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Evidence That Online Dating Is Changing Society
- Danihan 9y agoSo... am I missing something, or is the only evidence they cite a thin correlation between increased online dating and increasing rates of interracial marriage?
- macinjosh 9y agoNope, thats it. Nothing to see here.
- mirimir 9y agoLiterally. It won't let me read with Firefox in incognito mode. Bloody idiots.
- recursive 9y ago"We noticed you're browsing in private or incognito mode.". Huh... how can they detect that?
- hexane360 9y agoMaybe not being able to store cookies?
- recursive 9y agoAFAIK, Incognito modes do generally store cookies up to the point where you close your browser window.
- thatcat 9y agoYou're right, I checked the differences between ff and ff incognito on panopticlick.com and both have cookies enabled. I think it's the blocking of trackers/invisible trackers that the website is picking up on.
- mschuster91 9y agoSubtle differences in IndexedDB handling, for one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31159316/detecting-preventing-firefox-indexeddb-invalidstateerror-caused-by-private-brows https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31159316/detecting-preve...
- mikestew 9y agoBeing kind of curious, I fired up Safari's "private window", and it worked fine. I don't have FF on this box, but I do repro with Chrome. The detection is in article.js, and a quick glance indicates they're checking if the cookies get disabled. It would seem that Safari does that differently than FF or Chrome, and pass the test.
- slaymaker1907 9y agoIt seems to work if you disable JavaScript.
- trendia 9y agoOn mobile, I was able to read it in incognito by using Reader mode (which disables all page CSS and Javascript.) This probably works on desktop too.
- mirimir 9y agoThanks, that worked :) I usually try that with paywalls, but this was a different enough block that I didn't think of it.
- chubot 9y agoYeah I was baffled by this article. It feels like it was more a simulation than science (observation, measurement, etc.)? 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. The original paper is probably better, but this explains almost nothing to me.
- ScottBurson 9y agoSimulations can certainly be a way of doing science. Of course you have to ask how realistic the simulation is, but that's true of any model -- you always have to be aware of your simplifying assumptions.
- DonaldFisk 9y agoThe original paper was easy to find: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.10478.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.10478.pdf
- jiggunjer 9y agoThis is why I read the comments first. skips article
- in_cahoots 9y agoI found this article to be a good way to hone my bullshit detector. It’s a reputable source, I’m sure many people would read it and pass the conclusions on to friends without thinking too deeply. Part of the appeal of HN to me is that I can read something, form an opinion, and get immediate feedback as to what others think. I would miss that if I read the comments first.
- ithilglin909 9y agoYep. Also, online dating lets users filter potential partners to a much greater extent than they realistically can irl. Seem like this might actually narrow the socioeconomic spectrum that they date within...
- wolco 9y agoMost dating is location based with more demand on the female side guys so guys are more likely to have less filters and accept everyone. But the true cause is changes to views around the issue and increased globalization.
- smsm42 9y agoIt looks like the article commits classical "post hoc ergo propter hoc" error - if interracial marriage became more common at the same time as online dating became more common, it must be that the latter caused the former. Obviously, it could also be that people became more accepting of interracial marriages because of reasons having nothing to do with online dating - but the article does not admit such possibilities.
- ScottBurson 9y agoMy wife and I met online in 1992. Not on a dating site; we were both posting to a Usenet group, alt.psychology.personality. She had posted that she was trying to figure out whether she was a Five or a Six in the Enneagram system of personality analysis. My first words to her, in a private email, were "Well, do you have a bigger problem with depression or paranoia?" Ha! How's that for a smooth come-on line?? :-)
- jacobush 9y agoSo which one are you - depression or paranoia? ;-)
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoYou know what they say about crazy...
- dogruck 9y agoReminds me of this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0217krj http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0217krj
- hi5eyes 9y agoany site with a text field is a dating site
- Retra 9y agoThat's not true for obvious reasons.
- Waterluvian 9y agoYou uh... want to tell me why not over coffee later?
- HalcyonicStorm 9y agoI'd love to :D
- online-ignorer 9y agoOnline dating is all about looks first and nothing else! You better look halfway decent or your going to hate Tinder and etc. If your a minority I bet it’s not a lot of fun either!
- a2tech 9y agoI met my wife online. The first time I ever saw her was when I drove 3 hours to meet her. She is black and I’m not. Prior to dating online I would have probably not dated a black girl, but because of the internet I had the best thing that ever happened to me. So...I totally relate to the article.
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y agoLikewise, the first time I saw my wife was when she showed up on my doorstep after about 6 weeks of online messages 15+ years ago. Fell in love at first sight! She's white and I'm not; although so were most of the girls I met online, so I guess that didn't change much on my end. I wanted to meet her because of the words she used and how she expressed herself made her irresistible. That she turned out to be gorgeous in person was just icing on the cake
- listic 9y agoOnline dating is not just Tinder, but also questionary-heavy sites like OkCupid. "Substance, not just selfies" is their current slogan.
- jstewartmobile 9y agoThe questions are just lagniappe. Try OkCupid with the "nice boy" pic for a while, then switch to one with visible abs, then let us know if you still believe their slogan. edit: p.s. if you're online dating and don't have abs, get some.
- infruset 9y agoI wonder how culture specific this is. I once read a fascinating article about the differences in taste between Quebec and French women, where the former preferred muscular men while the latter preferred thinner ones. The theory was that in France, not being muscular is perceived as a sign of belonging to a higher social class whereas having strong arms betrays that you do a physical, low-paid job; whereas in North America, going to the gym seems to be a practice which transcends social class. EDIT: where as --> whereas
- jstewartmobile 9y agoThis is an interesting train that was derailed into the boring track of race. I'd be more interested in what the long-term genetic effects of matching up fairly similar people across larger and larger divides (distance, social circles, habits, professions, etc.) might be.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- neolefty 9y agoIs there evidence that we're gravitating towards "fairly similar people"? The article points to evidence that online dating is increasing the diversity of couples.
- jstewartmobile 9y agoI'm speaking more in terms of traits, and working off of the assumption that like attracts like. Skin color is just a drop in the sea of traits.
- matt4077 9y agoNo, there's the opposite. People seek out with an immune system as different as possible from their own. How? They smell differently. (Pheromones etc.). At least that's what I remember from ten years ago or so. Not sure if the science held up.
- xupybd 9y agoHmm... this article points to a lot of good outcomes but I don't see any data to back up the claims. They also say the marriages are stronger, but don't indicate the metrics they're using? I hope their conclusions are correct but doubt the methods used to come to those conclusions.
- heyheyhey 9y agoHardest reality with online dating is realizing the competition (at least for a 30 year old like myself). When I was in high school, I'm only competing with like 2 or 3 guys for 1 girl. In college, that increases to probably like 5-10. With online dating? Feels like 50-100.
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoThat could be true in absolute terms, but my impression is that most of your competition can't manage much more than "hey, you're cute" come-ons or worse, so to stand out you just need not be a shallow jerk (apologies to people who are looking for shallow jerks, I'm sure they need love too). I met my last three partners online, over a spread over more than a decade, and that general pattern hasn't changed, talking to them about the people they rejected.
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y agoThis single fact is one of the most important aspects of online dating. Many years ago, a woman responded to my message with a reply that included the phrase "at least you don't sound desperate." I had no idea what that meant, so when we met I asked her and she showed me the many messages she received from other men. It was appalling to say the least. The messages were so awful and pathetic it was hard for me to understand how low their self-esteem had to be. Message after message made it clear that these guys felt they were out of options and were desperately messaging anyone in the hopes of a lucky positive reply. What woman they thought would find this attractive, I have no idea! Suddenly the success I was having in online dating became clear. Just being pleasant and positive was putting me head and shoulders above what I would be reluctant to call competition. tl/dr: Guys, just be nice, polite, friendly and have a positive spin to your dating messages/emails etc. That alone puts you in the top 1%.
- actuallyalys 9y agoTo add another anecdote to yours, as a woman dating online, the vast majority of the messages I've received from men are "hey you're cute" or worse. The messages I've received from women are much more likely to be better, but there are much fewer of them.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoOnline dating has diluted the decision making requirements of dating. Rather than getting to know someone, over time, dating websites allow us to flip through massive numbers of people. With this impression that there are massive numbers of people to choose from, it tricks us into believing we can be more selective, and dismissive of attributes. These websites, IMO, have the negative affect of giving us "too much" choice, and so people never settle or make choices, or take chances.
- Analemma_ 9y agoIt'd be nice to have a citation for any of this. Do you know for a fact that people who do online dating actually have these problems at a greater rate than people who find their dates in meatspace?
- Overtonwindow 9y agoWell, for one: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/why-bad-looks-good/201705/online-too-many-dating-choices-decreases-commitment https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/why-bad-looks-good/2017... This has been well studied. A quick Google search yields scientific articles and studies. For two, http://theinformation.ischool.uw.edu/wp/2015/02/endless-love-the-illusion-of-unlimited-choice-in-online-dating/ http://theinformation.ischool.uw.edu/wp/2015/02/endless-love... And many others.
- gozur88 9y agoThey don't give us too much choice. They give us the illusion of more choice. If everybody has more people to choose from, it increases the probability the people you find interesting won't be interested in you.
- csomar 9y agoI disagree. Online dating empowers those at the top tier. By a lot.
- dmschulman 9y ago
- abalone 9y agoIt's still just a correlation, and there's a problem with the article: Of course, there are other factors that could contribute to the increase in interracial marriage.... [But] “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. Except there are more than two possible explanations for this correlation. For example, attitudes towards interracial marriage may have changed in the past couple decades. Therefore this is faulty logic (on the part of the author who wrote this summary, who is different from the researchers). The study makes a good case for online dating playing a role, but it falls short of establishing it as "the main driver."
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago> attitudes towards interracial marriage may have changed in the past couple decades That's an understatement. According to Gallup polls, Americans approving of interracial marriage were a minority until the mid '90s, and the last poll in 2013 showed 87% approval [1]. [1] http://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-w...
- geoffreyhale 9y ago“Our model also predicts that marriages created in a society with online dating tend to be stronger,”
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ak_yo 9y agoThe figure in this article* is taken (without citation) from a 2012 article by sociologists Michael Rosenfeld and Reuben Thomas. (open-access preprint: https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_How_Couples_Meet_Working_Paper.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_How_Couples_Mee...) * Edit: The paper on ArXiv cites R&T properly, it's the MIT Tech Review piece that doesn't.
- drcross 9y agoThis ignores the far bigger reaching impact of online dating, that which includes some uncomfortable gender dynamics for hetrosexuals; The top percentage of men get the lions share of the dating options and presumably more frequent sex with no reason to commit to the ladies in question while lower tier men suffer disillusionment from their lack of options. The OK Cupid blog page is a filled with these sorts of nuggets, such as women rate 80% of guys as worse-looking than the medium: https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...
- ohyes 9y ago>The top percentage of men get the lions share of the dating options and presumably more frequent sex with no reason to commit to the ladies in question while lower tier men suffer disillusionment from their lack of options. This tacitly implies that women are sex objects and that men only seek them out as such. I find that offensive, but more so than that, sad. You'd also have to prove that online dating has 'caused' this effect, and what you've posted is a complete lack of evidence, at best. It could simply be that many women have better career options and don't have to settle for early marriage to whichever man in a bid for financial security and social acceptance, or changing attitudes towards more casual sexual encounters, or a number of other things.
- merpnderp 9y agoAs somewhat more intelligent primates you can rest assured that sex is a primary male driver in seeking the attention of women, if not the only reason. Let’s not ignore a million years of biological inperative and assume a few hundred years of civilization has changed us.
- vacri 9y agoThis is a pop-science view of biological and psychological drivers. The reality is more complex than "everything is a thin veneer over 'let's fuck'" "Let's fuck" is vital for continuation of a species, but it not the only reason why species might show a behaviour.
- baristaGeek 9y agoAccording to the article Tinder has 50 million users. Is 50 a million a significant sample considering that the world has 6 billion people?
- k_sh 9y agoA sizable chunk of that 6B are people that don't live in a society that is structured for online dating (undeveloped region, arranged marriages, etc)
- astura 9y ago>“Our model also predicts that marriages created in a society with online dating tend to be stronger,” they say. From everything I understand the data says just the opposite, that couples who met online are more likely to break up. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/01/online-dating-marriages_n_5909212.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/01/online-dating-marr...
- lloyd-christmas 9y agoThe article you link addresses 'couples'. This post addresses the specific subset of 'marriage'.
- astura 9y agoNo, it addresses married couples too. >8 percent of [married] online couples were separated or divorced over the course of the survey, compared to 2 percent of the couples who met offline. It's interesting because the paper says people who meet on-line are less likely to get married in the first place, so it really paints a picture of how volatile these relationships actually are.
- modzu 9y agough: "To continue reading this article, please exit incognito mode or log in... Visitors are allowed 3 free articles per month (without a subscription), and private browsing prevents us from counting how many stories you've read. We hope you understand, and consider subscribing for unlimited online access." So like, I can just clear my browser cache to reset the counter, but you're going to nag me about closing my browser to read this one? Come on MIT
- harshaw 9y agoI am 42 and got married (for the second time) a couple of months ago. After getting a divorce I worked my butt off on okCupid to meet my wife. I made it a full time gig and I am happy with the results. Besides finding a great life parter, one of the most surprising results is what is hinted at but not really discussed in the article. She brought a completely new social circle into my life. Although we are the same age (Roughly) and have lived in Boston for the last 20 years, the Venn diagram of our circle of friends didn't overlap. My perception is that my social life is much more interesting at this point because of this, rather than my College friends, many of whom married their college parters.
- pjdemers 9y agoIt's going to change everything about the future, because it's going to change everyone who lives in the future. In a few generations, everyone will have ancestors who met through online dating, and therefore would not exist without it.
- StillBored 9y agoHmmmm. The graphs are interesting, particularly the bar/restaurant line which seems to have been fairly flat until the online line flattened out, and then it had a big rise. I wonder if that is because more people are actually meeting in bars, or because people are using social media of some sort and "meeting" in a bar/restaurant for the first time and putting that in the survey instead of "online".
- Mz 9y agoI think they are missing an important detail. Online dating doesn't simply connect you to "new" people. It connects you to them privately. It is a setting in which you and you alone need to judge this person and how suitable they are as a partner for you. I grew up in the Deep South. * I attended public school. I had non-white classmates. I knew guys who were Black or Hispanic who were interested in me. But, I had no path forward. In a racist environment, just talking to someone of color in a flirty way will get significant social push back. You have to be willing and able to stand your ground in order to pursue the relationship at all. People don't want to deal with something like that at the curiosity stage. Its very existence helps kill relationships before they can begin. It is just too much drama and makes it too hard to navigate the relationship. Online dating lets you talk to people without all that. It lets you say "Hi!" and flirt without deciding five minutes after you met them that standing down the entire world is a thing you are up for. No one in their right mind is up for that just to have coffee. You commit to that at the marriage stage, not at the making eyes at each other stage. If you have to make that decision before you can even chat them up, 99 percent of the time the decision will be to not chat them up to begin with. Edit: I will add that the privacy angle is likely a large factor in why online dating has been so popular for starting homosexual relationships. * A long time ago. Hopefully, it's better now.
- ams6110 9y ago> just talking to someone of color in a flirty way will get significant social push back. This will be true in almost any public school anywhere.
- briga 9y agoNot really. I don't know where you live but this isn't true in Canada.
- ShabbosGoy 9y agoAs a counterpoint to your low effort dismissal, "yes really". As a man of color, I could not talk to white girls at the primarily white public schools I attended without significant social pushback. Even today, in 2017, I still have to watch my back if I'm seen walking with a white woman. And I live in one of the most liberal states in the US. Just because it never happened to you, or you never witnessed it personally, doesn't mean it can't happen. This response seriously disappointed me. Not only did you not provide data or citations of any kind, your tone comes off as morally superior/holier-than-thou. So I'll give some back to you, Canada sure seems like a swell place to live if it contains people like you.
- justonepost 9y agoI am really curious about that bump in the 80's.
- jamiethompson 9y agoHave you seen Halt & Catch Fire?
- ransom1538 9y agoA fun math question (interview?): let's say you want to meet someone and you are in a bar in SF. What are the odds? 1) The population of sf 800,000. 2) Ok, but 1/2 the population isn't into you. (male vs female). 400,000 3) Ok, but people under 20 and people over 30 you aren't interested in. A 10 (ten) year span of average age of 70. But hey we are friends here so lets do 1/5. We are down to 80,000. 4) Ok, but how many people in that time frame are not in a relationship. %10 (pulled from my facebook). Ok, that is down now to 8,000. 5) Ok, but you are into people that are physically fit. That removes %50. You are down to 4,000. 6) Crap. You like college educated people that have a job. Now you are at another %50 loss. 2,000. 7) Ok, but you are in a bar. What percent do not go into bars? %50 loss. 1,000. 8) But you are in a bar @ saturday at 8pm. People go out let's average 1 time a week (thur,fri,sat). That is another %66 loss. Down to 330. 9) You are in a particular bar. There are ~600 bars in sf., with only 330 people in SF that meet your criteria. They will not be wearing a sign. 10) So, there you are, buying $8 beer #4, standing in a bar hoping to meet someone - that statistically isn't there. => Online wins.
- azernik 9y agoCliff?
- kfk 9y agoFor some. For me I go to a hiking or cooking event and I get 1-2 potential dates. There is a lot of noise on Tinder and similar, lots of people with interests too different from mine and lots of people that go there to just waste time. I realized the best way to find a partner was to do things I enjoyed with other people (meetup works well for this), I found my girlfriend 3-4 months after that "strategy" change. => Bayes theorem wins
- cableshaft 9y agoI went through a Meetup phase (still an organizer of one) and went to a ton of meetups, met a lot of women, dated a few...but still ended up in a long term relationship with someone I met on an online dating site. Oops. I still say going to those meetups made me much more comfortable talking to and getting to know women better, which probably allowed the relationship to progress to the point it has today (almost two and a half years now).
- Abishek_Muthian 9y agoWhen we launched FindDate (https://finddate.co https://finddate.co) - a chat app network dating platform, I chose to keep it interracial by default; even though geo fencing is just a click away. Some felt it might not work. I firmly believe that, We cannot address racism, by hiding races. We need to give a chance to the people to mingle with people of different races to show that they are equal. We cannot address body shaming, by hiding people of different body sizes. This was our base principle in FindDate and from the feedback we're receiving; it looks like people are loving it.
- slackingoff2017 9y agoDevil's advocate here, but how are skin color and body size any different from eye color or height preference? The only way to do it truly fairly is to disallow any physical characteristics. By only blocking some you just change the criteria/groups who are discriminated against. But who would use a dating site where you have no idea what the other person looks like? Better to use statistics to level the playing field by, for example, showing people with less % likes more often. This is pretty much how affirmative action works. Give people biased against by other humans more opportunity to make up for it. Lot easier than trying to fix the bias in the humans. If you think you can make humans ignore their sexual preferences by hiding certain identifiers you're a lot more optimistic about humanity than I am. I expect the most popular openers on the site to be "r u fat?" for men and "r u at least 5' 10"?" for women. Isn't it just better if those people never talk to each other in the first place at that point?
- Abishek_Muthian 9y agoGood question. Scientifically speaking, yes the same melanin pigment which causes skin coloration does cause the skin colouration in eye; but my context is more on social aspect of it. People with particular eye colour aren't oppressed as much as people of particular skin color. By grouping users by location often denies them a chance to see and mingle with people of other races and that's what we would like to avoid with FindDate.
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- epx 9y agoI found my wife in an online chat about 10 years ago. We would never ever meet if the technology wasn't there. And it was quite easy to stand out - according to her, I was the only guy that didn't say something in the line "nice shoes, wanna fuck?". And yes, I was looking for low-level contact with the opposite sex; but also open to a higher-level relationship if it worked out.
- wallace_f 9y agoThe article concludes that online dating is good for society because it increases the rate of interracial marriage. Isn't online dating changing more than just the rate of interracial marriage? I suppose complex subjects can be easily simplified by looking at only one of the effects, but it doesn't help us to understand whether it is good or bad, it only gives an indication. Dynamite, heroin, chemical weapons, fossil fuels, and refrigeration have all been argued to be good for society due to some single inherent positive effect. They all have negative effects that were unforeseen. If we want to know what the effect would be, we would need to conduct scientific experiments and see the results.
- King-Aaron 9y agoI don't think any woman I've met so far in life has damaged my self-esteem quite to the extent that services like Tinder have.
- xor1 9y agoCount yourself lucky for not having run into someone with a Cluster-B personality disorder yet.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gumby 9y agoSurprised the article referred to the value of weak ties without explicitly mentioning Granovetter‘s seminal paper, The Strength of Weak Ties (which applies to much more than dating): http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/225469 http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/225469
- gumby 9y agoThe funny thing about social circles: I met my gf online a few years ago; after we connected I realized that I knew her PhD advisor (she studied outside California) and that a fellow student of my advisor whom I knew (I also studied outside California but in a different city from her) lived next door to her and knew her well. And we have both lived and worked in Palo Alto for the last 15+ years. Yet despite those pretty tight connections our social circles are essentially completely disjoint.
- hokuspokus99 9y agoOnline dating is also a reason why, especially in the Bay Area, we see so many Asian Female White Male couples. (There are 2x as many AFWM as AMWF. Anyone who lives in the Bay Area has seen this pairing disproportionately.) Asian females who have mostly Asian social circles, but who have racial inferiority complexes, are now able to satisfy their insecurities via Tinder by dating or having casual sex with white men. Yes, not all AMWF couples are based on creepy racial dynamics, but too many are.
- Dowwie 9y agoTechnologyReview is reporting plausible but non-peer reviewed research because being first to report is more important than reporting truth. Their "Emerging Technology from the Arxiv" needs a lightbox disclaimer warning that the contents are unverified. A lot of people here are taking the time to read, reflect, and comment on this material as if it were true.
- gerbilly 9y agoI don't get online dating. Just meet people in real life and leave it up to chance, you know like it has always been since the dawn of our species... Can you imagine a shakespeare play 500 years from now where one of the major characters is an algorithm? Geez.
- known 9y agoDo not marry unless he/she clears fMRI http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150127212158.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150127212158.ht...
- peter303 9y agoCorrection: online dating srted in the 1980s with usenet and dialup bboards.
- nunez 9y agoThat was more a byproduct of Usenet than an actual goal of it. It didn't really start until Yahoo! Personals in the mid-1990s.
- nunez 9y agoOnline dating is a godsend. It eliminates so much of the bullshit you deal with by meeting a stranger through "common ties" (as the authors of this article put it) or in a social environment like a bar or outing. You can literally find someone that you'll highly likely be compatible with by answering a ton of questions and searching for exactly what you want. My fiancee and I met on OkCupid, and we are proud to tell people that we met on there and how. I've been dating online for many years before I met her, and I can tell that the stigma associated with it has gone down a lot since then. I wouldn't say that online dating completely eliminates the race problem, however. While it definitely makes it easier for people of different races to come together by dint of not having to rely on social circles to make connections, there are plenty of people that have their racial preferences set in stone. I've come across plenty of women whose profiles said that they were only interested in x (where x was usually someone white). I suppose that it's really hard for someone who's grown up in a homogeneous environment to try something else all of a sudden. This became a lot clearer for me after we moved down to a Dallas suburb from NYC, where damn nearly everyone is white and the racial divide is really, really clear. I'm almost always the only person of color in the events I participate in with my fiancee (she is white) and I'm one of very, very few in our church (she picked it out). This doesn't bother me very much, and no-one has given me shit for looking different (except one dude who thought I was Mexican for some reason), but I do wonder how someone in an environment like this would go about getting romantically involved with someone non-white.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]