Couples

Dating site eHarmony has found that quarantine helped solidify new relationships at an accelerated speed as people partnered and navigated lockdown together. The company also found that it helped long-term couples feel more connected, too. 

Relate, a non-profit that provides mental health and counseling services, worked with eHarmony to gather the data. According to Good Housekeeping, they found that 63% of respondents say their relationship feels stronger after quarantining together, and 58% say they know they want to be with their partner forever.

Facebook has created a new app exclusively for couples dubbed Tuned. With it, they are able to share messages, music and digital scrapbooks with each other privately and in theory – deepen their connection.

Facebook entered the relationship app world with Facebook Dating, which has fallen flat among users as Tinder, Bumble and other dating apps have seen a surge of activity. Tuned however was created by Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team, and focuses exclusively on couples instead of singles – helping them foster an intimate virtual connection. There hasn’t been a huge marketing push like there was ahead of the launch of Facebook Dating. Instead, Tuned has had a quiet rollout, almost like a beta test. 

Bond Touch Bracelets

Online dating has given us wonderful things and terrible things, and some things that are wonderful and terrible at the same time. It allows us to connect with potential partners all over the world (wonderful), but it also opens us to the possibility of falling in love with a perfect match who lives hours, miles or even oceans away (terrible). Despite what they say about absence and the heart growing fonder, and the ever-expanding number of communication tools that claim to bring us closer, long-distance relationships are hard.

Entrepreneurs are eager to find ways to help couples stay connected no matter where they are in the world. Bond Touch bracelets use haptic technology to let you and your dearest physically feel each other, even when you’re apart. When you touch your bracelet, your partner’s matching bracelet vibrates and lights up in the color of your choice, letting them know they’re on your mind. Bond Touch bracelets are waterproof up to three feet, with a battery life of up to four days and a variety of accessory bands that can be swapped to customize your style.

Researchers have long been fascinated by the ways online dating has changed how we meet and match. A Pew Research Center analysis of recently released survey data from Stanford University found that online daters are more likely to choose partners who are different from them in race or ethnicity, income level, education or political affiliation.

The Stanford survey, How Couples Meet and Stay Together 2017, collected answers from 3,510 U.S. adults who are currently married, currently in a relationship, or who have ever previously been in a relationship. Couples who met online were more likely to date someone with a different education level, political ideology or race/ethnicity than couples who met offline. The difference between those who met online and offline was particularly significant for political party and race/ethnicity.

We know we shouldn’t compare ourselves to what we see on social media. Everything, from the poreless skin to the sunsets over pristine beaches, is edited and carefully curated. But despite our better judgement, we can’t help feeling envious when we see travelers on picturesque getaways and fashion influencers posing in their flawlessly organized closets.

This compulsion to measure our real lives against the heavily filtered lives we see on social media now extends to our relationships. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are littered with images of #couplegoals that make it easy to draw comparisons to our own relationships and give us unrealistic perceptions of love. According to a survey from Match.com, one third of couples feel their relationship is inadequate after scrolling through snaps of seemingly-perfect partners plastered across social media.

Online daters aim high when it comes to hooking up and finding love. According to a recent study published in Science Advances, both men and women aspire to date partners who are “out of their league.”

Researchers from the University of Michigan and the Santa Fe Institute analyzed heterosexual dating habits in four major U.S. cities – New York, Boston, Chicago and Seattle – using messaging data from a popular unnamed online dating service. The results of the study revealed that singles pursue partners who are, on average, 25% more desirable than themselves.

A person’s desirability was determined in part by the number of initial messages they received. The most popular individual in all four cities was a 30-year-old woman living in New York, who received 1504 messages during the period of observation, equivalent to one message every 30 minutes, day and night, for the full month of the study.

However, desirability is not just about the quantity of people contacting a user - the quality of people also matters. Those who receive messages from highly desirable people are presumably more desirable themselves. To account for this, the researchers looked at the aggregate desirability of those sending the initial messages using PageRank scores.