagi Electric
- i found someone via bbs in 1996, though we only dated a few months.
DoD nerds be fuckin'.
- In my experience, the deeper and more academic you get in the nerd forest, the freakier people get.
University hosted BBS in 1989 here.
- BBSes were a thing for decades before the Web.
  The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) was started in 1985.
  CBBS dates to 1978
It's a survey, so it relies on the surveyed to tell accurately the date they meet and how, so I won't be surprised that the line here is incorrect.
Or maybe they refer to using classified ads in the newspaper or over of those "romantic meeting agency" (I don't know the name in English, in French it is agence de rencontre) that existed back in the day
Phone dating?
I'm curious if that included classified and dating messaging services. Aziz Ansari has a good book where he interviewed people who met using those services back in the day, and were embarrassed to tell people that's how they met.

Looks like a bisected whale!

That's interesting. I wonder whether those 6519 surveyed are representative of whole population, or of people who anyway online a lot. It’s seems there was an inflection around 2012 - what happened then ? The curve ends during covid lockdowns, wonder whether deflected since ?

There was an almost overnight shift from "ewww, online people are weird strangers" to "the Internet is just digital real life". For years it was the first, and then as mainstream popularity hit, it was like a switch flipped and suddenly the Internet was "cool" and just like comics and superheros, everyone acted like they were a fan all along.
It was kinda jarring tbh. All the things that got you labeled a nerd and a geek(negatively) were suddenly good things. I think it mostly had to do with the tech surge and people seeing it as a valuable thing now.
Tinder launched in 2012. eHarmony and Match.com were pretty fringe sites but Tinder commodified and gamified the mechanics. That made online dating “fun”. Also we saw a huge growth in smart phones in 2010 to 2012
Tinder launches in 2012.
Based on the one class I took in college about surveys and mass comm I’d say that’s a good sample size (assuming they were chosen at random). Most political polls survey about 1500 people with 90%+ accuracy
- But how, practically, do you choose any sample "at random" nowadays ?
  Especially if trying to avoid a bias towards (or away from) online people ?

Makes sense. People are getting married later so they're not in school or college anymore, and we have no friends

Congrats, you're a millennial / gen Z 👍

Reopen The Fuckhouses Goddamnit

2000 roughly sums up to about 130% all in all? How did that work? And now much less couples meet?? What are the gaps in these data?

Is it possible some people reported both an online relationship and another method in the same year?
- That's possible, and it would make the most recent drop even more dramatic as there still should be people with more than one dating experience in a year.
  So only about 30% of the population are dating right now? Sounds suspicious to me.

I wonder how many met like me and my wife, smoking crack in the same trap house.

its so high up in the graph that it isnt even visible

My wife and I met through a dating site in 2011. She felt awkward about online dating, so we had a cover story for the first few years of our relationship until the stigma around not meeting "the natural way" died down.

"She was turning tricks on the street. I was one of her regulars. After awhile she said she didn't want to charge me anymore, so here we are."
Luckily, my wife and I met in high school, so she doesn't have to rely on me for a cover story.
- "We met at an orgy and the condom broke. We met up the next day so I could buy her plan B, and things just went from there!"

This ends at 2020. During the pandemic lockdown.

Of course meeting online went up if every bar and restaurant was closed and half the workforce suddenly was work from home or just not working.

It already dwarfed every other statistic before 2020, but sure, the last little bit was covid

I'm sick and tired of being a single gay man

You could become several gay men
I'm tired of being a single bi man. You anywhere near Minneapolis and want to go on a date?
The good news is that there is another single gay man out there for you. Several hundred to thousands depending on your area. Single straight men don't have that going for them so you have the advantage here.
Go through all your hobbies. Find every meetup related to them within an hour of your location. Attend them. Have fun doing what you are doing. Maybe you meet someone, maybe you don't, maybe you meet people that help you meet people. Either way you are out and doing the things you like and that's better for your mental health. It's win-win.

Trough family 👀

I don’t see hetero in the graph

Source?

The source is mentioned on the bottom of the graph.
- I am asking the source of it being on hetero relationships
  The study itself claims “The study oversamples self-identified gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults”

when does attraction start? it feels weird that couples would exist in grade school (sorry if this is a dumb question, I am aromantic)

I believe this means how they met in general, not when they started dating.
Based on the only "next" school category being college, I'd assume that "grade school" includes high school, even if that is not a common usage