Before the first date, one legal question.

There is no evidence behind any of the 'wait X months before dating' rules.

The circulating rules – wait a year, wait half the length of the marriage, wait until the decree is signed – do not come from research. This review found no study, systematic review, or professional-body guidance that identifies a safe or optimal interval between separation and dating. The intervals that do matter are legal ones, set by statute in your state, and they are about conduct and money rather than about readiness.

The rules people repeat have no traceable origin in the research literature. No peer-reviewed study, no government health agency, and none of the professional-body guidance reviewed here (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, CDC) publishes a recommended waiting period before dating after a separation or divorce. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry's Facts for Families sheet on Children and Divorce, updated April 2026, does not mention a parent's dating or new relationships at all.

This is not the same as saying timing does not matter. It is saying that the specific numbers have been invented somewhere downstream of any evidence, and that a reader who is being told 'the research says wait a year' is being told something untrue.

Two things genuinely are time-sensitive, and both are legal rather than psychological. First, in some states conduct before a settlement agreement is signed or before a final order is entered carries consequences that the same conduct does not carry afterwards – South Carolina's alimony bar and Virginia's fault ground are both drafted around a specific cut-off date. Second, in some states moving in with a new partner can end spousal support. Those dates are set by statute, not by advice columns, and they differ by state.

The honest framing for a reader is therefore inverted from the usual one. The question is not 'have I waited long enough to be ready', which nobody can answer for you and no study has answered in general. It is 'what, in my state, changes on which date', which a lawyer can answer precisely.

Population data measures remarriage, not dating – and the best national figures on it are thirty years old.

No US government statistical series measures when divorced people start dating. What exists measures the formation of new marriages and new households. The most-cited national figures come from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth: 54 percent of divorced women had remarried within five years and 75 percent within ten. Those numbers describe women aged 15-44 in 1995 and should not be read as a description of the present.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Dating is not a transition that appears in vital statistics or in household surveys. Marriage and cohabitation are. So every national number a reader is likely to encounter about 'moving on after divorce' is actually a number about remarriage or about a new person moving in, which happens far later and far less often than dating does. Anyone quoting a national statistic about when divorced people start dating is quoting something that does not exist.

The National Center for Health Statistics report First Marriage Dissolution, Divorce, and Remarriage: United States (Bramlett and Mosher, Advance Data No. 323, 2001), drawing on Cycle 5 of the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 1995, found that 54 percent of divorced women had remarried within five years and 75 percent within ten years. The sample was women aged 15 to 44. Men were not covered, older divorcing adults were not covered, and the data are now three decades old.

Those caveats are load-bearing rather than decorative. The survey predates the internet dating market entirely, and it predates the rise in cohabitation as a substitute for remarriage. A person who repartners today may never appear in a remarriage statistic at all. The 1995 figures should be treated as historical, not current, and this research did not locate an equivalently authoritative and more recent national series.

The practical upshot for a reader is that there is no benchmark to measure yourself against. If you are wondering whether you are dating 'too early' or 'too late' relative to other people, the data to answer that has not been collected.

Dating before the divorce is final can carry real legal consequences, and what those are depends entirely on your state.

In a number of states, sexual conduct while you are still legally married is a ground for divorce, can bar or reduce spousal support, can be raised in a custody case, and in a few states remains a criminal offense on the statute books. In other states none of that is true. The range is genuinely enormous and the difference is not a matter of degree. This is a question for your own attorney before you act, not after.

Separation is not divorce. Until a final decree is entered you are married, and every statute that attaches consequences to the conduct of a married person still applies to you. This is the single fact most often missed by people who have been physically separated for a year and reasonably feel single.

The consequences fall into four separate categories, and a state can attach any combination of them. First, fault grounds: adultery remains a statutory ground for divorce in some states. Second, spousal support: some states bar or reduce alimony where adultery is proven. Third, custody and parenting time: some states direct courts to weigh a parent's moral fitness insofar as it affects the child, and others expressly forbid courts from considering parental conduct that does not affect the parent-child relationship. Fourth, criminal law: a small number of states still have adultery offenses on the books.

Separately from all of that, a handful of states still permit civil suits by a spouse against the third party. North Carolina is the clearest surviving example, and it is the reason the risk is not always the reader's alone – a new partner can be the defendant.

The dates that trigger these rules vary and are drafted with precision. South Carolina's alimony bar attaches to adultery before the earlier of a signed written settlement agreement or a permanent order. Virginia's adultery ground reaches only adultery that occurred before the last separation of the parties, so post-separation conduct does not supply that ground in Virginia. North Carolina's third-party torts do not reach acts after the spouses physically separate with intent that the separation be permanent. Three states, three different cut-offs, all doing different work.

The individual topics that follow give the verified statutory text for specific states. They are examples chosen because the text could be read on the state's own legislature or court website. They are not a survey, they do not tell you what your state does, and a state not named here is not thereby safe. The Cusp's per-state pages are the place to start; your attorney is the place to finish.

One practical point that applies regardless of state: written and photographic evidence of a relationship, including dating-app profiles, messages, geolocated photographs and payment records, is routinely discoverable in a contested divorce. The question of whether conduct matters legally is separate from the question of whether it can be proved, and in the internet era the second question has become much easier to answer.

In some states, proven adultery can bar spousal support outright – and the bar is written around a specific date.

South Carolina bars alimony to a spouse who commits adultery before the earlier of a signed written settlement agreement or a permanent order. Virginia bars permanent spousal support where the paying spouse can establish adultery as a ground, unless the court finds by clear and convincing evidence that denial would be a manifest injustice. Both are verified statutory text. Most states do not have a bar this hard, and some do not consider conduct at all.

South Carolina Code Section 20-3-130(A) provides: 'No alimony may be awarded a spouse who commits adultery before the earliest of these two events: (1) the formal signing of a written property or marital settlement agreement or (2) entry of a permanent order of separate maintenance and support or of a permanent order approving a property or marital settlement agreement between the parties.' The bar is absolute on its face – there is no discretion written into that sentence – and it runs to whichever of those two dates comes first. A South Carolina spouse who has been separated for two years and has not yet signed an agreement is inside the window.

Virginia Code Section 20-107.1(B) provides that 'no permanent maintenance and support shall be awarded from a spouse if there exists in such spouse's favor a ground of divorce under the provisions of subdivision A (1) of Section 20-91', which is the adultery ground. Virginia writes in an escape valve that South Carolina does not: the court may nonetheless award support if it 'determines from clear and convincing evidence, that a denial of support and maintenance would constitute a manifest injustice, based upon the respective degrees of fault during the marriage and the relative economic circumstances of the parties.'

Virginia's ground itself is narrower than its reputation. Section 20-91(A)(1) reaches adultery 'that occurred prior to the date of the last separation of the parties'. On the face of the statute, adultery after the last separation does not supply that ground – and so, on the face of Section 20-107.1(B), does not trigger that support bar. This is the kind of detail that inverts a reader's assumption entirely, and it is also the kind of detail that is fact-specific enough that no reader should act on it without counsel confirming how it applies to their own separation date.

The contrast between two neighboring southeastern states with hard-looking bars, one with an exception and one apparently without, and with different cut-off dates, is the strongest available illustration of why a general rule cannot be stated. Neither state's rule tells you anything about a third state's.

There is a second, quieter financial consequence that survives the divorce itself and is covered separately below: in some states, cohabiting with a new partner after the divorce can end spousal support.

A few states still have criminal adultery statutes on the books, and at least one of them also criminalises the unmarried partner.

Wisconsin classifies adultery as a Class I felony, and the statute reaches both the married person and the person who has intercourse with someone married to another. Virginia's adultery statute remains in force as a Class 4 misdemeanour. Prosecutions are, so far as this research could establish, vanishingly rare – but the statutes exist, and their existence can matter in a divorce even when no prosecution follows.

Wisconsin Statute 944.16 provides: 'Whoever does either of the following is guilty of a Class I felony: (1) A married person who has sexual intercourse with a person not the married person's spouse; or (2) A person who has sexual intercourse with a person who is married to another.' Subsection (2) is the part readers do not expect. The unmarried new partner of a separated-but-not-divorced Wisconsin resident is within the terms of the statute.

Virginia Code Section 18.2-365 provides: 'Any person, being married, who voluntarily shall have sexual intercourse with any person not his or her spouse shall be guilty of adultery, punishable as a Class 4 misdemeanor.' The section was displayed as in force on the Virginia Law Portal, the Commonwealth's official code site, when checked on 22 August 2026.

The realistic risk is almost never prosecution. This research found no data source on the frequency of adultery prosecutions and makes no claim about it; the honest statement is that such prosecutions are widely understood to be extremely rare and that we could not verify a rate. The reason the statutes still matter is indirect and procedural: where conduct is a crime, a party questioned about it in a deposition or at trial may have a Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, and how that interacts with proving or defending a fault ground is a live tactical question in a divorce. That is a matter for counsel, and it is one of the clearest reasons to raise the subject with a lawyer before it comes up under oath.

These two states are examples verified on their own official sites. Other states have had such statutes and some have repealed them in recent years. This research did not attempt a fifty-state survey and no inference should be drawn about any state not named here.

In North Carolina a spouse can sue the new partner directly – but not for anything that happens after a permanent separation.

North Carolina still recognizes the civil claims of alienation of affection and criminal conversation, which are brought against the third party rather than against the spouse. North Carolina General Statute 52-13 limits them: no act after the spouses physically separate with intent that the separation be permanent can give rise to either claim, and any action must be brought within three years of the defendant's last act.

These are torts, not crimes, and the defendant is the new partner. That is what makes them unlike everything else in this section: the person exposed is the one who was never married to the plaintiff.

North Carolina General Statute 52-13 provides: 'No act of the defendant shall give rise to a cause of action for alienation of affection or criminal conversation that occurs after the plaintiff and the plaintiff's spouse physically separate with the intent of either the plaintiff or plaintiff's spouse that the physical separation remain permanent.' The same section provides that 'An action for alienation of affection or criminal conversation shall not be commenced more than three years from the last act of the defendant giving rise to the cause of action.'

The structure of that statute is worth reading carefully, because it does two opposite things at once. It confirms that the claims survive in North Carolina, which most people assume they do not exist anywhere. And it draws a bright line at permanent physical separation, which means the risk window closes earlier than a reader might fear – conduct after that point is outside the statute.

The intent element is the soft spot. The cut-off depends on the physical separation being accompanied by an intention, held by either spouse, that it be permanent. Where that intention arose and whether it can be proved are contestable questions of fact, which is precisely why a reader should not self-assess this.

This research verified the North Carolina statute only. A small number of other states are commonly said to retain one or both of these claims; that was not verified here and is not asserted.

Whether a new relationship can be raised in a custody case depends on whether your state's statute lets a court look at conduct at all.

States take opposite positions in their own statutory text. Illinois directs that in allocating parenting time the court 'shall not consider conduct of a parent that does not affect that parent's relationship to the child'. Louisiana directs courts to weigh 'the moral fitness of each party, insofar as it affects the welfare of the child'. Both statutes contain a filter tied to the child. Neither treats a parent's private life as relevant on its own.

Illinois, 750 ILCS 5/602.7(c): 'In allocating parenting time, the court shall not consider conduct of a parent that does not affect that parent's relationship to the child.' The verb is 'shall not'. On the face of the statute, a parent's new relationship is off the table in an Illinois parenting-time allocation unless a link to the child is established.

Louisiana, Civil Code Article 134, lists the best-interest factors a court must consider, including factor (7), 'The moral fitness of each party, insofar as it affects the welfare of the child.' Louisiana permits the inquiry that Illinois forecloses – but only through the same filter. Moral fitness is not a free-standing factor; it is qualified by its effect on the child's welfare.

Reading the two together gives a reader something more useful than either alone. The difference between these states is real and consequential, but neither statute supports the fear that a judge will simply disapprove of a parent's dating life. In both, the question that has to be answered is what the conduct does to the child. What crosses that line in practice – exposing a child to a series of overnight partners, leaving a child with an unvetted adult, missing parenting time because of a new relationship, conflict in front of the child – is decided case by case by judges, and this research found no dataset on how they decide.

That last point deserves emphasis because it is where confident advice usually appears. This research located no study, and no professional-body guidance, quantifying how often a parent's new relationship affects a custody outcome or in what direction. Anyone who tells you dating 'always' or 'never' matters in custody is not reporting evidence.

Practical exposure is also driven by what can be documented. Where a state permits the inquiry, the material that gets produced is ordinary digital life: messages, photographs, social media, calendar entries, overnight patterns visible in a parenting-time log.

After the divorce, moving in with someone can end spousal support – in Virginia, after one year.

This is the financial consequence of dating that survives the final decree, and it is the one most often overlooked. Virginia Code Section 20-109(A) requires a court to terminate spousal support where the recipient has been habitually cohabiting with another person in a relationship analogous to a marriage for one year or more. The trigger is cohabitation, not remarriage, and the parties can contract around it.

Virginia Code Section 20-109(A) directs termination where 'the spouse receiving support has been habitually cohabiting with another person in a relationship analogous to a marriage for one year or more commencing on or after July 1, 1997'. Two exceptions appear in the same subsection: where the parties have 'otherwise provided by stipulation or contract', and where the receiving spouse proves that termination would be unconscionable.

Three features of that drafting matter to a reader. It does not require remarriage – a relationship 'analogous to a marriage' is enough, and what counts is litigated. It has a duration requirement, one year, so a new relationship does not put support at risk immediately. And it can be varied by agreement, which means the terms negotiated in the settlement may displace the statute entirely.

That last point is the actionable one. If you are receiving support and expect to repartner, the question of what your agreement says about cohabitation is worth answering before you move in with someone, not after. If you are paying support, it is worth knowing whether your agreement preserved this or bargained it away.

Virginia is the state whose text was verified here. Provisions of this general kind exist in a number of states with different triggers and different durations, and some states have no such provision. Do not read Virginia's one-year rule as a national default; this research did not survey other states.

The research is about how many partners move through a child's life, not about how soon the first one is introduced.

The relevant body of work is the partnership-instability literature, and it studies the number of family structure transitions a child experiences, not the timing of an introduction. It finds associations between more transitions and worse socioemotional outcomes. How much of that association is caused by the transitions, and how much reflects pre-existing differences between the parents, is genuinely disputed – and the two most careful studies reach different conclusions.

The distinction between transitions and introductions is the whole point, and it changes what a parent should actually be careful about. A transition, in this literature, means a partner moving into or out of the household. Meeting a parent's date does not create a transition. Someone moving in, and later moving out, creates two. The literature therefore has nothing direct to say about whether to introduce someone at three months or at twelve, and a great deal to say about the accumulated churn of partners entering and leaving a child's home.

Fomby and Cherlin (American Sociological Review, 2007) examined whether children experiencing multiple family structure transitions have worse outcomes, using longitudinal data with information on maternal characteristics measured before the child's birth – which lets them ask whether the transitions or the mothers' pre-existing circumstances are doing the work. Their finding was substantially deflationary: for white children, the association between the number of family structure transitions and cognitive outcomes was 'largely explained by mother's prior characteristics', with a possible partial effect on behavioral outcomes remaining. Among Black children they found no significant effects of transitions.

Lee and McLanahan (American Sociological Review, 2015) revisited the question using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and marginal structural models, a method designed to handle confounders that themselves change over time – a harder test than controlling for baseline characteristics alone. They reported effects that survived, and, importantly, that were not uniform. Transitions out of two-parent households showed stronger negative associations than transitions into them. Effects were more pronounced for socioemotional outcomes than for cognitive achievement. And they differed across racial and ethnic groups.

That asymmetry – leaving hurts more than arriving – is the most practically useful finding in the literature, and it points away from the conclusion most parents fear. It does not say that a new partner harms a child. It says that a partner who arrives and then leaves is the pattern associated with harm, which makes the relevant caution about the stability of the relationship you introduce rather than the speed at which you introduce it.

Both studies are observational. Neither randomly assigned anyone to repartner. Even marginal structural models rest on the assumption that the confounders measured are the ones that matter, and unmeasured differences between parents who repartner often and parents who do not remain a live alternative explanation. Effects, where found, were modest rather than dramatic; this research did not obtain the full effect-size tables from either paper, only the abstracts, and so does not quote specific coefficients.

No study located in this research examines the timing of a first introduction and child outcomes. If such work exists it was not found here, and no number about when to introduce a partner should be attributed to research.

Telling the other parent before the children do is a custom, not a rule – and this research found no evidence on what it does to co-parenting.

It is common for separated parents to tell each other before a new partner meets the children, and common for parenting plans to require it. There is no evidence base establishing that doing so improves co-parenting or protects children, and this research found no study measuring what happens to a co-parenting relationship when one parent starts dating. What can be said is that a plan may already require notice, and that a requirement in an order is enforceable regardless of what anyone thinks of it.

Start with the document rather than the norm. Parenting plans and separation agreements frequently contain notification clauses – requiring a parent to inform the other before introducing a romantic partner to the children, or before a partner stays overnight during parenting time. Where such a clause exists it is part of the order, and complying with it is not optional. That is a much firmer footing than any general expectation.

Where no clause exists, the practice remains widespread. The usual rationale given is that a child who mentions a new adult to the other parent should not be the way that parent learns of it, because the reaction the child then witnesses is the harm. That rationale is plausible and this research found no study testing it.

This research located no research measuring the effect of one parent's repartnering on the quality of the co-parenting relationship. Studies of coresident partner transitions and co-parenting quality exist in the Fragile Families literature; the full text of the relevant article we could not retrieved during this research and its findings are therefore not reported here rather than reported approximately.

What the instability literature does support, indirectly, is the value of not disrupting the child's arrangements. Lee and McLanahan's finding that transitions out of two-parent households carry the stronger association is a finding about disruption. A dispute between parents that destabilises a parenting schedule is a disruption; a conversation in advance that prevents one is not a therapeutic intervention, but it is not nothing either.

None of this means the other parent gets a veto. Telling someone and asking permission are different acts, and outside of what an order requires, the second is not customary.

Romance fraud is a large, government-measured crime, and the FBI describes its typical victim as an older divorced or widowed woman.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 23,159 confidence and romance fraud complaints in 2025, with reported losses of $929,287,469. Victims aged 60 and over accounted for 10,188 of those complaints and $584,032,745 of the losses. The FBI's own description of romance scam victims names divorced women explicitly. Reported figures are a floor, not a total, because most fraud is never reported.

The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded 1,008,597 complaints across all categories and $20.877 billion in reported losses. Within that, the Confidence/Romance Fraud category accounted for 23,159 complaints and $929,287,469 in losses. Losses rose sharply with victim age: $25,097,693 for victims in their twenties, $74,644,395 for those in their forties, $131,385,454 for those in their fifties, and $584,032,745 for victims aged 60 and over. That last group made up 10,188 complaints – fewer than half the total – but nearly two-thirds of the money.

The Federal Trade Commission measures the same crime through a different system and reports different numbers, and the two are not comparable. The FTC's February 2023 Data Spotlight reported that nearly 70,000 people reported a romance scam in 2022 with losses of $1.3 billion and a median individual loss of $4,400, and gave a series of $493 million (2019), $730 million (2020), $1.3 billion (2021) and $1.3 billion (2022). The FTC's own online dating page still cites $547 million for 2021, an earlier figure for the same year – a useful reminder that these totals are revised upward as reports accumulate, and that any single-year number is provisional.

The most recent romance-specific figure the FTC has published is for 2023, in a blog post of 13 February 2024: 64,003 reports, $1.14 billion in reported losses, and a median individual loss of $2,000 – which the FTC describes as the highest reported losses of any form of imposter scam. Note what moved and what did not. Total losses fell against 2022; the median individual loss fell by more than half. That is not obviously good news, and we are not going to pretend to know what it means from two data points.

After that the trail goes cold, and it is worth saying why rather than filling the gap with something that looks like a number. The FTC's Consumer Sentinel Data Book for 2024 does not break romance out at all – it reports the combined imposter-scam category, 845,806 reports and $2.95 billion, which bundles romance together with government, business, tech-support and family impersonation. For 2025 the only romance figure the FTC has published is a partial one: a Data Spotlight of 27 April 2026 puts $298 million in reported losses to romance scams that began on social media, and says nearly 60 percent of people reporting a romance-scam loss in 2025 said it started there. That is a channel, not a total. The same Spotlight carries a footnote that matters more than most footnotes: reports were not collected by the FTC during the 2025 government shutdown, so every 2025 FTC figure is incomplete by an unknown amount.

You will see a $1.16 billion figure for 2025 romance losses in news coverage. It is not from an FTC report. It is a query someone ran against the FTC's public Explore Data tool covering the first nine months of the year, and it inherits the shutdown gap. We are not repeating it as a fact, and neither should anyone else.

On the specific question of whether the recently divorced are documented as vulnerable: the FBI states it directly. Its published account of romance scams describes victims as 'predominantly older widowed or divorced women targeted by criminal groups usually from Nigeria' who are 'for the most part, computer literate and educated' but 'also emotionally vulnerable.' This is an official law enforcement characterisation rather than a study, and it is about who is targeted rather than a measured risk ratio – but it is a direct answer, from a government source, and it names divorced people.

The Federal Trade Commission's Protecting Older Consumers report to Congress of December 2025, covering calendar year 2024, found that older adults were 39 percent more likely to report a loss on a romance scam than younger people once population size is accounted for, and that gift cards were again the most frequently reported payment method among older adults.

How the money leaves matters, because it determines whether it can come back. The FTC found that cryptocurrency and bank wires together accounted for more than 60 percent of reported romance scam losses in 2022, and that 24 percent of people who lost money used gift cards. All three methods are effectively irreversible. A request that money move by one of those routes is not a detail; it is the identifying feature.

Two structural caveats. First, all of these figures count reports, and romance fraud carries unusual shame, so under-reporting is presumed to be severe and the true totals are unknown. Second, the IC3 reports cryptocurrency investment fraud – $7.2 billion in 2025 – as a separate category from confidence and romance fraud, and does not publish a figure for how many of those investment frauds began as a romantic approach. The $929 million figure therefore understates the harm that starts with a relationship.

The FBI has separately warned that romance fraud victims are recruited as money mules, groomed over time and persuaded to open bank accounts used to move criminal proceeds. That converts a victim into a potential defendant, and it is a reason to treat any request to receive and forward money as serious rather than flattering.

The official safety guidance for meeting strangers online is short, specific, and almost entirely about verification and money.

The FBI's published advice is to search the person's photo and profile, go slowly and ask many questions, never send money to anyone you do not know personally, and never share financial details or a Social Security number. It flags three warning signs: a person who is too perfect or who quickly moves you off the dating platform, one who isolates you from friends and family or requests intimate photographs or financial information, and one who promises to meet in person but always has an excuse.

This guidance is professional-body and law-enforcement guidance rather than evidence. This research found no study demonstrating that any of these steps reduces harm. They are graded thin on that basis, and are worth following anyway because the cost of following them is close to zero.

The FBI's protective steps, quoted from its published guidance, are to 'Research the person's photo and profile using online searches', to 'Go slow and ask lots of questions', to 'Never send money to anyone you don't know personally', and, from the IC3 public service announcement, to 'Never provide credit card numbers or bank account information without verifying' identity and to 'Never share your Social Security number or other personally identifiable information.'

The single most diagnostic warning sign is the request to move off the platform. The FBI lists it first, alongside the person seeming 'too perfect'. Dating platforms retain messages, run moderation, and can be subpoenaed. Encrypted messaging apps do none of those things, which is why moving the conversation is usually the first thing a scammer asks for, and often within hours.

The isolation pattern the FBI describes – drawing someone away from friends and family – is worth naming separately for this readership, because a person recently out of a marriage may already be more isolated than usual and may experience intense attention as a relief rather than as a warning.

The safety advice for a physical first meeting is conventional and not, so far as this research could establish, published by a US federal agency in a form we could cite: meeting in a public place, arranging your own transport both ways, and telling someone where you are going and when to expect you. Those are described here as ordinary precautions rather than as sourced guidance, because we could not source them to an official body.

Two of the FBI's specific tips are worth repeating because they are unusually concrete. A reverse image search takes under a minute and defeats a large share of fabricated profiles. And a person who has never appeared on video, after weeks of intense correspondence, has told you something definite.

Most of the dating market belongs to two public companies, and one of them has settled Federal Trade Commission charges over how it sold subscriptions.

Match Group, Inc. owns Tinder, Hinge, Match, Meetic, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Azar, BLK, Pairs and, per its corporate site, HER, The League and Upward. Bumble Inc. owns Bumble, Badoo and BFF. The apps are free to download because the business model is subscriptions: Match Group reported $3.5 billion in revenue and 14.2 million payers in 2025. In August 2025 Match Group agreed to pay $14 million to resolve FTC charges over deceptive guarantee advertising, hard-to-cancel subscriptions, and locking out users who disputed charges.

Ownership first, because it is not obvious from the apps. Match Group's Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2024 names Tinder, Hinge, Match, Meetic, OkCupid, Pairs, Plenty Of Fish, Azar and BLK as its portfolio brands; the company's own corporate site additionally names HER, The League and Upward. Bumble Inc. states it is 'the parent company of Bumble, Badoo and BFF'; it sold Fruitz in July 2025 and discontinued Official. Grindr Inc. is a separate public company listed on the NYSE. eharmony belongs to ParshipMeet Group, alongside Parship, ElitePartner and LOVOO, which sits under ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE. A reader choosing between five apps may be choosing between two or three companies.

The business model explains most of what the apps do. Match Group's 10-K states that 'Many of our brands enable users to establish a profile and review other users' profiles without charge', and that direct revenue is 'primarily derived from users in the form of recurring subscriptions' with subscription 'packages (generally ranging from one week to six months)', plus smaller a la carte revenue and a much smaller advertising component. Free to join, paid to do the things that make it work.

The scale is worth stating because it clarifies the incentive. Match Group reported $3.5 billion in revenue for both 2024 and 2025, with 14.9 million payers in 2024 falling to 14.2 million in 2025. Tinder produced $1.9 billion in direct revenue in 2024 and Hinge $550 million. Bumble Inc. reported $965.7 million of revenue for 2025 and 3.7 million paying users, both down year on year. Grindr Inc. reported $439.9 million of revenue for 2025 and 15 million average monthly active users.

The much-repeated claim that dating apps are designed to keep you single is not something this research can support or refute – no filing states it and no study was found. What the filings do establish is narrower and sufficient: these are subscription businesses whose reported revenue depends on the number of people paying each month, and whose payer counts have been falling. That is a real structural fact about the incentive, and a reader can draw their own conclusion from it without anyone inventing a motive.

The Federal Trade Commission's action against Match Group is the concrete regulatory history. The FTC sued in September 2019. Its allegations included that Match sent advertisements to non-subscribers claiming someone had expressed interest in them when many of those contacts came from accounts the company had already flagged as fraudulent; that between June 2016 and May 2018 consumers purchased 499,691 subscriptions within twenty-four hours of receiving an advertisement touting a fraudulent communication; that in certain months between 2013 and 2016 'more than half of the instant messages and favorites' came from accounts flagged as fraudulent; and, citing the company's internal assessment, that '25 to 30 percent of Match.com members who register each day are using Match.com to attempt to perpetrate scams.' The FTC also alleged the six-month guarantee's conditions were not adequately disclosed, that the cancellation process violated the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act – quoting Match's own employees describing it as 'hard to find, tedious, and confusing' – and that consumers who disputed charges were banned from services they had paid for.

On 12 August 2025 Match Group, Inc. and Match Group, LLC agreed to a stipulated final order resolving those charges: $14 million, and permanent obligations to disclose guarantee terms clearly, stop misrepresenting guarantee conditions, provide a simple cancellation mechanism, and stop retaliating against consumers who file billing disputes. The order names Match.com, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish and The League among the platforms. As is standard for a stipulated order, it resolves the charges without an admission of wrongdoing, and the allegations above are allegations. Match Group is the only online dating company named as an enforcement action on the FTC's own online dating page.

Two things a reader should take from that history. The scam-prevalence figures were the FTC's characterisation of Match's internal data as of the mid-2010s and should not be read as current rates on any platform today. And the conduct that was actually enjoined – guarantee terms, cancellation friction, lockouts after billing disputes – is billing conduct, which is what to watch when signing up.

Whether to say you have children on a dating profile is a matter of custom, and the safety considerations run the other way from the honesty ones.

Saying that you have children, without naming them, showing their faces, or giving details that identify their school or neighborhood, is the common practice. There is no evidence base on whether disclosure improves outcomes. There is a specific and well-founded reason not to post identifiable images of children on a public profile, which is that a dating profile is visible to strangers by design.

Two separate questions get run together here. Whether to mention that you are a parent is a question about honesty and about filtering for compatible people, and it is entirely a matter of custom. Whether to post photographs of your children is a question about their safety and privacy, and it is not.

On the first: the widespread practice is to state that you have children and, often, their approximate ages, without names or images. The stated rationale is that it filters early for people unwilling to date a parent, and avoids a disclosure that lands as a concealment later. This research found no study testing whether disclosure on a profile improves match quality, relationship outcomes, or anything else. It is a custom, and the site should describe it as one.

On the second: a dating profile is designed to be shown to strangers, most of whom the user will never meet or vet. Photographs of children on such a profile are photographs shown to strangers. This is the same reasoning behind the FBI's advice not to share personally identifiable information with people met online, applied to a person who cannot consent. The common practice is to use photographs that do not show children's faces, and to avoid details – a school name, a team, a recognisable street – that would let a stranger locate them.

There is a third consideration specific to readers whose case is not finished. Where a divorce is live, a dating profile is a document. It has a creation date, it may be produced in discovery, and its contents can be put to you. That is a reason to be accurate on it, and a reason not to write anything about a co-parent on it.

Custody documents sometimes speak to this directly. Some parenting plans restrict what either parent may post about the children online. As with notification clauses, a term in an order outranks any general practice.

The research on rebound relationships points the opposite way from the folk wisdom – with caveats that matter a great deal here.

The one dedicated empirical study located found that people who started a new relationship sooner after a breakup reported higher wellbeing, higher self-esteem and more confidence in their desirability, and that people in new relationships had weaker residual feelings for their ex-partners. The associations were small to moderate and correlational. The samples were around 20 years old and mostly students, which is not this site's readership, and the authors themselves say the direction of causation is unresolved.

Brumbaugh and Fraley, 'Too fast, too soon? An empirical investigation into rebound relationships' (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2015), ran two studies. Study 1 was prospective, 77 participants (60 women), mean age 20, assessed about seven months after a breakup, of whom 23 were in new relationships. Study 2 was cross-sectional, 236 participants (125 women), mean age 21.7, comparing 131 single people with 105 in relationships.

Among people who had begun a new relationship, a shorter time spent single was associated with higher wellbeing (meta-analyzed across the two studies, r = -0.28, p < .001), higher self-esteem (r = -0.19, p < .05) and greater dating confidence (r = -0.23, p < .05). Comparing partnered with single people, those in new relationships reported greater confidence in their desirability and weaker residual feelings for their former partner (Study 1 r = -0.43, p < .01; Study 2 r = -0.45, p < .01).

In plain terms: on these measures, faster was associated with better, and the people in new relationships were less hung up on their exes, not more. That is the opposite of the received wisdom that a rebound relationship is a way of avoiding grief that stores it up for later.

The caveats are serious and the authors state most of them. The correlations are small to moderate; an r of 0.28 describes a tendency, not a rule, and says nothing about any individual. The design cannot establish direction – as the authors put it, psychological states 'may have been a cause or impetus to become involved again', so it is entirely possible that people who were already doing better repartnered sooner rather than that repartnering made them better. The rebounding subsample in Study 1 was tiny. Study 2 was cross-sectional and assessed people roughly two years after their breakup. Both samples were majority women, college-aged, and drawn from relationships that were typically short.

That last point is the one this readership should weigh most heavily. A 20-year-old ending an 18-month relationship and a 47-year-old ending a 20-year marriage with children, a house and a support order are not the same phenomenon, and nothing in this study establishes that the finding transfers. This research found no equivalent study of post-divorce repartnering in middle adulthood. The honest position is that the best available evidence contradicts the folk wisdom, and that the best available evidence is not about people like the reader.

What does follow, modestly, is that a reader should stop treating 'this is just a rebound' as a diagnosis. There is no evidence for it as a category, and the little evidence there is runs against it.

Sexually transmitted infections are common, frequently symptomless, and testing is the only way to know.

CDC recorded 1,515,985 chlamydia cases, 543,409 gonorrhoea cases and 190,242 syphilis cases in the United States in 2024, on provisional data. CDC states plainly that 'STIs often have no symptoms, so you may not know you have one.' Someone who has been monogamous for many years has not been tested in many years, and neither has any new partner. Testing before a new sexual relationship, not after a symptom, is the practice CDC's guidance implies.

The national picture, from CDC's Sexually Transmitted Infections Surveillance, 2024, published as provisional as of 14 August 2025: 1,515,985 chlamydia cases, 543,409 gonorrhoea cases, 190,242 total syphilis cases of which 41,496 were primary and secondary. CDC noted that demographic and state-level breakdowns are not published until the 2024 data are final, so this research does not report an age breakdown and makes no claim about rates among older adults – a claim frequently made elsewhere that we could not verify from current CDC data.

The direction of travel has reversed, and most writing on this subject has not caught up. Announcing the 2024 provisional data on 24 September 2025, CDC reported that primary and secondary syphilis – the most infectious stages – declined for the second year running, down 22 percent since 2023; gonorrhoea declined for the third year running, down 10 percent; and chlamydia declined for the second year running, down 8 percent. US rates had risen for most of the preceding decade, and a great deal of dating-safety writing was written during that climb and still describes it. Three consecutive declining years is a real change in the trend. It is not a reason to skip a test: the absolute numbers above are still 1.5 million chlamydia cases in one year, and a falling rate tells you nothing about whether one particular person is infected.

The clinically important point is CDC's own: 'STIs often have no symptoms, so you may not know you have one. But even without symptoms, infections can cause serious health problems and spread to others.' Waiting for a symptom is not a screening strategy.

CDC's testing recommendations relevant to an adult re-entering dating: everyone aged 13 to 64 should be tested at least once for HIV; all sexually active women under 25 should be tested annually for gonorrhoea and chlamydia; and annual gonorrhoea and chlamydia testing is recommended for 'women who have new partners, multiple partners, or a partner who has an STI'. Gay and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men are advised to test annually for syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhoea, and at least annually for HIV. CDC also notes syphilis testing for sexually active adults based on local prevalence, which means the right answer varies by where you live and is a question for a clinician.

The specific situation of a long marriage is worth naming because it defeats intuition. Neither a person's own status nor a new partner's is knowable from history: a partner may have been infected years ago and never had a symptom. That two people are middle-aged, careful and honest with each other does not substitute for a test.

CDC lists three routes to testing: a healthcare provider, FDA-approved at-home self-tests, and self-collection kits mailed to a laboratory. The last two matter for anyone who would otherwise not go, though a positive result on any of them needs a clinician.

Contraception is a separate question that this section does not cover and that a clinician should. So is the fact that a long-married person may not have used barrier protection in decades and may be out of practice with the conversation, which is a real obstacle and not a trivial one.

Keeping finances separate early is a custom without a study behind it – but the reasons it matters more after a divorce are documentable.

This research found no study on financial commingling in new post-divorce relationships. What can be documented is why the stakes are different: a divorced person's finances are often still legally entangled with the marriage, cohabitation can terminate spousal support in some states, and the FBI's and FTC's fraud data show that money moved to a new partner is usually irrecoverable. The practical rule – no shared accounts, no loans, no co-signing, no property in joint names until a relationship is established – is prudence, not evidence.

Say plainly what this is. No peer-reviewed study, government statistic, or professional-body guidance located in this research addresses financial commingling in new relationships after divorce. Everything in this topic is either a legal fact verified elsewhere in this section, a fraud statistic verified elsewhere in this section, or prudence. It is graded as custom on that basis.

The first documentable reason the stakes differ is that a divorced person's finances frequently remain tied to the marriage after the decree. Support obligations run for years. Property transfers, refinancing and retirement-account divisions can take months and sometimes fail. Money that arrives from or leaves toward a new partner during that period lands in the middle of an unfinished settlement.

The second is directly verified above: in Virginia, spousal support terminates where the recipient has been habitually cohabiting with another person in a relationship analogous to a marriage for one year or more. Moving in with someone is a financial act with a statutory consequence in some states, and the parties can have contracted around it in their agreement. That is a reason to read the agreement before combining households, not merely before combining accounts.

The third is the fraud data. The FTC found that cryptocurrency and bank wires accounted for more than 60 percent of reported 2022 romance scam losses and gift cards for 24 percent of the people who lost money – all routes chosen precisely because they cannot be reversed. The FBI's flat rule is 'Never send money to anyone you don't know personally.' The FBI also warns that victims are groomed into opening bank accounts to move criminal proceeds, which turns a financial favor into legal exposure.

A fourth consideration is specific to parents. Where support is calculated on income and resources, and where a court can revisit an order on a change in circumstances, a new partner's money moving through a household can become a discoverable fact. Whether it matters depends on the state and on the order.

The usual practical list – separate accounts, no lending, no co-signing, no adding anyone to a deed or a title, no shared credit – is unremarkable and is not this site's invention. It is worth following. It should not be dressed up as a finding.