Studies

For the sixth year in a row, Match.com surveyed singles from across the United States to examine what it means to be single and looking for love in the 21st century. More than 5,500 were surveyed for the 2015 edition of the annual ‘Singles in America’ study. The report covers a wide range of topics, but two are especially hot: sex and exes.

The survey begins by comparing the two most talked-about generations. Match found that Boomers, despite being older, are hardly prudes. They’re 118% more likely to have a one-night stand on vacation and 53% more likely to have a threesome. Millennials, on the other hand, are 165% more likely to have filmed sex and 236% more likely to be completely drunk the first time they sleep with someone.

Singles In America goes on to present sex stats on a range of subjects:

• 44% of respondents lost their virginity by 18
• 75% had sex by 21
• 16% of women said they’re open to making a sex tape
• 24% of men admitted to having sex in public
• 55% of women have had multiple orgasms
• 3% of men never orgasm from sex
• 50% of singles have had 6 or fewer partners
• 47% of singles have had fewer than 15 partners
• 46% of singles have had a friends-with-benefits arrangement
• 25% of singles have turned a one-night stand into a relationship

What happens that those relationships don’t work out? Match.com also studied the behavior of exes in America. Unsurprisingly, sex was still a hot topic. Twenty-five percent of singles said they've hooked up with an ex, while 33% confessed to dreaming about doing it.

The biggest questions involved breakups and friendship. Forty-two percent of women said they would stay friends with an ex, but fifty percent of female respondents said they wouldn't be okay with a friend dating their ex-boyfriend. However, 25% of women and 50% of men said dating an ex’s friend is totally cool.

Your likelihood of scoring that date in the first place depends on the language you use in your profile. A ‘LOL’ or a ‘Haha’ boosts your odds of a date by 255% and your chances of hitting the sack by 39%. But the real winner of the language race? It’s 2015’s most trendy phrase: ‘Netflix and chill.’

Match.com found that the sneaky sex reference increases your odds by an astronomical 99%, a sizable advantage over some of the year’s other trendy terms. ‘Ghost’ bolstered your chances by 63% and ‘Bae’ by 64%, with ‘on fleek’ pulling up the rear at a disastrous -26%. Time to give your profile a linguistic spring cleaning. Read our review of Match.com for more information on the dating service which conducted this study.

Is the perfect partner dall, dark, and handsome? Is he a leather jacket-wearing bad boy? Maybe she’s an effortlessly beautiful model, or a geeky gamer girl.

The real answer, of course, goes much deeper than that. A perfect partner should be judged not by their looks, but by their actions. EliteSingles polled 10,000 members from around the world about how they would like their future partner to act in a relationship. Some of the results may surprise you.

Participants were asked to agree or disagree with a series of statements about the behavior they expect from their partners. According to the survey, the top five things singles would like their ideal partner to do are:

1. Share his/her concerns with me: 91%
2. Include me in his/her plans for the future: 86%
3. Accompany me to a family member’s birthday party: 84%
4. Give me freedom to have time (hobbies, interests, etc.) for myself: 83%
5. Find the time to talk to me every day: 80%

The study also delved into things EliteSingles members didn’t expect their future partners to do. Men and women gave mostly the same answers, but they expressed a significant difference in the way they expected their partners to show affection. Only 2% of women wished for their partners to show affection through sex, while men were averse to being shown affection by receiving compliments. Only 3% of men said they expect praise from their partners.

Other key differences between Mars and Venus focused on household chores and fashion choices. Fifty-nine percent of women said expect their partners to do housework, compared to 38% of men. What men were more interested in was lingerie - 62% of men said they would like to be surprised with sexy underwear, compared to just 26% of women.

As silly as some of these stats may sound, and as easy as you may think it is to write them off, expectations are essential to relationships. Standards are necessary and healthy, as long as you don’t saddle a partner with an excessive number of expectations or expectations that are unreasonable.

EliteSingles psychologist Salama Marine offers this caution:

“The problem is when you feel obligated to fulfill your partner’s expectations: when you start to feel limited in your decisions or not free anymore to do what you want; or when your needs are completely forgotten to only respond to your partner’s expectations. If this is the case, then it’s a sign that there is a problem in the relationship.”

If you find yourself in that situation, there’s only one solution: communication. Discuss your expectations with your partner clearly and openly, and be sure to listen to them in return. "Good communication will allow you to negotiate and compromise,” says Marine.

For more information on this dating service please read our Elite Singles review.

Another year, another Singles In America study. Match.com kicked off February by releasing the results of the 6th edition of the annual survey, which explores the attitudes and behaviors of over 5,500 singles across the nation.

“This year we focused on the crucial ‘second date,’” says Dr. Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist and Chief Scientific Advisor to Match, “a vital courtship step that has been seriously understudied until now.”

Yes, believe it or not, there’s actual science behind your likelihood of scoring a second date. For starters, Match explored where singles are most likely to find great dates. They found that 33% of respondents met their last first date through online dating, while 26% met their last first date through a friend. And there’s even more good news for online daters: those who use dating services are 93% more likely to want to get married and 78% more likely to get a second date.

Experts encourage out-of-the-box date ideas, but many singles stick to the classics and there could be a reason why. Singles In America 2015 found that you’re 107% less likely to get a second date if you skip dinner or drinks (ouch). You can stack the deck even further in your favor if you choose your destinations and your orders wisely:

• Going for sushi ups your chances by 170%
• An expensive restaurant ups them by 50%
• Ordering a cocktail boosts your odds by 137%
• After-dinner drinks increase your chances by 59%

Of course, it’s not just about what you put in your mouth. It’s also about what comes out of your mouth. Match studied first date conversation to compile a list of do’s and don’ts. Despite the commonly held belief that controversial topics should be avoided, Singles In America found that politics, money, and religion are fair game for 80% of daters. In fact, discussing politics boosts your chances by 91%.

On the other hand, only 14% of singles are up for discussing their ex on a first date, so it’s safe to say that’s a subject best saved for later conversations. Even sports, a seemingly harmless topic for a date, didn’t rate highly with survey participants. Less than 25% said they care about athletics.

Timing, as they say, is everything. The majority of singles - 60% - prefer an evening date, but a minority of 22% would rather go out in the afternoon. Weekends, naturally, are prime time for romantic adventures. Thirty-nine percent of Singles in America respondents opt to go out on Saturday nights, followed closely by 34% who prefer Friday night dates.

If all goes well, you’ll find yourself saying goodbye on the doorstep at the end of the night. Fifty percent of singles think a good first date ends with a kiss, so go ahead and pucker up if you’re feeling a connection. The odds aren’t bad.

For more first date data, visit the Singles In America microsite. To find out about the dating service you can read our Match.com review

Most of us have heard the term “six degrees of separation,” made famous first by the sociology study in the 1960’s, and later in the nineties through references to Kevin Bacon’s prolific acting career. The theory was born: we are all only “six degrees of separation” from him, or anyone else, on the planet.

Now, Facebook is concluding we could be even more connected to each other – by as little as 3.5 degrees.

What this means is that that when you are connected to all the people you know, and they are connected to all the people they know, and so on, you are inevitably linked – through your own network of friends, and friends of friends - to such notable figures as the President of the United States, a Kardashian, football star Tom Brady, or Senator Marco Rubio. That’s right, we’re all only six people removed from everyone else on the planet.

Recently, the numbers were studied again – this time by Facebook, using its own platform. The company found that despite the fact that over the last twenty years or so the population of the planet has increased – we are now closer to each other than ever before. We are all, on average, only three and a half degrees of separation from anyone else on the planet, thanks in large part to the role social media plays in our lives.

Think of it this way: If you have 100 friends, and each of your friends has 100 friends, that's already 10,000 friends of friends to whom you are connected.

In the United States, people are even more closely connected to each other – by an average of 3.46 degrees. At least among those who have Facebook accounts, which totals about 1.59 billion according to Facebook. And Pew Research Center’s report last year shows that about 72% of US adults are active online.

More people are signing up for the Facebook platform every day, which means the numbers are dynamic and makes the connections even closer. For instance, in 2011, researchers at Cornell, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and Facebook analyzed the average across 721 million people using the site then, and found that the degree of connection between people was 3.74. Now, with twice as many people using Facebook, we've grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world.

One problem with Facebook’s figures is that in real life, the majority of people only consider a portion of their Facebook friends as “real” friends. The typical Facebook user has 155 friends, but only describes 50 of them as friends in real life, according to a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center. Thirty-five percent of people have Facebook friends they've never met in person.

What does this mean? For one, social media and the Internet have drawn us all closer to each other – in a way. Maybe we aren’t any closer to each other in terms of real life interactions, but in a virtual world, we find connection.

Found if this social network makes a good dating service substitute, read our Facebook review.

With Valentine's Day come and gone and spring fast approaching, romance is still on everyone's mind. Plenty Of Fish and Amazon both decided to celebrate the most loved-up day of the year by finding the most romantic places in the United States.

POF began by processing the interests data of 5 million US singles. To determine which states and cities are the most romantic in the country, POF looked at the percentage of singles within that region who listed romantic interests on their profiles. Key phrases included “walks on the beach,” “candlelit dinners” and “cuddling by the fire” (which begs the question of whether POF found the most romantic places or just the cheesiest, but never mind).

The site found that Southeastern states are by far the least romantic in the US, with the exception of Florida. In contrast, the Northwest and pockets of the Northeast are home to some of the country's most romantic states. The top spot was claimed by Michigan with Vermont coming in at a close second.

City-wise, Portland clocked in at 34% more romantic than the national average. Seattle came in second and El Paso pulled up the rear.

Highlights from the POF analysis include:

• Single US women are on average 36% more romantic than their single male counterparts.
• Washington DC is the only state in the country where men are more romantic than women. DC women are 38% less romantic than the national average.
• Single women who live in large cities are much less romantic than their rural and suburban female counterparts.
• Michigan is the most romantic state in the country. Michigan singles are 55% more romantic than the national average.
• Single men in the state of New York are 12% more romantic than the national average.
• Single men in Michigan are 74% more romantic than the national average.
• Louisiana is the least romantic state. Singles in Louisiana are 25% less romantic than the national average.

Amazon also got in on the V-Day action with its annual list of the most romantic cities in the US. The retailer assessed cities with more than 100,000 residents per capita, ranking them based on yearly sales of items deemed romantic (like romance novels, romantic music and “sexual wellness products”).

According to Amazon's data, the South, Southwest and Pacific Northwest are the regions most alive with love. Amazon users in the Northeast aren't feeling the prick of Cupid's arrow this year. The top five most romantic cities are:

1. Alexandria, VA
2. Miami, FL
3. Knoxville, TN
4. Orlando, FL
5. Vancouver, WA

Here's hoping that, in 2017, Amazon and POF combine their powers for the romance study to end all romance studies. To find out more about the dating service which performed the study you can read our review of Plenty of Fish.

Reports of online dating-related rape have risen by more than 450 percent in six years, according to the UK's National Crime Agency.

Between 2009 and 2014, the number of reports of serious sexual assaults during first face-to-face meetings following initial contact online rose in the UK from 33 to 184 – a nearly sixfold increase. With around seven million UK residents currently using dating sites, that number is a small fraction of total online encounters – but its growth is still a reminder that safety is an important concern when dating online.

“Early analysis indicates that the online dating phenomenon has produced a new type of sexual offender,” reads the NCA's report on the subject. “These offenders are less likely to have criminal convictions, but instead exploit the ease of access and arm-chair approach to dating websites. This is aided by potential victims not thinking of them as strangers, but someone they have got to know.”

Becaue online relationships tend to progress more quickly than those that begin offline, online daters often have a heightened (and misleading) sense of emotional intimacy. By the time they meet in real life, they falsely believe they are at a more advanced stage of the relationship than they really are. In turn, they are comfortable taking more risks than they normally would and can find themselves in vulnerable situations. That, the NCA posits, is why attacks are most often committed during the first face-to-face meetings.

Looking deeper at the stats, the majority of the victims were women. Eighty-five percent of those reporting rapes were female and 15 percent were men. In spite of safety warnings issued by dating services, police and rape-prevention groups, many opt not to hold their first dates in public spaces. As a result, 71% of the alleged rapes were committed at the victim's or offender's residence.

The National Crime Agency strongly emphasized that the increased risk associated with certain online dating behaviors does not mean blame should be placed on victims.

"A rape victim is never at fault and we do not want the circumstances in which these assaults take place to cause any victim to doubt that," said Sean Sutton, Head of the NCA's Serious Crimes Analysis Section. "Sexual assault is a crime, full stop, and we want victims to feel confident reporting it to the police."

For more information on preventing rape and sexual assault in an online dating context, the NCA recommends visiting Get Safe Online, an initiative supported by the government. The initiative's extenstive guidelines can help daters stay safe when meeting face-to-face.