If you look at Figure 1 in this 2012 paper on how Americans meet their mates, you basically see that many of non-collegiate modes of meeting a partner have been in free-fall since the 1990s. …
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College has also dipped since 2000 as a place to meet, but only modestly; bars and restaurants have ticked upward, and the internet, predictably, has exploded. This trend may not be a bad thing for marriage as an institution: So far, the data on unions formed online looks pretty encouraging, and it’s possible that the internet is helping to compensate for the eclipse of other forms of community, rather than contributing directly to those other forms’ eclipse.
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