In order to find out more about finding love online, Bored Panda spoke to Jessie, who started the viral twitter thread “How it started/How it ended” by posting a snap of the first tweets between herself and her partner Julia, which led to their beautiful love story. Jessie’s tweet caused a stir on Twitter with 466K likes, 41.2K retweets, and 16.3K quote tweets.

Jessie told us that both she and Julia had fan accounts for Pitch Perfect and she had seen Julia's tweets before and found her now-partner super funny. “My ‘hand wave’ was as smooth as I could be because I really wanted to be her friend,” the woman said.

Six months later, the couple met in person when Jessie flew to meet Julia across the world. “And right now, we're waiting for her to receive her visa so she can come live with me in the US,” she said in excitement.

Jessie suggested that everyone try their luck at finding love online because “it’s so easy to connect with people with similar mindsets and interests and I think the internet can be an amazing place for meeting your soulmate.” And we can’t agree more!

There’s never an easy way to find your other half you’d like to spend the rest of your life with (or at least, a part of it). But with the recent surge in the use of digital technology, more and more people are meeting their partners online instead of in school, at work, or through friends and family.

A recent study by sociologists Michael Rosenfeld and Sonia Hausen of Stanford University showed that between 1995 to 2017, meeting through friends saw the largest decline, from 33% of couples at the start of the period to just 20% at the end.

Moreover, the study revealed that 39% of heterosexual couples and 60% of same-sex couples in the US that ended up dating had first met online. The results showed that online dating has fortunately lost its initial stigma and has recently become by far the most common way that Americans find their partners.

Recently, Pew Research Center reported another interesting factor in online dating. The "How Couples Meet and Stay Together 2017" survey data found that couples who meet online are, in fact, more likely to be diverse in choosing a partner who is different from them in race or ethnicity, education, political party, or income. 

Three-in-ten of those who say they met their partner online report that their partner is a different race or ethnicity, compared with 19% of those who met their partner offline. Moreover, those who met their partner online are also somewhat more likely to say that they and their partner do not identify with the same political party (46% vs. 40%).

And finally, people who met their other half online are more likely than those who met offline to identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (13% of those who met their partner online identify as LGBT, in comparison to 4% who met them offline.)