If someone were to ask me, “How many dates have you been on?” I’m not sure I’d be able to answer correctly. Even with a pen and paper, I might be able to provide a ballpark figure to find the one.
But if someone were to ask me, “How many people have you dated in the online dating world?” I can answer that question easily, name every single guy and exactly what we did (and didn’t do) on each date.
Why? Although I can be picky when it comes to in-person dating, I treated online dating like it was the last night before a final college math exam. I truly wanted to make sure I wasn’t wasting my time with someone I met in a digital space. And when you’re looking at someone’s online profile, you’re working with a cheat sheet already.
Should online daters keep score?
While I’m clearly not Irish, a post in “Her” (a publication geared toward Irish women) about “The Rosie Project” caught my attention. (Happy belated St. Patrick’s Day, FetchaDate’s Irish readers, and a Happy Women’s History Month to all!)
It’s been eight years, 3.5 million copies and 40 language translations since author Graeme Simsion released the book “The Rosie Project.” It was the Australian Book Industry “Book of the Year” in 2014, and there’s planning going about to make it into a romantic comedy.
While Jennifer Lawrence walked away from the movie adaptation of the book and Richard Linklater followed her, the affiliate dating study of 2,000 men and women still gets people talking. Why? Released the same day as the book, it has proven to be quite the roller coaster ride to find the perfect romantic partners.
What’s inside of the affiliate dating study that intrigued worldwide readers? Here goes.
Online dating scene for the average woman
- She will have 15 kisses.
- She will have seven relationships, two of which lasted longer than one year.
- She will be heartbroken twice.
- She will suffer through four disaster dates.
- She will be stood up once.
- She will fall in love twice.
- She will live with one partner.
- She will have four one-night stands.
- She will go on two additional blind dates and two online dates.
- She will have seven sexual partners.
- She will be the cheater on at least one occasion and be cheated on at least once.
- She will have at least one long-distance relationship.
Online dating scene for the average man
- He will have 16 kisses.
- He will face being stood up twice.
- He will have six one-night stands.
- He will go on three additional blind dates and three online dates.
- He will be heartbroken twice.
- He will fall in love twice.
- He will have 10 sexual partners.
- He will have eight relationships, two of which will last longer than a year.
- He will be the cheater on at least one occasion and be cheated on at least once.
- He will have at least one long-distance relationship.
And all of this has to happen before finding “The One” to settle down with. However, keep in mind that Simsion’s book (and this study) was published in 2014, long before the COVID-19 pandemic crashed the online dating world and digital dating became the go-to for social isolators.
Online dating has changed to find the one … or has it?
According to Statista, online dating revenue raked in $602 million in the United States in 2020. The Statista Digital Market Outlook also guesstimates that revenue will increase to $755 million by 2024.
I’m not altogether sure that I can match all of the numbers for women in this dating survey, specifically considering so many of their numbers appear to not be online-dating related.
What I can say is I blew right past their average of two online dates in one month after breaking it off with one guy I met online. In fact, I went on three back-to-back, in-person dates to make sure I never got too hung up on one online “match.”
If I was going to pay for an online service, I was going to get my money’s worth and not end up on MTV’s “Catfish”! (This was pre-COVID-19.) But for some online daters, especially in a digitally dominant world, video streaming sites have made online dating far less cumbersome than it was for me in my early dating days.
Is comparing our dating lives to others taking the fun out of dating?
If we look at surveys or dating publications like this, do we take the fun out of dating? By Kiss #14, should women start checking for wedding venues? Should men start making space in their closets by Kiss #15? “The One” is right around the corner, right?
In my opinion, don’t hold your breath but don’t lose hope either. There does come a time in everyone’s life when dating just gets old. It’s not necessarily the people’s literal age.
However, going through the motions over and over again can make single people more focused on what they do and don’t want. The men I dated in my twenties would’ve never, ever gotten a millisecond of my time in my thirties. I’d learned hard lessons and knew what to avoid.
But I also enjoyed all of them for different reasons. Instead of trying to dissect them before and after each date, I looked at them all individually. Some were A+ dates; others failed out of the semester completely.
One guy lasted for five years (off and on) and could hang out with my parents on his own. A couple others never lasted past the first date. Then, I dodged another man on Valentine’s Day with more determination than the two years I spent ducking coronavirus.
It takes more than a tally vote to know when you’ll find the one. These surveys and dating books are fun to read, but don’t get too hung up on the answers.
While math is one of those subjects where the numbers don’t lie, as with any test, your questions may not be in the same order as the next person. Don’t cheat yourself out of the experience trying to earn a high score.
