For a while now, I’ve been pondering dating odds. As you get older, more and more people are in relationships – sure, some fail, but eventually some people get it right and are removed from the dating pool. Does that mean that your chances go down? Or does a smaller pool of singles actually improve your odds? That’s a lot to tackle. But through the power of Facebook, we can at the very least get some of the data needed to start answering that question – and that’s what this post is all about.
[This post is a rewrite and update of one I did a few years ago; conclusions are broadly the same, but the data is a lot better and my old blog is no longer online. I’ll be posting some new follow-up analysis soon, though.]
Relationships over time
A first step in studying relationships over time is to ask: what fraction of a people are in relationships? In particular, what would a graph of the percentage of people in a relationship at different ages look like? A logical guess might be something like this:
No one dates for ages less than about 10, say. (C’mon, grade 3s don’t date – they just pull each other’s hair.) Then the percentage slowly increases as relationships slowly stick before eventually plateauing out after age 60, say. (Let’s ignore death. For now.)
Thinking more, though, I wondered whether there would be more features to the graph – specific points where the percentage rises faster or slower or where, on average, people are actually breaking up more than they are getting together, so that we would see an actual dip.
I had two ideas: one such time might be after high school – perhaps relationships peak in Year 12 (age 17), then slowly fail as people grow apart, move, go to University, etc. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of high school relationships fail after 5-7 years, which might mean a dip around age 23-25. Secondly, you could conceive a dip at around age 40-50 in the “mid life crisis” phase. A new graph might then look like this:
Of course, it might be that even if these effects were real, they could be too small to notice when averaged over enough people.
But how to test this? The Australian Census records marital status, but only as Single/Married/Divorced (or De Facto through Dwelling information questions). That’s not enough for want I want though. I could survey people, but that’s painful and hard to get a good sample.
Then, I stumbled upon a blog post (inspired by yet another post) that looked at the demographics of Facebook members. Turns out, this data is made available to potential advertisers – and so pretending to be interested in advertising my next party to the 9 million Australians on Facebook, I started gathering data about males and females in Australia and their relationship status. I’ve in fact been gathering this data for a couple of years…but that’s, literally, another post. (Others have looked at relationship statistics, but not by age, etc.)
Results follow after the break!
I looked up males and females in Australia in January 2011, who listed their relationship status as either “Single”, “In a Relationship”, “Engaged” or “Married”. (Anyone who selected nothing or “It’s complicated” are not included; see below for a discussion.) Numbers are good across all age groups, with somewhat more women than men:
Yes, I went with the stereotypical colours – don’t hold it against me! To compare ages, I looked at the percentage of men and women at each age listed as in a relationship. Let’s look at the women first:
The shaded red area is the percentage of women who are listed as not single for each age, and the lines show how relationships, engagements and marriages contribute to that. (We’ll come back to those dots!)
First of all, I was roughly right in my overall shape – it starts at low (though not zero – but we’re starting at age 13! And check out those 13 year old marriages. Uh huh, right), increases, then roughly plateaus.
Also really nice is that the peaks in the separate types of relationships are sequential: relationships peak at around 22, engagements at 27 and marriages from 35 onwards. Of course, you can’t naively assume that the individuals of that first relationship peak end up in the marriage column, but it does neatly reflect the different stages of life and love (nawwww).
My hoped-for post-high-school dip hasn’t appeared, nor has my mid-life crisis. If we were being overly confident about our data, you could squint and say marriages seem flat from 30-45, then slowly rise for later ages – possibly suggesting that divorces have slowly the net marriage rate in those years. This needs more investigation. Also, net relationships (red area) apparently fall even while marriages rise, possibly suggesting this is probably either margin of error or a reporting bias.
Let’s look at the men quickly before we move on to further discussion:
Again we have roughly the same peaks, and relationships, engagements and marriage are in the right order. The really flat marriage plateau seen for women doesn’t appear here, so it probably was just chance.
It’s also interesting to compare the two:
We see that women are about three years behind men in both total relationships and marriage, so men are probably marrying women around three years younger than them (either that, or there’s a few guys who are serious cradle snatcher sand are throwing off the stats!) The gap widens a little til early 30s, then shrinks – eventually age is no barrier!
Interestingly, for any age on my plot, a higher percent of women are married, or dating in general. While some of these are going to be same-sex partnerships or marriages, it should affect both about the same (unless I’ve unearthed an incredible statistic and lesbians are far more common than gays!) Census data shows that this is a real effect, however, and that it switches over sometime around age 60. You can’t see that on my figures, however, because Facebook lumps lumps all data for over 64s into the one category (oh, the discrimination!).
The census data shows that from age 65, more and more women start to become single – which I guess has a pretty morbid interpretation. Still, my data does hint at a boost in relationship numbers in later years – so our oldies are still finding love, if not marriage!
But is it real?!
Okay, let’s cut to the chase. We’ll only really know if this data is any good if we compare at least some of the results to an independent source. Say, the Australia Bureau of Statistics. After some rather painful googling, I found that marriage data by age is indeed available, in the form of the aptly titled data set “20680-Social Marital Status by Age by Sex – Time Series Statistics (1996, 2001, 2006 Census Years) – Australia”.
And, of course, anyone paying attention already knows the punchline – I’ve plotted the 2001 and 2006 census data points on the charts above. That’s a damn fine match! Women on Facebook slightly more likely to be married than the Census, men slightly less – this could be either a change in the last 4 years (it’s comparable to the 2001-2006 shift) or there could be a bias in the data. Let’s consider a couple of options to explain this deviation.
Some sources of bias
First of all, it’s not a truly random sample: it’s people on Facebook. On the other hand, “everyone’s” on FB these days (nearly half of Australia!), so it’s becoming increasingly good. But married women are likely to have kids, and so are more likely to be on Facebook to check up on them – thus producing a disproportionate number of married women. Should that apply to men too, though? And I could equally propose that Singles have more time on their hands and are more likely to join. Without any evidence one way or the other, I’m going to leave this one as a small source of error.
What about another type of bias: are people more likely to list one type of status over another? If you’re single, you might not want everyone to know. Or maybe you do, hoping to attract attention. Equally, most people in a relationship want to shout it to the world (disgusting, no?) – but after changing your status back to single for the first time, many people decide to list nothing. And then there’s those who simply have privacy concerns, and don’t make it available.
How can we tell? If a higher portion of single/non-single people are hiding it, you’d expect there to be some correlation between those not listing and the relevant status. So let’s see the graph for women (the male version is basically the same):
Between 60-70% of women list their status up to their mid-30s (which seems surprisingly high to me). This then decreases until only a third do by their mid-60s. You’d expect that if there was a correlation between relationship (or marital) status and privacy then we should see it here – but we don’t! When relationship status changes most, there’s no change in privacy. And when privacy starts to change, there’s no impact on status.
There could be some crazy, coincidental effect that (for example) marriage is actually growing and impacting privacy, hiding the marriage growth. But this seems a bridge too far for me, given the census data especially. Nope, the only thing influencing privacy (I say boldy, waiting to be disproved) is age. Neat!
Conclusions, part 1
So, conclusion: we can use Facebook (is there nothing it can’t do?) to investigate relationships through the ages (ha!). The graph looks roughly like you’d expect (or I’d expect; take your pick), with about 80-85% of people ultimately reporting themselves as being in relationships. By age 40, two thirds of people are locked into marriages and removed from the dating pool. And women are going for the older man, as pop culture would suggest.
I’ll shortly post a few follow ups. One looking at how this data has changed over the last 3 years (if at all!), and another looking at different countries (if you think India looks cool, you’d be right!) I also have a neat maths-y post where you can work out error bars for the status-listing bias, if not for the Facebook sample bias. After that, I can finally get into my newest dating data project!