Marriages are on the Web

A way to get acquainted with his future wife, who chose Thomas Henley, deserves attention primarily to anthropologists, sociologists and those who study the oddities of human nature. It gives a modest, but model of one of the most incomprehensible marriage customs of the late XX century.

Robert Shekeli. Knight in gray flannel

When in 1957, Robert Shekeli wrote his story “Knight in a gray flannel”, he foresaw that the method of acquaintance of people would inevitably change, but could not imagine exactly how. Meanwhile, in 1995, the first website of the online dating of Match.com appeared, and after a decade of such sites there were already several hundred. They significantly expanded the circle of communication and united people from many countries, which could not but affect the picture of the marriage world, in particular, the number of interracial marriages. This is intuitively understandable, but science requires evidence.

There are many sociological studies devoted to the impact of acquaintances online on the quantity and quality of prisoners of unions, but these studies only systematize the available data. Two young scientists, a teacher at Essex University (Great Britain) Josue Ortega and a graduate student of the University of Vienna, Philip Hergovich, developed a mathematical model that allows you to predict the features of marriages concluded in different ways of dating.

According to the researchers, they were led by economic interest: they refer to statistical studies, according to which interracial couples (with the exception of those that include African American) have a total income more than spouses belonging to the same race. For example, the Belo -Asian couple has an income of 14.4% higher than purely Asian, and 18.3% higher than that of the White four.

Traditionally, people choose a spouse among those with whom they personally met. As a rule, these are friends of friends, familiar families, classmates, classmates, colleagues, neighbors, parishioners of the same church. “Knight in the gray flanel” Thomas Henley met his future wife in the brisons arranged by his aunt. But in the past twenty years, the situation has changed dramatically. A third of marriages are concluded by people who met on the Web. Among the Americans (we always know everything about Americans), this method of acquaintance is occupied by the second most common place for heterosexual couples, and for the same -sex generally out of competition (Fig. 1). These two methods, traditional and online, are considering the model.

The model represents a community consisting of several races (from two to five), in each equal number of representatives distributed randomly; Men and women are equally, and they want to marry. With people of their race, they communicate with the probability of P, with representatives of another race - with the probability of Q.

The analysis showed that in the case when a person can marry only a girl from the inner circle, and the one he met personally, the number of interracial marriages will grow over time, although quite slowly. If friends of friends and their friends are included in the circle of potential partners, as it happens with online dating, the share of interracial marriages increases rapidly. After all, it is enough to get acquainted with one representative of another race, as all his acquaintances immediately fall into the circle of possible communication. Theoretically, in the presence of five growing interracial marriages, it can grow to one.

The second assumption that the researchers made on the basis of their model lies in the fact that marriages based on online dating are stronger than traditional ones.

Scientists checked both hypotheses by comparing theoretical calculations with the statistics of interracial marriages in the United States since 1967 (the abolition of prohibition of interracial marriages) until 2015. According to this statistics, the frequency of marriages between representatives of white, black, spanning, Asian and Indian population or descendants of mixed marriages increased from 3% in 1967 to 17% in 2015 (Fig. 2).

The growth rate increased in 1995, when creating the first dating site Match.com, then in 2004, when other sites and online dating appeared, became popular. In the early 2000s, the share of interracial marriages increased from 10.68% to 15.54%-by as much as 50%. A huge leap! The latter acceleration occurred in 2012, after creating the Tinder dating site. This platform has about 50 million users and more than 12 million meetings daily. Researchers have no doubt that an increase in the number of online ones affected the number of interracial marriages.

Another explanation of this phenomenon can be proposed: over the past 20 years, the share of white people in the United States has decreased from 83.1% to 72.4%, which should affect the frequency of interracial unions. However, these changes do not explain the size of the observed jump.

The authors of the model also refer to the data of a survey of 19 131 of an American conducted in 2005-2012, according to which marriages, concluded after online ones, less often break up and satisfy partners than unions, concluded with a traditional acquaintance. The term, however, is small - only eight years.

So, empirical data confirmed theoretical forecasts: dating on the network led to an increase in the share of interracial marriages; Unions concluded as a result of such acquaintances break up less often.

The authors of the model note that it has many restrictions: in particular, each character has only two variable characteristics and it does not take into account the romantic aspects of the problem, for example, love. “All mistakes are ours,” the researchers write. Calculations can be complicated, but it is precisely in the simplicity of the model that its strength lies, which allows you to make such correct forecasts.

The model can be used to study connections between different groups of cluster society, for example, to study interfaith marriages or marriages of people with different social (economic, educational) status or partners of different nationality. And in general, interactions between different public groups arise not only on marital grounds.

Natalia Reznik

1. Ortega J., Hergovic pH. The Strength of Absent Ties: Social Integration Via Online Dating // Arxiv: 1709.10478V1 [Physics.soc-ph] 29 Sep.