Everyone loves a good love story.

In a new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, we explore the love stories of 50 people who were engaged or married to someone they met in online dating: what those in the industry refer to as “success story” couples. Our interviewees were online daters between the ages of 21 and 62. They met on apps including Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, OkCupid, and eHarmony, among others.

To gather the data, we used an interview protocol modeled after Buehlman et al.’s Oral History Interview, which was popularized in the early 1990s in research by Kim Buehlman, John Gottman, and Lynn Katz. In their study, the way that couples reflected on their relationship’s history was over 94% accurate in predicting divorce years later.

We flipped the script by looking at the origins of couples who made it—who found love in online dating, which has become one of the most common ways to meet. We found different arcs in people’s stories that captured the trajectories of their relationships, including:

• Pace arcs. These stories emphasized how quickly or slowly things moved. Some people described their relationship as a slow burn, while others talked about online dating as an intimacy accelerator that put them on the fast track to finding love.
• Expectation arcs. Stories of this type were full of surprises. There were people who laughed as they reminisced about their first date, which was a comedy of errors in which nothing went as planned. Other stories followed a man/woman in the hole arc in which the first date was a low point causing them to second-guess their attraction, but things could only go uphill from there.
• Hurdles arcs. Hurdles stories were about obstacles to meeting offline. The hero’s journey was a common theme in long-distance relationships, in which people sometimes traveled to different cities or even states for the first date. Other times, their partner fought for the relationship by winning them over or being the last man/woman standing among the many vying for their attention.
• Fairytale arcs. Stories that unfolded like fairytales framed a relationship as meant to be. In love at first sight stories, people knew their partner was “the one” right away, sometimes even marrying the first person they met. For others, time is running out was a more accurate descriptor and motivator, with their partner coming along just when they were about to stop looking. Serendipity was another theme in the fairytale arc that referenced chance encounters, such as an accidental swipe.

Following are excerpts of some of the love stories people told us about meeting in online dating. (Ellipses in brackets indicate where stories have been shortened for space.)

The Stories

I was just cynical enough to really not take him seriously […] I was just getting to the point where I’m like, “Okay, I’ve had enough of this for a while. I’m just going to stop online dating.” And that’s why I literally almost blew him off before the meeting. The one I ended up marrying, I literally canceled the date twice. It was so weird. It’s like I kept trying to blow him off, and he was really, really persistent. —Ariel, 48, Tinder

I’d been on some other sites, and a friend of mine mentioned to me that some other friends of hers had met some nice people on Bumble, and I said, ‘Whatever, I’ll try it.’ And so, I tried it, and Rex, my husband now, was actually the first person I met on Bumble […] My first match. —Paula, 37, Bumble

I went on a solo trip around Europe, and I decided before I left that I was going to download Tinder […] I maybe matched with four people, and one of them was my partner […] She picks me up at my hostel in the early evening; it was still light out, and we walked and walked all night […] We went through this Latin neighborhood where they were playing music in the streets and there were ballet dancers dancing, and it was very romantic and cheesy, like storybook rom-com situation. She jokingly was like, ‘I’m going to show you the French-est date you’ve ever had,’ and then she did. —Lorinda, 25, Tinder

We met on Match […] He asked me out on a date and I told him yes, and then maybe two days later, I ended up telling him I had something come up with work […] Eventually, though, three days later, I said, ‘Did you want to go on that date?’ And so, we ended up meeting […] I’ll be honest, I just really did not think I was going to be interested in him. I remember texting a friend of mine going, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out.’ And then, I mean, I don’t know what he did to convince me in that hour and a half, but… —Tammy, 38, Match

Key Takeaways

As these stories show, many different roads can lead to marriage. Some stories are romantic, while others are more like romantic comedies. There were times when people went into the first date not expecting much, only to find their partner was not what they thought; they were better. Most importantly, it was not love at first sight for all of these couples—but it was happily ever after.