How do participants experience online dating?
Today I am going to discuss some representative data and at the same time point out that the success of the search for partners is often hampered by a great misunderstanding. However, if this misunderstanding is recognized and resolved, there usually isn’t much to prevent the success of finding a relationship.
representative dating experience
I’m reading the results of a rep opinion poll of Pew Research Center in the US, how people experience their online dating.
The most striking result is:
- 75% of those surveyed said that their online dating is not going well and is difficult.
Those looking for non-binding contacts were a bit more optimistic:
- Of these, 68% said their appointments were not going well.
- Conversely, however, 82% of those looking for a long-term relationship reported that things were not going well or that things were difficult.
I find the result very interesting because it is based on representative data and describes the experiences of participants averaged across practically all dating platforms.
I am also not surprised by the finding that a better course is described for short-term contacts and a more difficult course for relationship seeking:
- Long-term relationships are now even harder to find than non-binding contacts.
However, it is worth noting that 82% of those seeking a partnership online report a current negative experience.
How can this be explained?
resolve misunderstandings
From what I’ve read about studies over the years, seen in our own surveys, and learned from member feedback, I believe this result stems from a major misconception:
- Online dating participants rate their search for a partner negatively if they have not yet found a relationship, if nothing has happened so far, or if contacts have broken down.
Of course this is completely understandable and also obvious:
- When we go to the market to buy fruit and there isn’t any, we also end up dissatisfied. If we work and don’t get paid, certainly our satisfaction doesn’t increase either.
There is only one big difference:
- The search for a partner is not the acquisition of fruits or paid work.
- The special thing about finding a partner is that it can be completely “unsuccessful” for a long time, but that says absolutely nothing about your actual success.
- Because success only has to happen once. Just once in 6 months, a year, two years or three years is enough to talk about great success in general.
- Dating is a one-time event that can and does happen at some point during the dating process.
- However, until this happens, there may be a long phase where future success cannot even be guessed at.
There is nothing that allows the participants to perceive or anticipate success until success has occurred.
This is exactly what makes people dissatisfied as long as no association has been found.
However, this is in the nature of things and cannot be changed. The only thing that can be changed is the attitude towards it.
In this context, however, it is understandable that 82% of the participants spoke of a poor or difficult course.
Translated, this simply means that they cannot see any progress on the path to finding a mate. We can only determine such progress when searching for a partner when a partnership has been found.
Search for partners as a long-term perspective
As a general rule, we are used to our actions producing an effect. Because the effect occurs, we continue our actions. If there is no effect, we stop our actions or change them.
But there are, for example, some business areas where a course only needs to occur very rarely to be successful. If an expensive painting is sold 365 days a year, this may already be enough. However, for 364 days, the people involved utterly failed.
Being able to deal with it, not thinking about short-term goals but long-term goals, sticking with it even if you don’t see any effect – this is the secret to dating success. Unfortunately, there are not a few who give up prematurely. Many not because they were not really successful, but simply because success was not foreseeable.
Our own dating dates in unison.
These are the results of a survey among people who found a partnership with us. On average, they searched for two years.
Number of communication partners
the question was:
- How many people did you communicate with in total, where a communication consists of at least one response to an initial message?
The results were these:
- 4% only with one person, the partner: in
- 19% only with 2-3 people
- 24% with 4-5 people
- 25% with 6 – 10 people
- 19% with 11-20 people
- 5% with 21-30 people
- 3% with 31-40 people
- 1% with more than 40 people
In a nutshell, this means the following:
- Approximately one in four successful members had only been in contact with a maximum of three people before finding a partner.
- Almost half of all successful members had contact with a maximum of 5 people.
- Three out of four successful members had contact with a maximum of 10 people.
- Less than one in 10 members has had contact with at least 21 or more members.
Therefore, our members’ associations used to be the result of very few contacts. During an average search time of two years, most of them made very little contact. However, this did not stop interested parties from finding their partners with us.
Number of intensive communication partners
This fact becomes even clearer if we limit the contacts to intensive and long-lasting contacts.
the question was:
- With how many people did you have intense and sustained communication in total? (Estimate)
These were the results:
- Only with one person (my partner)
- 16% only with one person (couple).
- 47% with two or three people
- 23% with four to five people
- 12% with 6-10 people
- 3% with 11-20 people
- 0% with more than 20 people
All the people interviewed were successful in unison. Almost all of them were happy with their current relationships, and therefore almost all of the people interviewed were very happy with us.
But all this does not mean that they had sustained communications with many individuals:
- Every sixth person had only one intensive communication with their partner in the two years on average.
- More than six out of 10 people had intense communication with a maximum of three people.
- Almost nine out of 10 people had intensive communication with a maximum of five people.
- Only three in 100 people had intensive communication with at least 11 or more people in the two years on average.
Therefore, the time to find a partner is not usually a time of intensive communication with many people. It is usually a time when there is intense communication with only a few people. It is precisely from this that a partnership relationship developed between the interviewees.
Number of offline meetings
And the situation becomes even clearer when we ask about the number of people who actually met offline:
- 28% only met one person, namely their partner.
- 25% met with 2 people
- 18% met with 3 people
- 18% met with 4-5 people
- 7% met with 6-8 people
- 3% met with 9 or more people
Within two years on average, every quarter of the successful members met only one person, namely the future partner. More than half of the successful people knew a maximum of two people. More than seven out of ten people met a maximum of three people in two years. Nine out of ten people met with a maximum of five people. Only one in ten people met six or more people in two years.
Finding a partner, therefore, by no means means meeting as many people as possible. In fact, for most of the successful members of Gleichklang it has meant meeting very few or even only one person in their entire time with us. From this, however, a relationship developed between the participants, which is also the ultimate goal.
Finding a partner does not mean many contacts
The representative data from the Pew Research Center in the US cited above makes it likely that this is a fairly general phenomenon and not a specific one.
the sociologist field of roses of Stanford University used very large data sets to examine how often dating app users meet, for example. His result is that 80% of users do not meet at all within a year.
I don’t want to sow pessimism here, or even discourage readers from coming to us. I’m simply trying to explain that partnering is a singular event, that it only needs to happen once during the engagement, that it can take a long time for this success to happen, and that you generally don’t expect too many contacts or meetings.
However, having little or no contact does not mean that one day the event will not occur and a contact will develop from which a relationship will develop.
And now that I’ve laid out all of this, I can spread optimism about some of the perhaps sobering numbers. Because we’ve evaluated our success rates and averaged them to look like this.
- 34% found a relationship if (in the case of previous failures) they had not given up for at least a year.
- 61% found a relationship if (in the case of previous failures) they had not given up for at least two years.
- 78% found a relationship if (in the case of previous failures) they had not given up for at least three years.
Therefore, remember that the search for partners is a one-time event that does not depend on how many contacts or meetings you have had before.
Make life make sense to you right away, instead of necessarily demanding high speed or lots of contacts when looking for a partner.
In fact, as a member of the same sound, you have excellent chances of finding a partner.
Because there is a high probability that as a member of the same sound, one day the day will come for you when you meet the person with whom a love relationship will develop.
If you are interested in such a sustainable partner search, I would love to see you find your way to us.
We deliberately design our rates, including discounts, so that everyone can come and stay with us until they are in “steady hands”.
