When Andrew is asked if he remembers the first message he sent Josella on Tinder, he doesn’t miss a beat. “I said she had a mullet and a guitar and therefore she was the girl of my dreams,” he says.
“She responded based off my profile because I had a book and I was literate – that passed her test.”
He was 24 years old and she was 23 when they met up for the first time to walk on their lunch breaks between Sydney’s lockdowns in 2021. Andrew admits the first date was “super awkward”, partly because from the moment he saw Josella’s profile, he says: “I was really, really keen, very quickly.”
“I ended the date by doing the most awkward wink in the world,” he said.
“But clearly I passed the test because she said yes to a second date, which went for six or seven hours; [it] didn’t seem to end because we were having such a good time.”
Andrew and Josella are now among the majority of young Australians: the country’s largest and most comprehensive study of sexual and reproductive health, conducted once a decade, has found online dating is the most common way young people meet.
Dr Denton Callander, an epidemiologist at the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales, presented preliminary findings from the third Australian Study of Health and Relationships (ASHR) on Thursday at the International Union Against Sexually Transmitted Infections (IUSTI) world congress in Sydney.
“This is like our big Australian sex report card,” he said.
From nationally representative survey data of 7,226 people, Callander has found more than half of people aged 20-39 (52%) are now most likely to have met their most recent partner online.
When the ASHR was last carried out, over 2012-2013, Tinder had just launched. It changed the landscape of online dating, which before September 2012, had operated primarily through sites such as match.com and OkCupid that did not tend to attract younger users.
At that time just over one in 10 Australians (12%) had ever sought a partner online. In the latest study, with “nationally representative” data collected between 2022 and 2023, that figure has almost tripled to one in three (33%).
“It’s reasonable to say we could apply this to Australia’s population, which means that this year, 3.5 million people looked for a partner online,” Callander said. “This is a huge number.”
Callander noted that while online dating had the most uptake with a younger cohort, it is now “popular across the lifespan”.
For people aged 16 to 29 it’s even higher (44%) – while 37% of 30- to 49-year-olds have looked for online matches, and 21% of 50- to 69-year-olds. The survey showed that 80% of married people with another casual partner met that partner online.
“When we did the this big study 10 years ago, it was an entirely different digital context,” Callander said. “Our lives are increasingly digital, and there’s a blurring between the offline and online.”
Andrew doesn’t look down on his and Josella’s online meeting. “It was a really good way to meet her, and I’m really, really thankful I did.”
“It’s a bit awkward and we have a laugh when we say to our parents and the older generation that we met online, but everybody [among] our peers are pretty understanding that’s how the world is now,” he said.
The ASHR survey found 13% of Australians had sought partners online in the last three months, more than double the previous decade’s 5%.
Callander said online partner-seeking is much more common overall among LGBTQ+ people, who are 2.7 times more likely to say they met their regular partner online than cis-het peers. Gay and trans men were also more likely to meet casual partners and have sex straight away, Callander said. Among respondents of all genders and sexualities, two in five (38%) of those who met online had sex on the first day they met in person, compared with 24% of those who met offline.
The survey also found more than half of Australians have sent or received a sext, including about a third who did so recently. One in ten Australians sent their first sext before the age of 18, with largely no differences by gender.
Nearly one in five participants (19%) reported being frightened or sexually coerced by a partner they met online. Callander said while this was a disturbing statistic, the 22% of survey respondents who had ever experienced sexual violence or coercion overall put it in more context.
What the latest findings do show, Callander said, is how significant the internet is as a “social space for our sexual and romantic lives”.
“It seems clear from these data that online dating is certainly not about to fizzle out. In fact, if I had to guess, I’ll be back in 10 years to tell you it’s only going to continue to grow in popularity.”
Dr Lisa Portolan, whose academic work at the University of Technology Sydney focuses on dating apps and intimacy, said the findings reflect a significant increase in online partner-seeking – and “notably” since the launch of Tinder.
“[It] aligns with the steep trajectory of online partner-seeking,” Portolan said. “The findings demonstrate the growing reliance on technology in forming romantic and sexual connections, especially among young adults.”
Much of the data around consent and coercion emphasised the need for comprehensive sexual education programs to address the complexities of online dating, consent and safe digital practices, she said, and to equip young people with the skills to navigate these environments responsibly.
