A Good Match? Offline Matchmaking Services and Implications for Gender Relations

Meeting Online or Offline? Patterns and Trends for Co-Resident Couples in Early 21st-Century Britain

“…Interestingly, Langhamer (2013: 108) observed that higher expectations of love and personal fulfilment in the late 20 th Century led to 'efficient' ways of finding partners being seen as 'calculating and cold-blooded' (cf. Knudson, 2017); at that time, the low proportion of couples in Britain meeting via longer-standing pro-active approaches partly reflected their lack of cultural legitimacy (Lampard, 2007;Lampard and Peggs, 2007). Crucially, online dating does not appear to have shared this drawback for long (Finkel et al, 2012).…”

“…Langhamer, 2013). Bozon and Héran’s third, ‘private’ category, which relates to meetings occurring via personal social networks, 2 has been viewed as associated with class-related social closure; the use of dating services is also often seen as linked to this, or to class more generally (Knudson, 2017; Schmitz, 2016).…”

“…Dröge and Voirol, 2011; Schmitz, 2016) have observed that the online dating literature often foregrounds economic, market-related, or social exchange approaches (e.g. Hitsch et al, 2010; Skopek et al, 2011), with even non-economic analyses sometimes appearing to assume (homogeneously) rational choice and neglect biographical heterogeneity, and with sociological analyses still often emphasising exchanges of capital (Knudson, 2017; Schmitz, 2016). However, some authors employ more multifaceted analytical approaches.…”

“…While ‘thin markets’ may motivate online partner searches, whose search costs may be relatively low (Oyer, 2014), users often question online dating’s effectiveness for locating partners (Knudson, 2017), experiencing it as a time-consuming process (Ariely, 2011), or as addictive but inefficient (Kaufmann, 2012). Rosenfeld and Thomas (2012) acknowledge variations in efficiency between different online and offline contexts, although a context’s effectiveness may also be contingent upon users’ characteristics.…”

“…More generally, socio-geographic factors, for example, population density or composition, can impact on relationship formation behaviour in a market-related way, with urban–rural differences potentially affecting online dating usage and effectiveness (Knudson, 2017). Furthermore, places of meeting vary according to individuals’ lengths of residence within an area (Lampard, 2007); geographical mobility may also hinder couple formation, encouraging online dating (Lampard, 2016; Sautter et al, 2010).…”