One in ten partnered adults in the United States met their current spouse or partner through a dating site or app, and among partnered adults under 30, that number nearly doubles to one in five, according to Pew Research Center’s benchmark 2023 analysis. The same dataset shows something far less romantic sitting right next to that success story: 56% of women under 50 who have used dating sites or apps say they’ve received an unsolicited sexually explicit image or message. Both numbers come from the same survey, the same year, the same platforms. Online dating is, at once, working exactly as promised for millions of couples and failing badly at basic safety for the majority of young women who try it.
Where the success numbers actually come from
The success side of that split is real and growing. Pew’s research found that a quarter of partnered LGB adults (24%) met their significant other online, higher than the rate among straight partnered adults, reflecting how dating apps have functioned as connective infrastructure for people with smaller local dating pools. For adults under 30 specifically, meeting online has moved from novelty to plurality — a fifth of that group’s current relationships started with a swipe or a message rather than a mutual friend, a workplace, or a bar. That’s not a marginal channel anymore. It’s a mainstream one, on par with or ahead of several traditional ways couples used to find each other. Pew’s figures come from a survey of 6,034 U.S. adults fielded in July 2022, including an oversample of LGB respondents large enough to isolate that group’s numbers with confidence — so the 24% figure isn’t a rounding artifact of a small subsample, it’s a distinct and measurable pattern.
The harassment gauntlet behind those numbers
But the same Pew data makes clear that getting to that successful outcome often means wading through a specific kind of gauntlet, and it isn’t evenly distributed. Among women under 50 who’ve used these platforms, 43% say someone continued contacting them after they made clear they weren’t interested. Thirty-seven percent report being called an offensive name. Eleven percent say someone threatened them with physical harm. Layer those together with the 56% explicit-message figure and a pattern emerges: it’s not one bad actor sending one bad message. It’s overlapping categories of unwanted contact that a majority of young women navigate as a baseline cost of participating.
Men are not exempt from unwanted contact, but the gap is stark. Across all online dating users, 38% say they’ve received unsolicited sexually explicit messages — a national figure pulled sharply upward by what women under 50 specifically experience, since older users and men report these encounters at meaningfully lower rates. That gap between the aggregate number and the number for young women is the story: a single top-line statistic flattens an experience that is, for one demographic, closer to the norm than the exception.
Why the “is it safe?” number keeps shifting
Perception of danger has actually improved slightly. Pew found 48% of all adults now consider online dating an unsafe way to meet someone, down from 53% in 2019 — modest progress, and one that tracks with the platforms’ broader mainstreaming. That improvement isn’t evenly felt either. Adults 65 and older remain the most skeptical group, with 62% calling it unsafe, likely reflecting both less personal exposure to how the apps actually function day to day and, for some, secondhand awareness of exactly the harassment data above. Women across age groups consistently rate online dating as less safe than men do, which lines up with who is actually absorbing the unwanted contact.
What that leaves is a genuinely uneven bargain, not a uniform one. A man in his 30s and a woman in her 20s can open the same app, build similarly appealing profiles, and end up with very different lived experiences of what happens in their inboxes — one closer to a mild nuisance, the other closer to a recurring pattern of being contacted in ways they explicitly didn’t invite. That asymmetry is exactly what a single “is online dating safe?” headline number tends to erase, because averaging men and women, older and younger users, together produces a figure that describes almost no one’s actual inbox.
None of this makes the ten percent success figure less true. Millions of real relationships, marriages, and long partnerships started with a profile and a first message, and for LGB adults in particular, dating apps have plainly expanded who gets to find a compatible partner at all. What the data resists is a single clean verdict. Online dating isn’t simply working or simply broken — it’s a platform where outcomes and hazards scale together, where the same swipe-based system that connected a fifth of young couples is also the system where a majority of young women have fielded an explicit message they never asked for. Both facts describe the same technology, the same year, the same users. Treating either one alone as the whole picture misses what the actual data shows: online dating’s success rate and its safety problem aren’t separate stories competing for attention. They’re the same story, told from two different seats at the table.
