May 5, 2026
Romance stats or dating app fanfic?
What five years of data tells us about lasting relationships
Love stats or total nonsense? Commenters say this dating study got roasted instantly
TLDR: The app says its data shows meat eaters, Android users, and lower-income members stay in relationships longer before returning. Commenters were far more interested in roasting the study’s shaky timeline and arguing it sounds less like love science and more like sugar daddy app marketing.
A dating platform dropped a spicy batch of “relationship insights” from 120,000+ matches and claimed meat eaters last longer, Android users stay coupled up longer than iPhone users, and people with lower income or less education seem to stay away from the app for longer stretches. In plain English: the company is using how long it takes someone to come back as a rough clue for how long their last relationship lasted. That alone was enough to make readers raise an eyebrow.
But the real fireworks were in the comments, where people basically treated the whole thing like a reality show reunion episode. One commenter pounced on the timeline, asking how the company could have five years of data if it was supposedly built “in 14 days” just weeks ago, complete with a link like a receipt in a group chat. Others zoomed in on the app itself, saying this didn’t sound like a normal dating service at all, but more like an invite-only sugar daddy setup dressed up as broad relationship science. That led to the hottest take of all: maybe this isn’t “what lasting relationships look like,” but what happens in one very specific, very wealthy corner of dating.
And then came the pure internet comedy. One reader deadpanned, “I will never get these two minutes back,” which pretty much summed up the mood from the skeptics. The stats may have been dressed in serious language, but the crowd’s verdict was deliciously messy: interesting? maybe. trustworthy? the jury is absolutely not out.
Key Points
- •Hanker says it analyzed internal data on more than 120,000 member relationship cycles from 2021 to 2026 and used time-to-return to the platform as a proxy for relationship duration.
- •The article reports that meat eaters had a median return time of 26.3 months versus 18.7 months for vegans and vegetarians, the largest reported effect size in the dataset.
- •Android users had a median return time of 24.1 months compared with 20.4 months for iOS users, with the article saying the difference was significant and consistent across major markets.
- •Lower-income members and members with lower educational attainment showed longer median return times than higher-income and more highly educated members.
- •The article explicitly states that the study was not peer-reviewed, that correlation is not causation, and that return time is an imperfect proxy for relationship health.