[ForrestN]

Have you seen any data to support this? I'm not convinced it's true, based on my own experience. It seems to me like what's changed is the range of possibilities for women, who can now more easily pursue educational and professional ambitions rather than settling down right away. There has also been a striking decrease in the social stigma of being a single "older" woman, which used to be seen as reflecting a woman's desirability.

In my subjective opinion, things have gotten better in this sense, rather than worse. But it's kind of pointless to say so without any kind of study, because my own experience is limited and distorted by my unique perspective.

[conmarap]

I don't have tangible information, but what I'm referring to is what I know from experience in my social circle. Maybe, as you say, my perspective is distorted in some way. However, 15 years ago if you wanted to meet someone you had to go out and talk to people, which is hard and you're more open to hearing someone out. Today you open an app and swipe into oblivion and no one seems good enough. I've heard many people say that; both men and women. I've had people show me perfectly nice looking people they met through online dating and they either swiped right or rejected them after one date because they weren't good enough.

And again, it's important to marry someone you want to marry and not marry just because you're getting older or for the sake of it. Those marriages, more often than not, end in divorce. But I see a lot of people either using Tinder as a way to get as many one night stands as possible, or swiping away looking for someone perfect who they'll never find. I also know people who developed severe depression because they were on the receiving end of perpetuated ghosting.

I am, by no means, saying that online dating hasn't worked for people, but it just seems like it's done more harm than it's done good.

[Bartweiss]

This might suffice as supporting data: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35535424

There are a lot of interesting things here, although some (like that first graph) are rather subtle. In particular, I'd point everyone to the graph over time of where straight Americans met their partners. To my eye, it has three distinctive elements.

First, finding romance at a traditional "third place" has been almost completely destroyed. Meeting a partner through family, neighbors, church, or college shows an undulation in the sixties, followed by a sharp downturn in the last decade.

Second, meeting partners through work or friends has ceased to be a replacement. The decline in e.g. church meetings was thoroughly offset by professional and social meetings until the mid-nineties, but those meeting sources have been declining since.

Third, the spike in online meetings, and the s-curve in bar/club meetings. Crucially, this happens after meetings through friends and coworkers flatline; they aren't just being displaced by online dating, they stopped prior to that explosion.

Alongside all of those patterns, we can add the rising age of first marriage, the lowering frequency of sex (overall and within relationships), the rising gap in sexual intent versus outcome in both men and women (i.e. how much less sex people are having than they want), and the gap between intended and actual family size. A lot of the most obvious relationship shifts over the last ~70 years seem clearly good, and seem to benefit the people I know. But the data overwhelmingly suggests that people are forming relationships later and with more difficulty, with outcomes further from what they intend.