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. 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). Josue Ortega/University of Essex, Philipp Hergovich/University of Vienna 
 
 And the knock-on effect is profound. 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. “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. 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. 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. “People who meet online tend to be complete strangers,” say Ortega and Hergovich. “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. 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. “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.
– 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.