How Online Dating Is Making US Marriages Stronger and Diversified
Once upon a time we only married people with whom we were in some way already associated in our social circles. But with the advent of online dating, everything has changed. Now people are forging social bonds that didn’t exist before, interracial marriages are on the rise, and married couples who meet online are more likely to stay together.
New research from Cornell University, published in the journal Physics and Society , suggests that the way we meet our soul mates is changing the shape of society itself. Using currently available statistics, researchers Josue Ortega and Philip Hergovich created advanced data modeling to examine how powerful new social connections can be. In the past, people were more likely to find their partners through weak ties, like friends of a friend. Because of this, people’s social networks – like networking theory, not Facebook – were pretty tightly connected. Basically, you will only know people in your social circle who are often of the same race, and new social connections will slowly expand. This means that you will only date and marry people who have already been in your network.
But with online dating, your network is changing dramatically. You meet people who are – more often than not – complete strangers, and you begin to establish social bonds that have never been there before. This leads to the emergence of new social circles that may be outside your cultural or racial background. And when you consider that a third of modern marriages are now online, and online dating is now the second most common way for heterosexual couples to meet (and the most common way for homosexual couples), Ortega and Hergovich suggest racial diversity. our society here in the US is changing as a direct result of digital dating.
Observed rates of interracial marriage in the US have been on the rise for a while, but when researchers compared their model with statistics, they found that rates rose markedly when online dating first became popular in the late 90s. It then jumped again in the 2000s when online dating became more common, and again in 2014 with the launch of Tinder (widely considered the most popular online dating app).
So what does this mean? People of all backgrounds and subcultures are now mixing together more than ever before, and Ortega and Hergovich believe this is good for society as a whole . This promotes better cultural understanding and helps create more diverse and open-minded generations in the future. It should now be noted that their data does not prove that online dating is solely responsible for growth, but it is very consistent with their hypothesis.
Moreover, Ortega and Hergovich’s data model – along with current statistics – suggests that marriages in online dating societies tend to be stronger. Basically, married couples who meet online are less likely to get divorced, which can also benefit society in the long term. It makes sense, right? When you can actually see and communicate with all the fish in the sea, you are more likely to hook on what you really need, not just the one on your reef neck. Online dating has a lot of ups and downs – you know, if you’ve tried it – but as far as society in general is concerned, they seem to be pretty rewarding.