Utilizing data from an blogger.com relationship questionnaire completed by new users (N = 5,), this study identifies prioritized goals in new romantic relationships and whether importance of these goals differs by participants’ age and gender. Overall, users valued interpersonal communication more than sex appeal. Older users rated sexual attraction as slightly less important than Cited by: 13 ONLINE DA TING GOALS AND EXPECT A TIONS. Online dating across the lifespan: Users’ relationship goals. Media headlines like “Online dating enjoying a boom among boomers,” and · This is also the first study of relationship goals in online dating with an extensive age range and sufficient sample size in each age group to allow comparisons across the entire lifespan. As the population continues to age, there will be many single, older adults seeking blogger.com by: 13
Online Dating Across the Life Span: Users' Relationship Goals — Monash University
Either your web browser doesn't support Javascript or it is currently turned off. In the latter case, please turn on Javascript support in your web browser and reload this page. Psychology and Aging19 Oct30 4 : DOI: Free to read. b Centre for Primary Care and Prevention at the Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research at the Australian Catholic University, online dating across the life span users relationship goals.
c Centre for Primary Care and Prevention at the Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research at the Elkhart Group Ltd. Utilizing data from an eHarmony, online dating across the life span users relationship goals.
Overall, users valued interpersonal communication more than sex appeal. Older users rated sexual attraction as slightly less important than younger users did, but they still highly valued the goal. Women placed even greater emphasis on communication over sexual attraction compared to men. However, although men valued sexual attraction more than women at all ages, only the youngest women valued interpersonal communication more than young men.
Unfortunately, there is little research on the development of new romantic relationships among older compared to younger adults, but preferences may change with age due to developmental changes and life experiences such as divorce. We examined prioritized goals for new romantic relationships, and whether the importance of these goals varied by age and gender in a large sample of adults using the online dating service eHarmony. What do people want from a potential romantic relationship?
Companionship and sexual attraction are common relationship goals, as evidenced by the prevalence of the themes of warm, friendship-based love and more sexual, passionate love across most major love theories see meta-analyses by Graham, ; Masuda, online dating across the life span users relationship goals, People differ in their relative valuation of these goals, which can be assessed by having individuals rate the importance of characteristics in a partner that reflect these goals.
Undergraduates tend to desire positive internal traits e. Although this work was with young adults, we expect that sexual attraction and traits facilitating companionship will both be highly valued, but that companionship might be even more important than sexual attraction, at all ages, online dating across the life span users relationship goals.
Yet, research on romantic relationship pursuit later in life has been largely restricted to small qualitative studies of young-old adults, with companionship the most widely cited reason for dating e. A recent content analysis of online personal ads for men and women over age 40 found that romantic activities and sexual interests were mentioned at similar rates among the middle age and young-old age groups, but were significantly less likely to be mentioned by participants in the old-old age group.
Developmental changes may increase the value and salience of companionship compared to passion or physical attraction. Older adults prefer low arousal e. Given that sexual attraction is a high intensity, excited state and companionship elicits low arousal positive emotion, older adults may correspondingly have a greater preference for companionship relative to sexual attraction compared to younger adults. Gender differences in partner preferences are often subtle but are worth considering.
Among year olds, men were still more likely than women to say the most important reason for dating was to fulfill their sexual needs Montenegro, Therefore men may value sexual attraction more compared to women across the lifespan, and women might also value companionship more than men. Popular media claimed adults 55 years of age and older were the largest demographic using dating websites in Rosenbloom, In contrast, the online dating site eHarmony.
com collects extensive, quantitative assessments of all users' characteristics and goals through a mandatory questionnaire. In this paper, we first identified principal relationship goals from eHarmony's questionnaires by conducting a factor analysis. We expected that latent variables representing companionship and sexual attraction would emerge in a factor analysis of the eHarmony relationship questionnaire items, and that both younger and older users would place greater importance on companionship than on sexual attraction Hypothesis 1.
We then assessed how the importance of these goals differed by age and by gender. We hypothesized that older adults might value sexual attraction slightly less than younger users Hypothesis 2A and focus more on companionship Hypothesis 2B. Online dating across the life span users relationship goals, we tested whether gender differences observed in younger samples also exist among older adults.
We expected men to value sexual attraction Hypothesis 3A and women to value companionship Hypothesis 3Brelatively more than the opposite gender at any age. We expected women at all ages to place even more emphasis on companionship versus sexual attraction compared to men Hypothesis 3C.
In collaboration with eHarmony Research Labs Santa Monica, CAan age and gender stratified sample of 5, users was drawn from the entire population of United States eHarmony. com users between October and March Marital status and income distributions differed by age group; these additional demographics are provided in Supplementary Table 1.
Each new eHarmony. com online dating service user is required to complete a relationship questionnaire assessing individual differences e. We conducted a factor analysis on these items to empirically identify key themes of the assessed desires. Specifically, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis with a training sample of 1, users, and validated with a well-fitting confirmatory factor analysis on a validation sample of 4, users. Detailed procedures and results of the factor analyses are reported in the online supplement.
Three meaningful factors were found. Composite scores were calculated by taking the mean of the factor items. For additional item descriptive statistics, see Supplementary Table 4. Though we found two factors related to companionship, the analyses focus more on the interpersonal communication factor in order to highlight valued relationship qualities. Demographics e. long term relationships.
To test whether companionship was valued significantly more than sexual attraction, we compared the means of the composite scores using paired-samples t-tests. To test hypotheses about age and gender differences in absolute importance, we created regression models testing for effects of age, gender, and possible age by gender interactions.
Age was centered as indicated in Table 1 and rescaled to decades to facilitate interpretation. The composites were negatively skewed and exhibited ceiling effects, so we used censored regressions Schnedler, which account for ceiling effects see online supplement for additional information.
The life-span model does not include covariates. Overall, age and gender accounted for 5. Gender was coded with males as the comparison group. We first treated age as continuous and conducted analyses on the full age range. However, users' preferences can be influenced by specific life experiences that are partially online dating across the life span users relationship goals with age, particularly marital status divorce, widowhood.
Thus, to help minimize such confounds and clarify our understanding of age and gender differences over and above other demographic influences, we conducted analyses within age subgroups. Analyses on the full age range controlling for covariates are available in the supplement. To examine relative importance, we fit multiple regression models for the difference scores e.
The validation results were consistent. Additional details about adjusting estimates of effect size are available in the online supplement.
We expected that users would value companionship more than sexual attraction. We predicted that older users might value sexual attraction less than younger users Hypothesis 2A.
Across the full age range, we found a significant linear and curvilinear effect of age see Table 1. The curvilinear age term suggested that middle aged users valued sexual attraction highly, and only the oldest users valued sexual attraction less than the youngest users.
This was likely because there were more divorced users closer to middle age and divorced users valued sexual attraction more than never married users. Among the middle aged age users, older age was related to lower importance of sexual attraction over and above covariates We also expected that older users might value companionship more than younger users Hypothesis 2B.
For importance of communication, in the lifespan sample there was a significant disordinal interaction. When covariates were included in the model for young users agea different significant age by gender interaction emerged. Male users a decade closer to 40 valued communication 0. There were no significant effects of age among online dating across the life span users relationship goals age users or any of the older age subgroups.
Age did not relate to importance of individual companionate characteristics in lifespan or age subgroup analyses. Thus, there is no consistent evidence that communication or companionate characteristics are valued more at older ages. We predicted men would value sexual attraction more than women at all ages Hypothesis 3A. Male users consistently valued sexual attraction more than women did in lifespan and age subgroup analyses see Table 1 and Figure 1a.
We also predicted women may value companionship more than men at all ages Hypothesis 3B. A significant age × gender interaction in the lifespan sample identified larger gender online dating across the life span users relationship goals in the importance of communication among younger users than among older users Figure 1b. This pattern was driven by the young subgroup. While at age 20, female users were expected to value communication 0. There were no significant effects of gender among middle age users or the older subgroups.
In contrast, women valued companionate characteristics more than men at all ages Figure 1c. Actual mean composite scores split by age and gender for training sample. Indeed, the relative importance of communication compared to sexual attraction, and the importance of individual companionate characteristics compared to sexual attraction, was significantly higher for women than men at all ages.
At age 50, women rated communication an additional 0. To our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study to examine what online dating users across the lifespan are looking for in a new relationship. Using a cross-sectional population sample of over 5, eHarmony. com users aged 20 to 95, we were able to examine gender and age differences across the online dating across the life span users relationship goals in absolute and relative importance of both sexual attraction and companionship via interpersonal communication and individual companionate characteristics.
We found that users consistently valued communication and characteristics such as personality or kindness more than sexual attraction. We also found mixed support for our predicted age differences across the lifespan. We had expected that older users would value sexual attraction less and companionship more than younger counterparts. There was little evidence that older users valued companionship more, but this may have been due to a ceiling effect. There was more evidence that users approaching age 60 and older valued sexual attraction less than younger users.
Overall, young-old and old-old users had similar preferences in this sample. Our results are similar to the finding that across the lifespan, people generally want to experience more low arousal positive emotions such as the warmth and comfort companionship provides compared to high arousal positive emotions such as the excitement associated with sexual attractionespecially among older adults compared to younger adults Scheibe et al.
However, the age difference in desire for sexual attraction appears for middle age users, while decreases in importance of high arousal positive emotion were not observed until over
Online dating across the life span: Users' relationship goals
ONLINE DA TING GOALS AND EXPECT A TIONS. Online dating across the lifespan: Users’ relationship goals. Media headlines like “Online dating enjoying a boom among boomers,” and Utilizing data from an blogger.com relationship questionnaire completed by new users (N = 5,), this study identifies prioritized goals in new romantic relationships and whether importance of these goals differs by participants' age and gender. Overall, users valued interpersonal communication more than sex appeal. Older users rated sexual attraction as slightly less important than younger users did, but they still highly valued the goal Cited by: 13 · This is also the first study of relationship goals in online dating with an extensive age range and sufficient sample size in each age group to allow comparisons across the entire lifespan. As the population continues to age, there will be many single, older adults seeking blogger.com by: 13
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