My Cousin Found Love on Facebook - and She's Not the Only One

Grace Yagel

Over the summer, I was lucky enough to see my cousin (finally, according to our grandmother) getting married! We'd been told everything we needed to know about the groom: tall, handsome, good job, great family. Most importantly, they were happy! 

We heard they had met through their job, so imagine our surprise when my cousin's future mother-in-law let it slip that the two had met on Facebook! I don't know why this hit me so hard. Maybe I never expected my cousin to be that person. But people getting hitched after meeting online is nothing new.

I remember growing up seeing commercials for sites like EHarmony and Match.com that alleged that they would find you the perfect spouse. In fact, 52% of adults who have never been married have used an online dating service, according to a 2019 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. It's especially prominent in millenials, as 48% of 18-29 year olds have used a dating site or app and 21% of them found love online.

The very makeup of social media is meant to connect us - likes, comments, shares, hashtags - everything works to brings us together. We all have those friends we met on social media that we've never met in real life but that we couldn't imagine our lives without. Some of us are just brought together more than others. Wedding site The Knot even has a whole post about couples who married after meeting on social media. There's also an added layer of our hesitancy as a culture to speak to strangers for those of us who grew up in a "stranger danger" environment that leads us to flock to social media as an added layer of protection.

Despite our concerns over that rando on the street over there, as a society, we heavily rely on person to person connection. The COVID-19 pandemic brought that to a halt and had us all running and screaming at full speed, opening our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat apps as fast as we could. That's where MeetJew and CoronaCrush came in.

Moment Mag

There has always been a custom in the Jewish world to talk about marriage and impart the importance of marrying Jewish and having Jewish babies, especially as a minority in the United States and the world. The Orthodox community have long used matchmakers to find love, but to a more secular ear, the idea at first sounded ridiculous. Yet MeetJew and CoronaCrush both did something amazing - they played matchmaker by letting people feel like they are their own matchmakers.

Both MeetJew and CoronaCrush started via Facebook groups that now have several thousand members in each. They both expanded to create surveys with multiple questions surrounding age, gender, values, location preferences, and more that match you with matches based on an algorithm. MeetJew sends weekly emails to participants with matches, while CoronaCrush goes for the more traditional speed dating option; virtual speed dating events are held every few weeks. Both organizations still have their Facebook groups active, with new members joining and posting introductory posts every day.

CoronaCrush is so popular that Chabad Lubavitch, a prominent Jewish organization known for their dedicated outreach to Jewish communities around the world, partnered up with CoronaCrush to launch Met@Chabad, developed in partnership with Chabad on Campus. The team up features an even more intense survey than CoronaCrush's original survey that highlights the importance Chabad places on properly matching couples according to values and education for participants about the importance of marriage and healthy relationships. A May 2021 event found 58% of participants matching, meaning both them and one of their dates said they wanted to get to know each other further.

Some of the couples who married after
meeting on CoronaCrush
Jewish Insider

Both CoronaCrush and MeetJew have been successful in creating marriages. There was even a New York Times article written about a couple who got married after meeting via CoronaCrush! And look at all these other happy couples who also married after meeting through CoronaCrush. That's how you know you made it, am I right?

So while we're still not sure who slid into who's DMs first, one thing is for sure: my cousin is married after finding love online. And she's definitely not the only one.