Rachel Magee and Christopher Mascaro, students at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology, along with their advisor, Dr. Goggins, have done some research into online dating success stories. Their aim was to more accurately interpret the concept of online dating ‘success’, as it is more of a subjective idea when you look at it. For instance, does it mean marriage, and long-term relationship, or a hook-up?
The study is titled “Not Just a Wink and a Smile: An Analysis of User-Defined Success in Online Dating”. It’s a study of a two week sample of success story data from the online dating websites Match.com; eHarmony; and OkCupid.
84% of users with ‘successful’ experiences with eHarmony were referring to marriage. That’s quite a majority. However, Match.com’s users were only referring to marriage 46.7% of the time, and OkCupid users 23% of the time. The possible results were ‘dating’; ‘engaged’; and ‘married’. OkCupid, which had the lowest results for marriage success, did have the highest percentile for ‘dating’ ‘success’.
These sort of figures could help you decide which online dating service is right for you. But alternatively, and perhaps more importantly, it also provides a good excuse to think about online dating success. Not only are success stories out there, but what do you want from online dating? I think it’s good to consider dating someone regularly a success on its own. If you want more, then great. But I think you should always try to see littler things as successes in their own right too. A lot of success definitely comes from online dating websites, which is awesome.
