As Online Dating Grew, Which Meeting Channels Lost Share among New Unions?

This visualization uses current and retrospective partnership histories from the Generations and Gender Survey, Round 2, to examine how the expansion of online dating corresponded to changes in other partner-meeting channels among 38,772 coresidential unions across 11 countries and regions. Generations and Gender Survey–weighted descriptive estimates distinguish online dating from other online meeting and group offline channels into friends/family, school/work, public/leisure, and residual other settings. Online dating’s share increased in every context between 2002–2004 and 2017–2019, with gains ranging from about 4 to 20 percentage points. Yet the largest offline decline varied: friends/family in six contexts, public/leisure in four, and school/work in one. This heterogeneity suggests that digital intermediation is layered onto context-specific institutions and networks. A separate 2020–2021 end point is shown descriptively but excluded from the channel reallocation comparison because of pandemic disruptions. Adjusted robustness analyses yield substantively similar conclusions. The visualization documents compositional change rather than causal substitution, showing that a common technological expansion coincided with different reallocations across network-based, episodic, and institution-based meeting settings in different social contexts.