Probing Question: How much has dating changed in recent years?

By Melissa Beattie-Moss - Research/Penn State The economy may be struggling, but these days Cupid has found some profitable new niches. With about 95 million single adults in the United States, the online matchmaking industry is booming, to the tune of a billion dollars in revenue projected for 2012. Communication technologies such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype have created new ways to find potential partners, and GPS-enabled smartphone apps can even tell you which eligible singles are within a mile of your location at any given moment. Despite all the digital bells and whistles, it still all comes down to a face-to-face encounter, a.k.a. the date. Is dating fundamentally any different for young adults today than in our parents' and grandparents' days? There have indeed been some important changes, said Sara Vasilenko, a postdoctoral fellow in Penn State's Prevention Research Center and Methodology Center. "One of the biggest differences between young people today compared to earlier generations," she noted, "is that they are getting married at later ages." A recent Pew study shows that marriage is at a record low in the United States and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for both genders.