Online couples more likely to break up: study

Couples who meet online are less likely to get married and more likely to split up, a new study led by an Indian-origin scientist has found.
Aditi Paul, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University's Department of Communication, analysed an earlier study's dataset to see whether couples who met online had better romantic outcomes than those who met offline.
The earlier study had surveyed 4,002 adults across the US in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013 - of those, 3,009 had a spouse or significant other, 'Mashable' reported.
When Paul analysed the dataset she found that couples who met online were less likely to get married than those who met in real life.

There are three possible reasons that can explain the tendency of online couples staying in non-marital relationships than getting married, the study found.
First, online dating has been shown to provide individuals with too many options to choose from that leads to a lack of exclusivity where individuals find it difficult to be locked into one particular dating partner when they know that hundreds of other potential dating partners are available.

Second, relationships initiated online take more time to develop compared to relationships initiated offline.
Third, online daters have also shown to take more time to develop relationships purposefully in order to increase the level of trust with their partners, given some of the negative stigma associated with online dating.

Since exclusivity, commitment, and trust are some of the important determining factors of starting a marital relationship, the lack of these can explain the lower percentage of marriages compared to romantic relationships among online daters.
The study also found that online couples tended to break up more than their offline counterparts.
For married couples, relationship quality was found to be a significant factor for determining whether couples would stay together, irrespective of the duration of the relationship.