Abstract
Online dating is the fastest growing way of how couples meet. Recent studies find that almost a third of couples met online, and the number is on the rise.
Examining homogamy, i.e., the tendency of partners to resemble each other, has a long-standing tradition in social stratification research. However, studying already-formed unions (e.g., marriage, cohabitation) has its limits for explaining the origins of homogamy as it focuses on the successful outcome of the partner search, not the process itself.
Similarly, research relying on asking respondents about their desired partners may not be aligned with the behavior, as individuals are constrained by various limitations such as the structure of available mates and the mutuality of the interest. Utilizing digital traces from online dating gives us a unique opportunity to study not only the resulting unions but also the process that leads to them.
In this paper, we aim to address whether the tendency for pursuing similar mates (homophily) is visible in the initial contacts on an online dating app. In particular, we are interested in the homophily on desirability, which we measure as a frequency of messages each user receives.
We compare the overall contact distributions (who contacts whom) with the successful (reciprocated) matches and we also compare males and females. We use dataset from a Czech online dating app, selecting users from two major Czech cities, Prague and Brno.
We construct a network for each city, where nodes represents users and ties represent messages expressing interest ("swipes"). We in turn analyze these networks using social network analysis metrics modified for the specificities of our data.
We find that unlike in other contexts, women have the upper hand on the app as they are in the "choosing position" due to the uneven gender ratio on the app and their substantially higher desirability. The results show that the initial contacts are not homogamous but rather aspirational, i.e., individuals are pursuing users who are more desirable than themselves.
We also find that the initial contacts are less homophilous than the reciprocated contacts. These results suggest that in terms of desirability, similarity of partners is due to the subsequent mating processes (e.g., rejection) rather than due to initial preference for similarity.