eHarmony Discovers That “How You Meet Your Spouse Matters” (P. II)

When Dr. Gian Gonzaga and the research team at eHarmony decided to conduct a study on the relationship between divorce and the way couples meet, they found themselves confronted with a couple of hurdles to clear:

• Online dating is a relatively new phenomenon - it's been around for a little over a decade, and only been popular for the last 7 or 8 years. That's not a significant amount of time for a large number of couples to meet, marry, and then separate, and the sample size would likely have been too small to create an accurate study.
• One method of running the study would be to simply sample the American population at random, hoping that a significant number of people who had gotten divorced met their former spouses on an online dating site. The research team would have to hope that, through sheer luck, they would find a large enough number of people who had A) Married in the last decade, B) Met their partner on a particular online dating site, and C) Gotten divorced from that person. But surveying the entire population of the United States is far from practical, and leaves too much to chance.

Instead, the eHarmony team, aided by Opinion Research Corp., "identified an online panel of 4,000 people who had been married to AND divorced from that person in the last 15 years," with a focus on marriages that began between 2005 and 2009. Though their final sample size was small - only 506 people - their findings are still interesting. In most cases, "the expected number of divorces was very close to the actual number of divorces...observed in the sample," which means that "it didn't really matter how you met your spouse, you were just as likely to get divorced." The most notable results from the study showed that:

• People who met on eHarmony were 66.6% less likely to get divorced.
• People who met through school were 41.1% less likely to get divorced.
• People who met at a bar were 24% more likely to get divorced.
• People who met through unspecified other means were 16% more likely to get divorced.

Their findings are food for thought, but the eHarmony team acknowledges that they are far from definitive: "We realize the numbers of eHarmony divorces is pretty small and this is only one sample of divorces. We don't know if these results will replicate in another sample or generalize to all marriages. Those are important limitations to this study that need to be acknowledged. We're already working on replicating these findings to address these limitations."

It is also important to remember, as Dr. Gonzaga notes, that studies like these show only WHAT happened, not WHY it happened. "How you met your spouse is only one of many reasons for why a couple eventually ends up unhappy or divorced," he writes. "Many relationships that start off shaky end up lasting a lifetime. Others that have a great foundation still end up in trouble. How you meet is only the starting point. You, and your spouse, control where you end up."

Read the original post here and for more details on the matchmaking service which conducted this survey please read our review of eHarmony.