Email Sh’reen Morrison had been on an online dating site for only a few weeks before she realized that something was seriously wrong with the man who had been actively pursuing her by text message and email. They’d hit it off right away, and he said he lived just outside of Phoenix, which seemed relatively proximate to a woman in remote Yuma, Ariz.

But meeting in person was always a problem. First, he was traveling through India with his daughter. Then the daughter became ill and had to be hospitalized.

With more and more people relying on online dating to meet a partner, the act of online dating also gets studied more and more. Here are 11 revelations from recent studies.

Everything else is these days. I remember when tragedies brought even political opponents together in what seemed potentially like a learning moment about our shared humanity being larger than the differences of opinions, beliefs and ideas that divide us. Nor did it when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others were shot in a Tuscon, Arizona supermarket parking lot in January during a routine gathering of citizens meeting their congressional representative. One of the six people who died in that shooting was a nine year old girl who was born on September 11, President Obama referred to her several times in his speech at the Together We Thrive: Tucson and America memorial on January 12, White House staffers conferred with religious advisers about biblical passages the president might use in the speech to speak to a nation jarred to the core.

But at the core there was still — at that point in our relatively recent history — the need to connect worldly events with spiritual aspirations. Obama decided to quote from the Book of Job and Psalm And he did so to acknowledge and grieve the occasion when six people were killed and Rep. In his remarks after the tragedy in January , Obama remarked that people were seeking to make sense out of the senseless by debating issues like gun safety laws and the breakdown of the mental health treatment system.

This is good to remember as we go through tragedy after mind-numbing tragedy, and political discourse is growing more unkind, uncharitable, accusatory, harsh, intolerant, divisive, and scornful of religion.