I read dozens of studies about love, how people connect and why they do or don’t stay together.

I quizzed the crowds at my stand-up comedy shows about their own love lives.

This kind of rigor goes into a lot of my decisionmaking.

Whether it’s where I’m eating, where I’m traveling or, God forbid, something I’m buying, like a lot of people in my generation—those in their 20s and 30s—I feel compelled to do a ton of research to make sure I’m getting every option and then making the best choice.

I am perpetually indecisive about even the most mundane things, and I couldn’t imagine navigating such a huge life decision so quickly. Happily so—and probably more so than most people I know who had nonarranged marriages.

The first girl, he said, was “a little too tall,” and the second girl was “a little too short.” Then he met my mom. Let’s look at how I do things, maybe with a slightly less important decision, like the time I had to pick where to eat dinner in Seattle when I was on tour last year.

These were women whom Ok Cupid had selected as potential matches for him based on his profile and the site’s algorithm.

The question nagged at me—not least because of my own experiences watching promising relationships peter out over text message—so I set out on a mission.After looking the page over for a minute or so, Derek said, “Well, she looks O. I’m just gonna keep looking for a while.” I asked what was wrong, and he replied, “She likes the Red Sox.” I was completely shocked. Imagine the Derek of 20 years ago, finding out that this beautiful, charming woman was a real possibility for a date.If she were at a bar and smiled at him, Derek of 1993 would have melted.People even let me into the private world of their phones to read their romantic texts aloud onstage.I learned of the phenomenon of “good enough” marriage, a term social anthropologists use to describe marriages that were less about finding the perfect match than a suitable candidate whom the family approved of for the couple to embark on adulthood And along with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, co-author of my new book, I conducted focus groups with hundreds of people across the country and around the world, grilling participants on the most intimate details of how they look for love and why they’ve had trouble finding it.Watching him comb through those profiles, it became clear that online, every bozo could now be a stud.But dealing with this new digital romantic world can be a lot of work.It’s not just my ­generation—boomers are as likely as college kids to give online dating a whirl.Almost a quarter of online daters find a spouse or long-term partner that way. It provides you with a seemingly endless supply of people who are single and looking to date.Before online dating, this would have been a fruitless quest, but now, at any time of the day, no matter where you are, you are just a few screens away from sending a message to your very specific dream man. Throughout all our interviews—and in research on the subject—this is a consistent finding: in online dating, women get a ton more attention than men.Even a guy at the highest end of attractiveness barely receives the number of messages almost all women get.Toby Mac, Switchfoot, Crowder, Lauren Daigle, Matthew West, Danny Gokey, Natalie Grant, Sidewalk Prophets and Unspoken have just been announced as the final group of performers for this year's K-LOVE Fan… I asked my dad about this experience, and here’s how he described it: he told his parents he was ready to get married, so his family arranged meetings with three neighboring families. That’s how my dad decided on the person with whom he was going to spend the rest of his life.Medium height, thinning brown hair, nicely dressed and personable, but not immediately magnetic or charming.If he walked into a bar, you’d probably go, “Oh, there’s a white guy.” At our focus group on online dating in Manhattan, Derek got on Ok Cupid and let us watch as he went through his options.