Matchmaking is now done primarily by algorithms, according to new research from Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. His new study shows that most heterosexual couples today meet online.

Online dating has the potential to create a more diverse pool of potential mates to draw from by removing the structural and environmental barriers entrenched in our communities. How people of color can win at the online dating game. So we have seen how bad racism can be in the online dating sphere. Black women and Asian men get fewer responses and get swiped left the most. While online dating itself isn’t racist, that is, not against any racial group, it has succeeded in illuminating our innate social response to race. Racism is only getting worse and I feel that racism in the dating world is going to worsen, too. CORA: It's 2020, there is way more open-mindedness now than 20 years ago. The connection is what matters the most and showing that interracial relationships are a work of abstract art.

By Alex Shashkevich

Online dating provides users. Asian men in North America are much more likely than men from. Relationships is known as sexual racism. Finding love online. Online dating may have radically. May 14, 2018 OK, first of all, online dating isn’t racist — the book’s data reveals certain racial biases in online attractiveness (measured by likes and response rates), but online dating isn’t at fault for user behavior. Racial attitudes influence online dating in fundamental ways, and learning more about those patterns can help individuals be.

Algorithms, and not friends and family, are now the go-to matchmaker for people looking for love, Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld has found.

Online dating has become the most common way for Americans to find romantic partners. (Image credit: altmodern / Getty Images)

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Rosenfeld found that heterosexual couples are more likely to meet a romantic partner online than through personal contacts and connections. Since 1940, traditional ways of meeting partners – through family, in church and in the neighborhood – have all been in decline, Rosenfeld said.

Rosenfeld, a lead author on the research and a professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences, drew on a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults and found that about 39 percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting their partner online, compared to 22 percent in 2009. Sonia Hausen, a graduate student in sociology, was a co-author of the paper and contributed to the research.

Rosenfeld has studied mating and dating as well as the internet’s effect on society for two decades.

Stanford News Service interviewed Rosenfeld about his research.

What’s the main takeaway from your research on online dating?

Meeting a significant other online has replaced meeting through friends. People trust the new dating technology more and more, and the stigma of meeting online seems to have worn off.

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In 2009, when I last researched how people find their significant others, most people were still using a friend as an intermediary to meet their partners. Back then, if people used online websites, they still turned to friends for help setting up their profile page. Friends also helped screen potential romantic interests.

What were you surprised to find?

I was surprised at how much online dating has displaced the help of friends in meeting a romantic partner. Our previous thinking was that the role of friends in dating would never be displaced. But it seems like online dating is displacing it. That’s an important development in people’s relationship with technology.

What do you believe led to the shift in how people meet their significant other?

There are two core technological innovations that have each elevated online dating. The first innovation was the birth of the graphical World Wide Web around 1995. There had been a trickle of online dating in the old text-based bulletin board systems prior to 1995, but the graphical web put pictures and search at the forefront of the internet. Pictures and search appear to have added a lot to the internet dating experience. The second core innovation is the spectacular rise of the smart phone in the 2010s. The rise of the smart phone took internet dating off the desktop and put it in everyone’s pocket, all the time.

Also, the online dating systems have much larger pools of potential partners compared to the number of people your mother knows, or the number of people your best friend knows. Dating websites have enormous advantages of scale. Even if most of the people in the pool are not to your taste, a larger choice set makes it more likely you can find someone who suits you.

Does your finding indicate that people are increasingly less social?

No. If we spend more time online, it does not mean we are less social.

When it comes to single people looking for romantic partners, the online dating technology is only a good thing, in my view. It seems to me that it’s a basic human need to find someone else to partner with and if technology is helping that, then it’s doing something useful.

The decline of meeting partners through family isn’t a sign that people don’t need their family anymore. It’s just a sign that romantic partnership is taking place later in life.

In addition, in our study we found that the success of a relationship did not depend on whether the people met online or not. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how you met your significant other, the relationship takes a life of its own after the initial meeting.

What does your research reveal about the online world?

I think that internet dating is a modest positive addition to our world. It is generating interaction between people that we otherwise wouldn’t have.

People who have in the past had trouble finding a potential partner benefit the most from the broader choice set provided by the dating apps.

Internet dating has the potential to serve people who were ill-served by family, friends and work. One group of people who was ill-served was the LGBTQ+ community. So the rate of gay couples meeting online is much higher than for heterosexual couples.

You’ve studied dating for over two decades. Why did you decide to research online dating?

The landscape of dating is just one aspect of our lives that is being affected by technology. And I always had a natural interest in how new technology was overturning the way we build our relationships.

I was curious how couples meet and how has it changed over time. But no one has looked too deeply into that question, so I decided to research it myself.

This Valentine’s Day, many single people will be looking for their date online. In fact, this is now one of the most popular ways heterosexual couples meet. Online dating provides users with access to thousands, sometimes millions, of potential partners they are otherwise unlikely to encounter.

It is fascinating to see how online dating — with its expanded dating pools — transforms our dating prospects. Can we broaden our social network to a variety of backgrounds and cultures by accessing thousands of profiles? Or do we limit our choice of partners through targeted searches and strict preference filters?

When photos are readily available for users to evaluate before they decide to chat online or meet offline, who can say that love is blind?

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Before I started my research project about online dating in Canada, I did a micro social experiment with my partner. We created two profiles on a mainstream dating app for heterosexuals: one was a profile for a man that used two of his photos — an Asian man — and the other profile was for an Asian woman and used two of my photos.

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Each profile included a side-face photo and an outdoor portrait wearing sunglasses. One reason we used side-face photos and self-portraits with sunglasses was to avoid the issue of appearance. In online dating, discrimination based on looks deserves a separate article!

On both profiles, we used the same unisex name, “Blake,” who had the same interests and activities — for example, we included “sushi and beer” as favourites.

Every day, each of us indiscriminately liked 50 profiles in our respective dating pool.

Guess what happened?

Asian men rejected

The female Blake got numerous “likes,” “winks” and messages every day, whereas the male Blake got nothing.

Read more: Does being smart and successful lower your chances of getting married?

This reality took an emotional toll on my partner. Even though this was just an experiment and he was not actually looking for a date, it still got him down. He asked to stop this experiment after only a few days.

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Such experiences are not unique to my partner. Later in my research project, I interviewed many Asian men who shared similar stories. One 26-year-old Chinese Canadian man told me in the interview:

“… it makes me angry cause it sort of feels like you’re getting rejected when sometimes like you’re messaging people and then, they unmatch you … or sometimes they don’t respond, or you just keep getting no responses… it feels like a small rejection. So yeah, it feels bad ….”

My partner’s experience in our experiment and my research participants’ lived experiences echoed findings and themes in other studies. A large body of sociological research has found that Asian men live “at the bottom of the dating totem pole.” For example, among young adults, Asian men in North America are much more likely than men from other racial groups (for example, white men, Black men and Latino men) to be single.

Stereotypes: Asian women versus Asian men

Gender differences in romantic relationships are especially pronounced among Asian young adults: Asian men are twice as likely as Asian women to be unpartnered (35 per cent versus 18 per cent).

This gender gap in romantic involvement among Asians is, in part, because Asian men are much less likely than Asian women to be in a romantic or marital relationship with a different-race partner, even though Asian men and women appear to express a similar desire to marry outside of their race.

The gender differences in patterns of romantic involvement and interracial relationship among Asians result from the way Asian women and Asian men are seen differently in our society. Asian women are stereotyped as exotic and gender-traditional. They are therefore “desirable” as potential mates. But stereotypes of Asian men as unmasculine, geeky and “undesirable” abound.

While many people recognize the racism in elite-college admissions, in workplaces or in the criminal justice system, they tend to attribute racial exclusion in the dating market to “personal preferences,” “attraction” or “chemistry.”

However, as sociologist Grace Kao, from Yale University, and her colleagues have pointed out, “gendered racial hierarchies of desirability are as socially constructed as other racial hierarchies.”

Seemingly personal preferences and choices in modern romance are profoundly shaped by larger social forces, such as unflattering stereotypical media depictions of Asians, a history of unequal status relations between western and Asian countries, and the construction of masculinity and femininity in society. Regular exclusion of a particular racial group from having romantic relationships is known as sexual racism.

Finding love online

Online dating may have radically changed how we meet our partners, but it often reproduces old wine in new bottles. Like the offline dating world, gendered racial hierarchies of desirability are also evident in cyberspace and operate to marginalize Asian men in online dating markets.

Research from the United States shows that when stating racial preferences, more than 90 per cent of non-Asian women excluded Asian men. Furthermore, among men, whites receive the most messages, but Asians receive the fewest unsolicited messages from women.

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Exactly because dating apps allow users to access and filter through a large dating pool, easy-to-spot characteristics like race may become even more salient in our search for love. Some people never make the cut just because they are already filtered out due to gendered and racialized stereotypes.

Read more: Tinder profiles around the world: Same, same but different

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A 54-year-old Filipino-Canadian man, who started using online dating almost 20 years ago, shared his experience with me:

“I don’t like online anymore. It doesn’t do you justice …. Most women who I ask to date would be Caucasian and I would get a lot of ‘no responses.’ And if they did, I always asked why. And if they were open to tell me, they say they were not attracted to Asian men. So in a sense, metaphorically, I didn’t get a chance to bat. Because they look at my ethnicity and they say no. In life, I’ll meet Caucasian women. Even if they look at me and I’m not white but because of the way I speak and act, I’m more North American, they think differently later. Not that they would initially say no, but after they knew me, they would reconsider.”

This participant felt he was often excluded before he got a chance to share who he really was.

When asked to compare meeting partners online and offline, a 25-year-old white woman said she prefers meeting people in person because for her, that is where the judgemental walls come down:

“I find more quality in person. I’m in a better mindset. I’m definitely less judgemental when I meet someone offline — because online, the first thing you do is judge. And they’re judging you too — and you know you’re both figuring out whether you want to date. So there are a lot of walls you put up.”

For many online daters, the boundless promise of technology does not break social boundaries. If racial discrimination that prevails in the intimate sphere is left unchallenged, many Asian men will repeatedly encounter sexual racism.