Couples who meet online may have lower relationship satisfaction
How the couples meet could have an impact on the quality of their relationship
Good faces / UNCLASH
People who meet their online partners seem to experience less relational satisfaction and a lower love of love than those who have connected for the first time in person, according to a study covering 50 countries in the world.
The advent of the Internet has changed the way people have relationships. For example, in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, heterosexual couples have most often met through friends; This had changed online at the beginning of the 21st century.
To understand how it has an impact on the quality of relations, Marta Kowal at the University of Wrocław in Poland and her colleagues interviewed 6,646 people who were mainly in heterosexual relations in 50 countries of all continents except Antarctic.
They were asked if they had met their partner online and to assess their relational satisfaction. They were also evaluated on the intensity of their love, according to their levels of intimacy reported (as the feeling that their partner understands them), passion and commitment to their partners (as if they consider their relationship as permanent).
The 16% of participants who met their online partner obtained an average of 4.20 out of 5 on a relational satisfaction scale, against 4.28 among those who connected offline – a small statistically significant difference. They also pointed out levels of lower privacy, passion and engagement.
There could be several reasons for this, explains Kowal. Research suggests that partners who meet online tend to be less similar in terms of education, ethnicity and religious environments than those who meet offline. Kowal and his colleagues argue that this could mean that they differ in terms of routines and values.
Kowal also identifies the “overload of choice” – the dating websites and the applications present users with many options, which can then make them guess the partner they have chosen, which has an impact on the satisfaction of their relationship.
People are also sometimes on their online dating profiles, she adds. “You look at someone and you say to yourself:” No, it is not 2 meters. It is, like 170 centimeters, ”explains Kowal. This could lead to resentment that has an impact on relational satisfaction over the whole line, she says.
Luke Brunning at the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom, said that people in a wide range of countries make the study “interesting” and “useful” for future research, as discovering if online meetings change the way we approach relationships or if change is really motivated by attitudes to change of commitment in general.
He also maintains that the overall differences between people who meet online or not are “relatively small”.
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