We are currently in
the golden-age of dating! With the rise of technology, our love-lives have only
been enhanced. Our communication has been facilitated, helping us find
potential partners. After scouring countless relationship research papers, and
trawling through the annals of history, I present you with 10 amazing facts
about this unique mating ritual we call dating.
1.
The
longer you spend dating somebody before marrying, the less likely the marriage
is to end in divorce.
What’s the secret to a
successful marriage? I don’t imagine there is a straight-forward answer,
however Andrew Francis and Hugo Mialon of Emory University conducted a 2014
study involving 3,151 people and found that couples that had dated for three or
more years before proposing were almost 40% less likely to divorce compared to
those that had dated for less than one year. If that’s not an excuse to take
things slow, I don’t know what is.
2.
A
woman’s happiness is a key indicator of a successful relationship.
A 2014 study at Rutgers
School of Arts and Sciences found that overall marital quality was generally
greater if women were content with their relationship, whereas the happiness of
the man did not seem to affect marital quality as much. What does this tell us?
Well Rutgers School of Arts and Science’s Deborah Carr suggests that satisfied
wives are more likely to do a lot more for their husband, whereas men,
satisfied or not, are less as likely to provide support.
3.
No
correlation has been found between astrological sign and compatibility.
This isn’t much of a
surprise to anybody, yet OkCupid still decided to take it upon themselves to
gather information from over 500,000 of their users’ profiles to determine once
and for all whether there was a single correlation between compatibility and
star sign.
So what you mean to
tell me is that I can’t neatly fit over 7 billion people into
12 neat categories? Shocker.
4.
Iceland
has a dating app that stops you hooking up with your cousin.
Unfortunately,
Icelanders keep accidentally sleeping with their relatives. This is mainly due
to 3 reasons:
1.
Iceland has a
relatively small population (Roughly 320,000).
2.
Iceland has very few
foreign nationals.
3.
Icelandic surnames do
not give you much indication of lineage.
If this was a problem
for most countries, a good rule of thumb would be to avoid anybody who shares
your surname, however, even siblings in Iceland can have different surnames
since your surname would be the first name of your father and whether you were
his son or daughter e.g. Svensson (Son of Sven), Svensdottir (Daughter of
Sven).
Thankfully, Icelandic
citizens can download a dating app called Íslendingabók (Book of Icelanders)
which will tell you whether you’re related or not by bumping your phones
together, saving you the embarrassment of finding out at the next family
Christmas dinner.
5.
Before
it was the video sharing giant it is today, YouTube began as a dating site.
When YouTube first
launched, the founders of the website were unsure which direction they wanted
to take it in. Since the domain was registered on Valentine’s Day, they gave
the website the tagline of “Tune In Hook Up”. The aim was initially to provide
a platform where lovelorn singles could upload videos of themselves and hook up
with other users.
6.
Wearing
red can make people more attracted to you.
A word of advice for
those looking to improve their dating life: Wear red. Due to the themes we
associate with the colour red, it can affect how we perceive people. A 2008
study by the American Psychological Association found that men rated women
wearing red as more attractive, associating the colour with sex. A separate
2010 study by the same association, found women to associate the colour red
with power and status.
7.
People
are more likely to date somebody “out of their league” if they knew the person
much longer beforehand.
According to a study
conducted in 2014 by Northwestern University and the University of Texas, you
have the best chance of landing somebody more attractive than you if you’d
known that person a significant amount of time before dating. This also means
you’re equally as likely to date somebody less attractive than you if you knew
them for a long time.
Of the 167 Couples
studied, people who started dating after a short period of
knowing each other were more likely to be the same level of attractiveness.
What we learn from this is that the more you know somebody, the more you’re
attracted to their character; not their looks.
8.
The
19th century telegram was commonly used to find dates and has been nicknamed
“the Victorian internet”.
The 19th century
telegram was a way of contacting people over long distances by sending messages
in Morse code. Not long after the telegram was popularised, people were using
it in the same way we would use the internet today. People would look for
romance over long distances, and take part in Morse code chat rooms with the
hope they might meet somebody there.
9.
There
is a common “dating rule” to determine whether your potential love interest is
too young for you.
Have you ever
questioned whether or not you should date somebody because you felt that they
were just too young for you? Luckily, there’s general rule of thumb to put your
mind at ease. By halving your age, then adding 7 you should be able to
accurately determine whether or not that person you’ve had your eye on for
months is too young for you. You’re 36 and they’re 24? Better luck next year…
10.
Men
are usually the first ones to say “I love you”.
A 2011 study by the
American Psychological Association involving 94 participants ageing from 18 to
69 found that the participating males were more than twice as likely as females
to confess their love to their partner. Not only had the majority of the males
in the study been the first to say “I love you” in their current relationship,
but were also the first to say it in any relationship prior. The only sample
group where women were marginally more likely to profess their love first were
those more inclined towards no-strings-attached relationships.
Share this facts with
your friends…
Comments
Post a Comment