Long gone are the days where the best place to find a date was at the local pub.
Monash University and online dating service eharmony have teamed up for a Future of Dating research project, which predicted that by 2038 the majority of babies born will come from parents who met online.
The study project lead by Monash School of Business professor Yelena Tsarenko primarily focused on speculating the effect online dating will have on families and relationships over the coming decades.
They suggest that by 2030, over a third of babies will be ebabies, which is huge leap forward considering just two decades ago online dating was very much in its infancy.
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Stephanie Pavlidis met her partner Justin Camilleri on the dating app Tinder seven years ago and now the couple are set to get married in September and look forward to starting their own family.
“It was sort of the new trend to be going on Tinder and meeting people that way. I supposed I just jumped on the bandwagon,” Ms Pavlidis said.
Ms Pavlidis was not expecting to find love on the dating app, let alone be someone who would use online dating at all.
“I feel there was a bit of an attitude that it was for older people and divorcees. I thought I’d meet my partner naturally, like going out, chatting to people, but it didn’t end up that way,” she said.
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The couple initially didn’t even admit to meeting on the app when friends and family would question their origin story.
“We told them we just met through friends of friends and once things got a bit more serious we said ‘okay we actually met through this hook-up app Tinder’, we just embrace it now but initially it was so embarrassing,” Ms Pavlidis laughed.
Eharmony dating expert Sharon Draper notes that attitudes towards online dating have changed over the years, as seen in the report, but newer stereotypes have emerged as a result to new platforms.
“Online dating often gets a bad rap for encouraging casual dating and swipe culture. But our report with Monash University, demonstrates that there are countless people who look to technology to find life-long partners and start families,” she said.
It also seems that online dating has people with quieter personalities rejoicing, with just over half of the participants saying the internet makes it easier for introverts to find love.
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Katy Maximos also found herself giving online dating apps a go, which helped her come out of her dating shell.
“I personally didn’t choose online dating initially, I was always the type to connect with people face to face and had hoped to meet a partner in a more organic place like a cafe or in a library. As an introvert it was a really big step to take, to enter the online dating world! I was actually encouraged by a few friends and more so my mum, who told me to ‘get with the times’, otherwise I’d never find anyone. I’m glad I took that advice,” she said.
Ms Maximos also ended up finding her partner Andrew Agius through an online dating app, calling it “beginners luck” for it was the first face to face date from the first app she downloaded.
Online dating has grown massively over the last few years, with the study showing that the amount of relationships who got their start from the world wide web hit just over a third between 2016 to this present day.
Using a combination of nationally representative data and statistical probabilities, the study concluded that 2040 will be the ‘tipping point’, when just over half of relationships will flourish from online interactions.