MIT Study Says Online Dating Sites Create Stronger Marriages

Trending News: This MIT Study Proves That Online Dating Is Changing Society

Long Story Short

A new MIT study reveals that online dating is leading to more interracial relationships and stronger marriages.

Long Story

How did your parents meet? Probably through a friend, right?

Today, that's still the most popular way to meet a partner for heterosexual couples, but the gap is closing. Online dating is spiking as a way to meet a life partner. And for same-sex couples, it's already far and away the most common way to meet.

And we're not talking about hookups here (there are specific hookup sites for that).

Researchers Josue Ortega at the University of Essex in the U.K. and Philipp Hergovich at the University of Vienna in Austria reported that "marriages created in a society with online dating tend to be stronger."

That's right, the couples that met through Tinder tended to be stronger than those who met through friends.

In their MIT study, the researchers also observed another huge impact of expanding your options outside of your friend and friend-of-friend groups. They found that the rise in online dating and a rise in interracial couples is not a coincidence.

“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,” the researchers report.

It makes sense, right? When you're meeting people inside your friend group, chances are the people might be from a similar race or background. But online dating helps you meet people of a different race, culture or ethnicity.

And yes, the researchers made sure to measure if a more multicultural society played a factor.

“The change in the population composition in the U.S. cannot explain the huge increase in intermarriage that we observe,” Ortega and Hergovich said.

A counterpoint to all this is that I'd definitely heard that Tinder can be discriminatory on people of color. Perhaps the MIT research shows that discrimination is not as big of an issue across all dating sites.

So yeah, if you haven't tried online dating yet, what are you waiting for?

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How can they conclude that marriages are stronger with online dating when they've only existed for 22 years max?

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Tinder says it hosts 12 million matches a day.