D means Degree.

It took me about 4 seconds to adopt that as my mantra my senior year at Truman State University.

Coerced into carrying a B Plus grade point average to maintain a scholarship, the day my tuition was officially paid for was officially the day I quit worrying about maintaining that attainable but annoying level of academic prowess.

It was time to get a bad case of senioritis. If it wasn’t a class in my major, I wasn’t doing any more than the minimum.

That included statistics. But despite my apathy, which did equate to a D in the class, I remember one thing the professor said on the very first day that may be all I need to know about statistics.

After walking into the classroom, the professor set down his satchel and commented “The first thing you need to know about statistics is you can use them to prove a mouse can dangle an elephant over a cliff. But common sense tells you otherwise.”

Pretty much everything after that was blah, blah, blah, numbers, blah, blah, variable, blah blah.

But that commentary on stats stuck with me, probably because of its prevalence in society.

Whether we’re talking about deficit spending, or financial statements, tax increases or even if something is a tax increase, stats can be used to support either side of an argument.

It’s the beauty of numbers. They’re like clay.

But sometimes, that clay can be formed to make a pretty interesting diorama.

Stanford University recently published a sociological study into how couples meet. Where are folks getting together in 2024 … and how does that compare to 1930.

It made for a nice visual that made its way around social media but also painted an interesting picture of society.

In 1930, family reigned supreme as the number one way spouses met at 22.8 percent. There are jokes a plenty available regarding cousins and Arkansas, but keep in mind this would include friends of the family.

The second most likely place for spouses to meet at 22.6 percent was school, and presumably secondary as college had its own category, finishing a distant seventh at 3.6 percent.

Friends rounded out the top three at 18.6 percent, which means 64 percent of all couples connected via family, friends or school.

Neighbors (11 percent), church (10.3), bar/restaurant (7.9) checked in at 4-6 and 2.8 percent of couples met as co-workers, the only category lower than colleges.

Friends unseated family as the top way couples met in 1943 while bars/restaurants and co-workers moved up to 4/5.

Bars moved into the third slot behind friends and family in 1969 and by the early 1980s, finding true love at worked had zoomed all the way up to the number two slot.

The numbers stabilized for the next dozen or so years and by the time I graduated with my D in Statistics, friends (27 percent) co-workers (16 percent) and the bar (14.5 percent) were still the most common ways to meet a spouse.

But 1994 was an important year in this study for another reason as the first where there was a 9th way to meet a spouse that registered over one percent. With 1.1 percent, it was a distant ninth behind church (5.4 percent): online.

Online hookups started slowly and it actually took 7 years for it to pass church, 5.7-5.1 percent, in 2001.

But after that, it was like apathy, a journalism student and a math class: all consuming.

By 2002, online was sixth. Fifth in 2003 and fourth in 2005. After coming in third in 2006 online dating secured second in 2007. It was a distant second though at 14 percent, compared to the still strong, tried and true friends at 27 percent, the same number as 13 years prior.

That lasted about 5 years when online dating, as it inevitably would, became the most popular way to meet a spouse, passing friends once and for all.

And based on 2024 numbers, it doesn’t look like that will be changing anytime soon as a whopping 60.4 percent of couples reported meeting online.

For the math impaired that’s more than half. Or it’s a lot. However you want to look at it.

Friends are a distant second at 14 percent followed by co-workers (8.5), a bar/restaurant (5) and family (4.5).

The most surprising part of the study to me though is the claim that less than one percent, .7 in fact, of couples say they met in college.

Which church at 2.1 percent, that means in 2024, you’re three times as likely to meet a future spouse at church than at college.

And yet you’re 25 times as likely to meet someone online than in either church or college.

I may have only got a D statistics, but I’m smart enough to know those numbers represent two very different worlds.

Gregory Orear is the general manager/editor of the Lincoln County Journal, Elsberry Democrat and Troy Free Press. He’ll gladly tell you the story about he asked a co-worker out who laughed at him, but later married him, largely out of pity. He can be contacted at gorear@cherryroad.com.