A lawsuit filed by a woman alleging that the person she was dating with the intention of marrying had a wife and child was recently in the news. What attracted attention was that the two met through a matching app. And today, one in four married couples say they met through a dating app.

The source of the numbers is the ”FY 2020 Young People’s Awareness Survey on Life Design and Encounters,” which was published by the Children and Families Agency in November 2024. This was a large-scale survey of 20,000 samples of men and women between the ages of 15 and 39 from all over the country, and 25.1% of those who were married (2,000 samples) answered that they met their current spouse through a matching app.
By the way, for married people, the reason they met their past partner was through school and work, at just over 39% each, and matching apps accounted for just under 35%. This is a question that allows multiple answers, but it can be said to show that encounters through apps are not unusual.

According to Recruit’s Bridal Research Institute, 15.3% of people getting married in 2023 will get married through matchmaking services. Even if we narrow down the services to online matchmaking services, 11.4% of the services are online, and while traditional matchmaking agencies only account for around 2%, the number of online matchmaking services has increased rapidly over the past 10 years. It can be said that the Internet has already become a popular means of finding love and getting married.
On the other hand, when we spoke to students, we found that although many have had the experience of installing or registering for matching apps on their smartphones, they do not use them frequently and, in fact, have many negative reactions. Of course, this is not an accurate survey, but it is hard to get the impression that love through apps is becoming commonplace.
In fact, according to a survey by the Children and Families Agency, only 17.4% of unmarried people are considering marriage.

According to a survey by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, the lifetime unmarried rate is rapidly increasing for both men and women. In other words, while awareness of marriage is declining, the proportion of people meeting through apps is relatively increasing.
This means that opportunities other than apps are decreasing. According to the Basic Survey on Birth Trends conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, in the 1970s, arranged marriages accounted for 30% of marriages at the workplace/work, but since the 1980s, arranged marriages have sharply declined, and referrals from friends and siblings have increased. Recent years have seen a combination of changes such as the separation of work and love, a decrease in the number of siblings, and an increase in online friendships. In the past, going to higher education or getting a job was an opportunity to renew friendships. However, with the proliferation of mobile devices, it has become easier to maintain relationships with old friends.

Furthermore, SNS allows us to meet people with the same interests and opinions. The fact that “one in four people get married through an app” can be interpreted as the result of a fundamental change in the structure of friendships, given the combination of such changes as the declining birthrate, the increasing number of unmarried people, the spread of mobile communication, and the separation of work and private life.

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