text: Not so long ago, nobody met a partner online. Then, in the 1990s, came the first dating websites. 
   
   Match.com went live in 1995. A new wave of dating websites, such as OKCupid, emerged in the early 2000s. And the 2012 arrival of Tinder changed dating even further. Today, more than one-third of marriages start online. 
   
   Clearly, these sites have had a huge impact on dating behavior. But now the first evidence is emerging that their effect is much more profound. 
   
   The way people meet their partners has changed dramatically in recent years 
   
   For more than 50 years, researchers have studied the nature of the networks that link people to each other. These social networks turn out to have a peculiar property. 
   
   One obvious type of network links each node with its nearest neighbors, in a pattern like a chess board or chicken wire. Another obvious kind of network links nodes at random. But real social networks are not like either of these. Instead, people are strongly connected to a relatively small group of neighbors and loosely connected to much more distant people. 
   
   These loose connections turn out to be extremely important. “Those weak ties serve as bridges between our group of close friends and other clustered groups, allowing us to connect to the global community,” say Josue Ortega at the University of Essex in the U.K. and Philipp Hergovich at the University of Vienna in Austria. 
   
   Loose ties have traditionally played a key role in meeting partners. While most people were unlikely to date one of their best friends, they were highly likely to date people who were linked with their group of friends; a friend of a friend, for example. In the language of network theory, dating partners were embedded in each other’s networks. 
   
   Indeed, this has long been reflected in surveys of the way people meet their partners: through mutual friends, in bars, at work, in educational institutions, at church, through their families, and so on. 
   
   Online dating has changed that. Today, online dating is the second most common way for heterosexual couples to meet. For homosexual couples, it is far and away the most popular. 
   
   That has significant implications. “People who meet online tend to be complete strangers,” say Ortega and Hergovich. And when people meet in this way, it sets up social links that were previously nonexistent. 
   
   The question that Ortega and Hergovich investigate is how this changes the racial diversity of society. “Understanding the evolution of interracial marriage is an important problem, for intermarriage is widely considered a measure of social distance in our societies,” they say. 
   
   The researchers start by simulating what happens when extra links are introduced into a social network. Their network consists of men and women from different races who are randomly distributed. In this model, everyone wants to marry a person of the opposite sex but can only marry someone with whom a connection exists. This leads to a society with a relatively low level of interracial marriage. 
   
   But if the researchers add random links between people from different ethnic groups, the level of interracial marriage changes dramatically. “Our model predicts nearly complete racial integration upon the emergence of online dating, even if the number of partners that individuals meet from newly formed ties is small,” say Ortega and Hergovich. 
   
   And there is another surprising effect. The team measure the strength of marriages by measuring the average distance between partners before and after the introduction of online dating. “Our model also predicts that marriages created in a society with online dating tend to be stronger,” they say. 
   
   Next, the researchers compare the results of their models to the observed rates of interracial marriage in the U.S. This has been on the increase for some time, but the rates are still low, not least because interracial marriage was banned in some parts of the country until 1967. 
   
   But the rate of increase changed at about the time that online dating become popular. “It is intriguing that shortly after the introduction of the first dating websites in 1995, like Match.com, the percentage of new marriages created by interracial couples increased rapidly,” say the researchers. 
   
   The increase became steeper in the 2000s, when online dating became even more popular. Then, in 2014, the proportion of interracial marriages jumped again. “It is interesting that this increase occurs shortly after the creation of Tinder, considered the most popular online dating app,” they say. 
   
   Tinder has some 50 million users and produces more than 12 million matches a day. 
   
   Of course, this data doesn’t prove that online dating caused the rise in interracial marriages. But it is consistent with the hypothesis that it does. 
   
   Meanwhile, research into the strength of marriage has found some evidence that married couples who meet online have lower rates of marital breakup than those who meet traditionally. That has the potential to significantly benefit society. And it’s exactly what Ortega and Hergovich’s model predicts. 
   
   Of course, there are other factors that could contribute to the increase in interracial marriage. One is that the trend is the result of a reduction in the percentage of Americans who are white. If marriages were random, this should increase the number of interracial marriages, but not by the observed amount. “The change in the population composition in the U.S. cannot explain the huge increase in intermarriage that we observe,” say Ortega and Hergovich. 
   
   That leaves online dating as the main driver of this change. And if that’s the case, the model implies that this change is ongoing. 
   
   That’s a profound revelation. These changes are set to continue, and to benefit society as result. 
   
   Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1709.10478 : The Strength of Absent Ties: Social Integration via Online Dating ||||| Digital match-making services have done more than just change how we find our perfect squeeze; they're changing the fundamental nature of our social networks. 
   
   According to a pair of researchers investigating online dating, the way we're looking for love (and lust) is connecting communities in completely novel ways, breaking down boundaries and possibly even making for stronger long-term relationships. 
   
   It wasn't all that long ago that most relationships would begin with a smile and a handshake, rather than a click or a swipe. 
   
   That began to change in the mid-1990s, when websites like Match.com merged traditional lonely-heart classifieds with the convenience of the internet. 
   
   Today there's a wide variety of sites and apps to suit your tastes, lifestyle, sexuality, and budget, from Tinder and Bumble for a quick swipe to like, to OKCupid and eHarmony for those who want their wit to show with their words. 
   
   Any stigma over online dating has slowly evaporated over the years. 15 percent of Americans admit to having used online dating, and 5 percent of those who are married or committed long-term relationships stating they met their spouse online. 
   
   Not only has digital technology made dating easier for romantic hopefuls, the data collected by such sites has been a boon for researchers curious about human mating habits. 
   
   But it's clear that the digital revolution hasn't only been shaped by the human appetite for sex and companionship; it's changed the way we form relationships. 
   
   Economists Josue Ortega from the University of Essex and Philipp Hergovich from the University of Vienna wanted to know just how the rise of digital match-making has affected the nature of society. 
   
   Society can be modelled as a web of interlinked nodes, where individuals are the node and the link describes how well they know one another. 
   
   Most people are tightly connected with about a hundred nodes, including close friends and family, and loosely connected with others. 
   
   We can trace pathways through relationships to all come to Kevin Bacon – or nearly any other figure on the planet – in surprisingly few steps. 
   
   "Those weak ties serve as bridges between our group of close friends and other clustered groups, allowing us to connect to the global community," Ortega and Hergovich told MIT Technology Review. 
   
   Even just a few decades ago most new connections were just a jump or two away inside an existing network. A bar, a sporting team, church, or college would typically provide the perfect environment for those first hot sparks. 
   
   Not any more. 
   
   For heterosexual couples, online dating has risen to second place – just below 'met through friends' – as the context for that first introduction. Among homosexual couples, digital match-making has skyrocketed. 
   
   Josue Ortega/University of Essex, Philipp Hergovich/University of Vienna 
   
   And the knock-on effect is profound. 
   
   "People who meet online tend to be complete strangers," say the researchers. 
   
   As far as networks go, this is like building new highways between towns, rather than taking the local backroads. Just a few random new paths between different node villages can completely change how a network functions. 
   
   Take interracial relationships, for example, long held to be a measure of the general social distances within a population. 
   
   Once illegal in many states, and long taboo, marriage between different ethnic groups in the US has slowly been on the rise since the mid-20th century. 
   
   The increase steepened at the turn of the 21st century in line with the rise in online dating, and then even further as swipe-to-match apps like Tinder went mainstream around 2014 (it launched in late 2012). 
   
   While there are almost certainly a variety of influences, the network changes resulting from online dating fits the observations perfectly. 
   
   "Our model predicts nearly complete racial integration upon the emergence of online dating, even if the number of partners that individuals meet from newly formed ties is small," say Ortega and Hergovich. 
   
   Marriages online were also predicted by the model to be more robust and less likely to end in divorce, a hypothesis which is supported by a study conducted in 2013. 
   
   The study is currently available online on the pre-publish website arxiv.com, so it has not completed its full peer-review process just yet. 
   
   It can often seem as if the online world reinforces our echo chambers and leads us to become more insular, especially when it comes to social media. 
   
   It's nice to have some evidence that the relationships we make online are also breaking down boundaries and making for stronger connections.
target: – Rates of interracial marriage are increasing—and you might have online dating to thank, according to a new study. The MIT Technology Review calls the results of the study a "profound revelation" and signs of an improving society. Researchers Josue Ortega and Philipp Hergovich found online dating has completely upended how society is formed. People have strong links to family and friends and weak links to a bunch of other people they're connected to through those strong links. Traditionally, it was those weak links that provided a romantic partner—think a friend's coworker or something. Then Match.com and other dating sites arrived in the mid-90s. Online dating is now the most common way homosexual couples meet and second most common way heterosexual couples meet, and 15% of Americans say they've tried online dating, according to Science Alert. Suddenly, people were forming strong links with complete strangers, ignoring those weak links altogether. Hergovich and Ortega developed a model to see how the rise of online dating affected interracial marriage. A lot, it turns out. “Our model predicts nearly complete racial integration upon the emergence of online dating," the researchers tell the Technology Review. And data from the real world supports their hypothesis. While the rate of interracial marriage has been increasing for decades, the rate notably jumped in the mid-90s, again in the 2000s when online dating got more popular, and once again in 2014 when Tinder took over the dating world. Hergovich and Ortega's model—and real-life data—also shows online dating is making marriages stronger.