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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. |