Skip the Bar and Go Online

As covered in class and backed up by TIME Magazine, marriages that began from online-dating have less rates of divorce than traditional marriages.

Online dating is "no longer an anomaly", 1/3 of marriages today started online. They are comparable to FtF relationships in their positive qualities.

They are more successful than relationships that began at the workplace, bars, or nightclubs, and are just as successful as marriages between those who grew up together, met at school, or through friends or religious groups. Online dating that began from sites specifically designed for it are what succeed, not those that began via online chat rooms (probably due to anonymity and lack of purpose in the communication).

But what makes them so successful? Self disclosure. The ability to self disclose is usually heightened online; people feel more confident displaying their true or inner selves on the web rather than in person (as quickly as online). On online dating sites, like eHarmony, you are asked to fill in personal questions such as your hobbies, favorite places to go, books you've enjoyed, and, more importantly, what you want of love and what you have to offer in love.

By doing this, you can immediately find people who match these qualities and goals in their own lives. You find out right off the bat if they want to marry, if they want children, if they tend to get into "flight or fight" mode when there is an important issue that comes up in the relationship. All of these things typically take anywhere between half a year to even decades for traditional relationships to talk about or begin to contemplate, ending most times in divorce or irreconcilable issues in the relationship due to differing opinions and ideas. But with online, it's all right there from the start. So, you're being paired with someone who you will get along with, share your goals, and you're already been intimate with them in the form of self-disclosure (the most important and overlooked aspect of intimacy).

Because of this, it is no wonder that marriages that began via online dating sites are just as successful as those between life-long friends, because you have self-disclosed very intimate aspects of yourself and your desires, so you're getting to be paired with someone who understands you on these complex levels which makes for a happy and successful marriage.