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Download More than one-third of US marriages begin with online dating, and those couples may be slightly happier than couples who meet in other ways, a US study said on Monday. Online dating has ballooned into a billion-dollar industry and the Internet "may be altering the dynamics and outcome of marriage itself", said the study by US researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research is based on a nationally representative survey of 19,131 people who married between 2005 and 2017. "We found evidence for a dramatic shift since the advent of the Internet in how people are meeting their spouse," said the study, led by John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago's Department of Psychology. People who reported meeting their spouse online tended to be 30 to 49 years old and in higher income brackets than those who met their spouses offline, the survey found. Of those who did not meet online, nearly 22 percent met through work, 19 percent through friends, 9 percent at a bar or club, and 4 percent at church, the study said. When researchers looked at how many couples had divorced by the end of the survey period, they found that 5.96 percent of online married couples had broken up, compared with 7.67 percent of offline married couples. The difference remained statistically significant even after controlling for variables like year of marriage, sex, age, education, ethnicity, household income, religion and employment status. | 
