Meeting Your Spouse Online Is Officially Mainstream

Still worried that meeting online is strange? Don't be.

If there was any doubt that meeting potential spouses online has gone mainstream, a recent survey by The Knot, a wedding planning website, removed it. According to The Knot’s 2017 numbers, the online venue is now the leading way people meet their spouses. The nineteen percent of couples who report meeting online isn’t overwhelming, but it is a plurality, with meeting through friends, at college, or at work all narrowly behind.

I can still distinctly remember when I first heard of online dating. CatholicMatch was the first site I became aware of. How long ago was that? Well, the site was still called St. Raphael.net and my member number was #2874.

I believed in this whole concept of meeting people online right from the outset, but that wasn’t the case with everyone.

It’s the reactions that people in my social circle had when I informed them I was on a dating website, that stand out the most. It wasn’t hostility. In fact, when I summarized the reality of my life—I don’t go to bars anymore, I go to a parish where there aren’t any single people and the workplace didn’t have any options, people would realize it made perfect sense. But there was a, “Yeah, but it still seems weird” sense that lingered in the conversation. It took time for skeptics to accept what their intellect told them was true—that in our modern society, online dating is the best path for a lot of people.

For eight years, I wrote most of the success stories that are here on the archives at CatholicMatch and talked to a large number of couples, both in person and via e-mail. The first question I was always asked regarded their attitude toward online dating when they joined CatholicMatch. In most cases, the attitudes corroborated what I had experienced in my own social circle. At least one person in the couple had deep skepticism about a venue like this. But the complete lack of dating prospects through any other healthy outlet made them willing to give it a reluctant chance.

If everyone shared their success story with others, we'd destigmatize online dating more quickly.

Over time, that’s not only resulted in more couples meeting online, but more people know couples who met online. Everyone they know that shared their online dating doubts, won’t have those doubts anymore. Each success story changes the worldview of everyone that couple interacts with and that’s borne out in The Knot survey.

It’s worth noting that The Knot referenced secular dating sites and app. I’d be interested to know what the numbers are if you narrow the focus exclusively to places like CatholicMatch and other religious-oriented websites, where people are looking to marry someone of a specific faith outlook and don’t want to date outside of that. My guess is that the nineteen percent figure goes significantly higher—the corrosive effects of secularism on the dating culture haven’t escaped our local churches and online dating has helped to create an international “parish community,” so to speak.

People using dating websites want real relationships, not hook-ups.

Another insight in The Knot’s analysis of their survey was also intriguing. They make the case that their results prove that dating apps are not people looking for hookups, but people looking for real lifetime commitments. I think that’s partially true: the apps that promote the hookup culture clearly aren’t going broke, but these survey results are the latest demonstration that technology is not, in of itself, good or evil. It does not shape our values. We do that ourselves. Technology has simply sped up the process by which we can meet people who share our convictions.

One final takeaway is something more transcendent and speaks to how to follow Our Lord—online dating didn’t become mainstream because people shouted it as loud or as angrily as they could. Or, on the flip side, it wouldn’t have become mainstream if it’s practitioners had stayed in the closet and refused to tell anyone what they were doing.

Online dating became mainstream because ordinary people used it, in spite of what others might think. They were willing to be different from everyone else. When asked, they talked about what it had done for them and they let the positive impact it had on their lives speak volumes. A wise course for any age. Do what you’re convinced is right. In time, others will pick up on it.