[conmarap]

I'm supposed no one has mentioned the - sort of - deterioration in our relationships. back in the day it used to be a lot easier for two people up meet, fall in love, get married and have kids. I'm not saying that there weren't any forced marriages, but that's not my point. In the age of tinder we are exposed to more and more people and possibilities. So basically it seems like the average Joe and Betty keep holding off for the perfect mate, when chances are they already rejected them. I'm just observing that the typical meets are decreasing rapidly and could be to, at least partially, blame.

[randomdata]

More to the point, there is a curious social stigma around having children before you enter your 30s that has developed.

The idea that you should "play the field" is part of it, but I'm not sure that tells the whole story. There seems to have been a concerted effort to reduce pregnancies among younger women. In fact, programs like "16 and Pregnant" and "Teen Mom", which follow young mothers in their teens and 20s, were, according to their creator, meant as a "cautionary tale" to reduce pregnancy rates. In modern culture, "rural hick" even conjures up images of a young mother. Not the image most want to portray, which is a powerful social tool.

Equally curious, once you enter your 30s all of a sudden the social norms flip to "why haven't you had children yet?", "the clock is ticking", etc. However, once you are in your 30s, there are some rather hard limits to how many children you can practically have.

[pjc50]

As others have said, having children very early is unsafe, and it's a demanding job that requires emotional maturity to do well. Having children before you have economic independence is also a very bad idea.

But your 20s are also critical from a career point of view. Women still have to fight a lot of prejudice from employers, which translates into trying to show commitment to career by delaying children.

The UK now has a very soft "two child policy": you won't normally get paid child benefit for children beyond two. The US has a ludicrous healthcare system where simply giving birth can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Also, they don't call it labour for nothing: it's a physically demanding, uncomfortable process.

[wasdfff]

I think its less stigma but economic realities that are driving this. People have too much debt and not enough income and are too early in their careers in their 20s to comfortably take time off to have a kid or pay for childcare.

[jcater]

Not only are there hard limits, but at age 35, suddenly it’s considered a “geriatric pregnancy”.

The risk of complications go up.

[watwut]

Pregnancies at 16 have very real health risks and 16 years old are not ready to be parents yet, not ready to be independent either. There is nothing curious or odd about the end.

[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.

[ausbah]

Isn't the opposite true? That in the age of Tinder, meeting people is easier than ever - and so it should be more likely for someone to also fall in love with someone. I don't see how the limited dating pools of the past provide any advantage on this front. It doesn't make sense to me that people today would "hold out for the perfect mate" when exposed to a larger dating pool - my thinking would be that when people have met someone they have a good relationship with they will settle down. I also don't buy the idea that someone has already "rejected someone when meeting them for the first time, if they weren't interested they wouldn't have gone on the date.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Tinder only works for a subset of the population due to human behavior. Women largely select for traits that are a proxy for alpha status. The same applies to all online dating. There is a paradox of choice going on where there is so much available that everyone ratchets up their minimum requirements.

[conmarap]

The bottomline is that I've seen it happen in real life, to people in my social circle and family.

I wrote a reply to another comment that addressed something similar. The best way I can create a correlation in the real world is this way: If you go to a restaurant with 20 choices it takes people much longer to order something as opposed to a restaurant that can fit their menu on one page.

It's some psychological paradox, or research, that I can't remember. Someone actually replied with a TED talk that touches on this matter.

[liveoneggs]

get off tinder and get on to eharmony with a profile like "I'm interested in getting married"

then see what happens

[MuffinFlavored]

Do people actually do this?

[bumby]

Your Tinder comment made me think of Barry Schwartz and his "paradox of choice" where too much choice ultimately leads to more unhappiness because it sets the expectation that, will all these options, we should expect to find 'perfect'

https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_c...

[conmarap]

Thank you for linking this.