ยป Where Do Couples Meet?
No one is really interested in how heterosexual couples meet in general. There’s a bunch of academic research into how men-who-have-sex-with-men meet (and whether they have safe sex), because people care about HIV transmission. And marketers and online dating sites are doing a bunch of research into how people meet online. The best recent I’ve found is this report by the Oxford University Internet Institute that looks at meeting overall in order to determine online dating’s current position.
The sample is couples in European countries as well as Japan and Brazil with an average age of 40.7. So the results are not necessarily applicable to 20 and 30 somethings in Canada (who are the target readers of this blog), but it’s the best data we’ve got.
The last time respondents were single, these are the places they looked for a partner:
And here’s where they actually found one:
Bars come out much better and sports teams much worse than I’ve observed in my social group (which could be a difference between young Canadians and older Europeans?). Some other interesting conclusions:
- Almost 25% of couples met in places where people don’t intentionally look
- Despite what your mom tells you, hobbies and volunteering are a horrible place to meet people
- Men are more intentional about finding a partner, except at church
- More young people try online dating, but older people are more likely to get partners that way
The researchers mention that there are some truly marvelous cross-tabulations in the data, but their report is too narrow to contain them. An example they do give: 23% of people who looked in bars & clubs were successful, while 9% of people who didn’t look in bars & clubs met their partner there anyway. My general conclusion from this report is that people who don’t want to pick up at bars, myself included, need to get over it.
I was going to ask what qualifies as a “couple” for this study, thinking that maybe the high success rate of bar/pub/club was because short-term relationships were considered. But I see in the first few pages of the study that it is looking at co-habitating couples.
And did no one in the study find their co-habitating significant other (CHSO)at church? Or is church included in one of the other categories in the “Where People Find Them” pie chart.
And is mom wrong? Few people found their CHSO through a hobby or volunteering, but it also looks like few people were purposefully looking via their hobby or volunteering. So what is the actual success rate of hobby/volunteering compared to the success rate of hanging out in bars/clubs? That’s the real question, although I doubt the data to determine that can be found in this study, since I think we’d want to measure success rate as the chance of success per hour/money/effort put into it. Especially since I’d much rather spend time in a club1 than a club2.
1 The kind run for and by hobby/sports enthusiasts.
2 The kind full of sweaty assholes, overpriced drinks, and loud, crappy music.
Don
18 Feb 11 at 2:45 pm
Oh whoops, I dropped church off the bottom of the pie chart: it’s 1.6%, the same as sports teams. I had to calculate online dating into that data set, so that means all the percents are a little off.
I agree that success rate would be very valuable here, but as I said, nobody has a good reason to study real-life dating so we don’t know. It could be that people who pursue a hobby with the intent of meeting a partner rather than intrinsic enjoyment of the activity are rarely successful. (Although it’s hard to believe that dance class doesn’t work sometimes?)
Jared
21 Feb 11 at 12:28 pm
Sports teams are usually single-sex. And the club-wide socials are usually too boozy to actually be attracted to someone (if there are actually any singles there!). I also wonder at the % of woman who play team-sports in Europe. It might be pretty low, especially as soccer is the big one.
And in Canada, hockey-chicks are not necessarily the cutest…?
Seeing as though your sport-circle is overwhelmingly related to ultimate and climbing, both typically high-end co-ed sports you might find your anecdotal evidence different than the stats.
stewie
21 Feb 11 at 6:03 pm
[...] then some of them will be outliers of shittiness. As a result, it’s impossible to get dating statistics from [...]
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