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. ||||| Mike Kemp / Getty Images 
 
 Everyone knows someone who met their spouse online. A friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in years told me recently that she, too, met her husband on an Internet dating site. They’re happily married, just moved into a new house, and are now talking about starting a family. 
 
 When I asked her if she thought online matchmaking was a better way than offline dating to find guys who were more compatible with her — and, therefore, better husband material — she laughed. “No, because I couldn’t stand him when I first met him,” she says of her husband. She thought he was full of himself and rude during their first encounter. It definitely wasn’t love at first sight, she said — that took a while. 
 
 In other words, according to my friend, Internet dating is just as unpredictable as the non-digital version. You never know how things are going to evolve until they do. But the benefit, she says, is that dating online gives you access to a lot more people than you’d ordinarily ever get to meet — and that’s how she connected with her future husband. 
 
 These observations have been borne out in a new study by social psychologists collaborating across the country. The extensive new study published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest sought to answer some critical questions about online dating, an increasingly popular trend that may now account for 1 out of every 5 new relationships formed: fundamentally, how does online dating differ from traditional, face-to-face encounters? And, importantly, does it lead to more successful romantic relationships? 
 
 (MORE: How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Tweet the Ways) 
 
 For their 64-page report, the authors reviewed more than 400 studies and surveys on the subject, delving into questions such as whether scientific algorithms — including those used by sites like eHarmony, PerfectMatch and Chemistry to match people according to similarities — can really lead to better and more lasting relationships (no); whether the benefits of endless mate choices online have limits (yes); and whether communicating online by trading photos and emails before meeting in person can promote stronger connections (yes, to a certain extent). 
 
 Overall, the study found, Internet dating is a good thing, especially for singles who don’t otherwise have many opportunities to meet people. The industry has been successful, of course — and popular: while only 3% of Americans reported meeting their partners online in 2005, that figure had risen to 22% for heterosexual couples and 6% for same-sex couples by 2007-09. Digital dating is now the second most common way that couples get together, after meeting through friends. But there are certain properties of online dating that actually work against love-seekers, the researchers found, making it no more effective than traditional dating for finding a happy relationship. 
 
 “There is no reason to believe that online dating improves romantic outcomes,” says Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at University of Rochester and one of the study’s co-authors. “It may yet, and someday some service might provide good data to show it can, but there is certainly no evidence to that right now.” 
 
 One downside to Internet dating has to do with one of its defining characteristics: the profile. In the real world, it takes days or even weeks for the mating dance to unfold, as people learn each other’s likes and dislikes and stumble through the awkward but often rewarding process of finding common ground. Online, that process is telescoped and front-loaded, packaged into a neat little digital profile, usually with an equally artificial video attached. 
 
 That leaves a) less mystery and surprise when singles meet face to face. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as profiles can help quickly weed out the obviously inappropriate or incompatible partners (who hasn’t wished for such a skip button on those disastrous real-life blind dates?), but it also means that some of the pleasure of dating, and building a relationship by learning to like a person, is also diluted. 
 
 It also means that b) people may unknowingly skip over potential mates for the wrong reasons. The person you see on paper doesn’t translate neatly to a real, live human being, and there’s no predicting or accounting for the chemistry you might feel with a person whose online profile was the opposite of what you thought you wanted. Offline, that kind of attraction would spark organically. 
 
 The authors of the study note that people are notoriously fickle about what’s important to them about potential dates. Most people cite attractiveness as key to a potential romantic connection when surveying profiles online, but once people meet face to face, it turns out that physical appeal doesn’t lead to more love connections for those who say it is an important factor than for those who say it isn’t. Once potential partners meet, in other words, other characteristics take precedence over the ones they thought were important. 
 
 “You can’t look at a piece of paper and know what it’s like to interact with someone,” says Reis. “Picking a partner is not the same as buying a pair of pants.” 
 
 (MORE: Online Dating Enjoying a Boom Among Boomers) 
 
 Making things harder, many sites now depend on — and heavily market — their supposedly scientific formulas for matching you with your soul mate based on similar characteristics or personality types. It may seem intuitively logical that people who share the same tastes or attitudes would be compatible, but love, in many cases, doesn’t work that way. 
 
 Some online dating sites, for example, attempt to predict attraction based on qualities like whether people prefer scuba diving to shopping, or reading to running, or whether they tend to be shy or more outgoing. But social science studies have found that such a priori predictors aren’t very accurate at all, and that the best prognosticators of how people will get along come from the encounters between them. In other words, it’s hard to tell whether Jim and Sue will be happy together simply by comparing a list of their preferences, perspectives and personality traits before they meet. Stronger predictors of possible romance include the tenor of their conversations, the subject of their discussions, or what they choose to do together. 
 
 “Interaction is a rich and complex process,” says Reis. “A partner is another human being, who has his or her own needs, wishes and priorities, and interacting with them can be a very, very complex process for which going through a list of characteristics isn’t useful.” 
 
 The authors also found that the sheer number of candidates that some sites provide their love-seeking singles — which can range from dozens to hundreds — can actually undermine the process of finding a suitable mate. The fact that candidates are screened via their profiles already sets up a judgmental, “shopping” mentality that can lead people to objectify their potential partners. Physical appearance and other intangible characteristics may certainly be part of the spark that brings two people together, but having to sift through hundreds of profiles may become overwhelming, forcing the looker to start making relationship decisions based on increasingly superficial and ultimately irrelevant criteria. 
 
 And remember, says Reis, “Online dating sites have a vested interest in your failure. If you succeed, the site loses two paying customers.” 
 
 Communicating online before meeting can help counter some of this mate-shopping effect, but it depends on how long people correspond electronically before taking things offline. A few weeks of email and photo exchanging serves to enhance people’s attraction when they finally meet, researchers found, but when the correspondence goes on too long — for six weeks — it skews people’s expectations and ends up lowering their attraction upon meeting. Over time, people start to form inflated or overly particular views about the other person, which leaves them at risk for being disappointed in the end. 
 
 Considering the many pitfalls, what accounts for the enduring popularity — and success — of online dating sites? Part of it may be the fact that singles who use online dating sites are a particularly motivated lot. Their desire to find a spouse and get married may make them more likely to actually find a life partner on the site, or believe that they have. And they’re also probably more likely to believe that the matchmaking algorithms that power so many sites really can find them that person who’s “meant to be.” 
 
 It also offers an attractive solution for an age-old problem for singles — where to meet potential mates. As more people delay marriage, either for financial or professional reasons, and with more people constantly moving around to find better jobs, disrupting their social networks, the easily accessed digital community of like-minded singles becomes a tantalizing draw. 
 
 Still, those who go online looking for love are left navigating a minefield of odds — not unlike dating in the non-digital realm. But at least there’s solace in matches like my friend’s. If there’s one thing online dating does better than any matchmaker or network of friends who are eager to set you up with that “someone who’s perfect for you,” it’s finding you lots and lots of candidates. “Like anything on the Internet, if you use online dating wisely, it can be a great advantage,” says Reis. You just have to accept that not all of your matches will be your Mr. or Ms. Right. 
 
 Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.
– 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.