Probably an aspect of people using apps while in college, and ending up in that bucket instead.
A graph of "age when met" for current couples would be interesting, if today's "final" couples meet at a later age than in the past because people don't want to settle down as early, you'll have less school couples.
We also need a graph of "number of relationships still around started by year" - if fewer relationships started in 2018 are still extant compared to ones in 2014, that's gonna skew numbers too.
I went to a commuter campus. Most of my classmates had jobs, some had kids, others lived at home with parents. The stereotypical American university experience of young, single people learning, living and socializing on a college campus can be inaccurate.
Though I would suspect that if you broke each of these meeting methods out and analyzed the failure rates for each, "met in college" would be one of the best 3 methods in terms of success rate. I would suspect "met in church", "met in college", and "met online" to be the methods leading to the most long term success. Further, if you asked about whether there was marital satisfaction as opposed to simply a marriage that didn't end in divorce, I would suspect "met in college" to be the best overall method.
The only better methods of meeting, I would suspect, are not mentioned here. For instance, a lot of successful marriages likely come from people who were in the peace corps together. Shared hardship and passion kind of thing.
Just my intuition though. No data to back any of that up.
> Previous research with the longitudinal follow‐ups after HCMST 2009 showed that neither breakup rates nor relationship quality were influenced by how couples met, so the retrospective nature of the HCMST “how did you meet” question should not introduce couple survivor bias (Rosenfeld 2017; Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012). [6] Once couples are in a relationship, how they met does not determine relationship quality or longevity. [7]
Being socially awkward is even worse than being unattractive. Being socially awkward and unattractive means that you end up still virgin after living in student hotel called by locals "spermdump".
