If you’ve been together for decades, chances are you met your valentine through family, work or in other traditional ways.
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But if your relationship is newer, it’s more likely you met online.
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According to a new nationally representative survey of 3,009 adults with a romantic partner, the Internet has now overtaken all the ways people meet, save one: meeting through friends.
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Regardless of when they met, at least 32 percent of respondents said friends brought them together, according to the study by Michael Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif.
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It’s the one category that works for every kind of couple — gays and straights, young and old. Everybody relies on their friends, says Rosenfeld, who will discuss his preliminary findings at a meeting of the Population Association of America in April.
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But among those who met in just the two years before the survey, 23 percent of heterosexual couples and 61 percent of gay and lesbian couples met online. (Of those surveyed, 474 were gay or lesbian.)
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The Internet is the one social arena that is unambiguously gaining in importance over time, the study finds.
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Rosenfeld’s research is among a few national samples that shed light on how people become couples, and it is by far the most recent data, compiled last spring. USA TODAY asked readers for their own how we met stories, and more than 300 responded; their experiences, along with Rosenfeld’s research, paint a picture of the way romances form in contemporary society.
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Rosenfeld says his research was conducted online by Knowledge Networks, a survey research company; participants were recruited by phone and provided online access if needed.
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The rise of the Internet as a way of meeting people makes a bit of an end run around family, he says. It doesn’t seem to erode the importance of friends, but…