Reuben J. Thomas’s research while affiliated with University of New Mexico and other places

We present data from a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults. For heterosexual couples in the United States, meeting online has become the most popular way couples meet, eclipsing meeting through friends for the first time around 2013. Moreover, among the couples who meet online, the proportion who have met through the mediation of third persons has declined over time. We find that Internet meeting is displacing the roles that family and friends once played in bringing couples together.

As the Internet’s role in creating new couples continues to expand, now accounting for over a third of recently-formed U.S. couples, its impact on endogamy is increasingly consequential. While there are good reasons to expect greater diversity from online romantic sources, there are also good sociological reasons to predict greater assortativity online. Increases in the rates of interracial and interreligious couples within the U.S. have occurred seemingly in tandem with the rise of online dating, but the evidence connecting online romances and couple heterogeneity have been limited and mixed. Using a unique nationally-representative dataset collected in 2009 and 2017 on how U.S. couples met, and controlling for the diversity of their local geographies, I find that couples who met online are more likely to be interracial, interreligious, and of different college degree status, but also more similar in age. Couples who met online are not more nor less likely to cross political boundaries, however, and not more nor less likely to have educationally different mothers. These exogamy differences can vary by where on the Internet couples met. Population-level estimates suggest that only a small part of the recent changes in couple diversity can be directly attributed to couples meeting online, but there is the potential for more Internet-induced change if it continues to expand as the modal source of romance.

How people meet new friends changes throughout life in ways that change the potential for diverse friendships. This study presents results from the first U.S. survey with data on how respondents met their friends, specifically the two nonfamily friends they most often socialize with. The most common sources of new friendships shift across life from the dominance of schooling during youth, to the centrality of work in midlife, to neighbors and voluntary groups in later life. Educational homophily peaks for friendships made in midlife, and is strongest for friendships made in higher education and at work. Racial homophily generally declines as people age but is lowest for men in midlife, while decreasing later for women. Friendship sources largely account for life course changes in racial homophily, but not educational homophily. The racial homophily induced by friendship sources also changes as people age, but in different ways for women and men.

The inheritance of social standing from one generation to the next did not occur for most of the time that humans have lived, but became common only once human societies grew beyond a certain size. This paper offers a theory of how social inheritance may have resulted from this change in size, simply through the accompanying decrease in social network density. This decrease brought about differentiation in social network positions, creating structural advantages and disadvantages in group decision processes. As these processes determined social worth and leadership in societies, social network position became integral to social status and political prestige. And because network position tends to be passed from parent to child, social status came to be passed on, not (at first) through the inheritance of power or property, but through the inheritance of social connections. To illustrate the relationship between structural advantage and network density, we use a mathematical model of social influence in an array of small networks, as well as larger random networks to show how network position becomes increasingly determinant of social status as density decreases and network positions become increasingly differentiated. We use these results to further predict the conditions under which “who you know” matters more than “what you know.”

This article explores how the efficiency of Internet search is changing the way Americans find romantic partners. We use a new data source, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey. Results show that for 60 years, family and grade school have been steadily declining in their influence over the dating market. In the past 15 years, the rise of the Internet has partly displaced not only family and school, but also neighborhood, friends, and the workplace as venues for meeting partners. The Internet increasingly allows Americans to meet and form relationships with perfect strangers, that is, people with whom they had no previous social tie. Individuals who face a thin market for potential partners, such as gays, lesbians, and middle-aged heterosexuals, are especially likely to meet partners online. One result of the increasing importance of the Internet in meeting partners is that adults with Internet access at home are substantially more likely to have partners, even after controlling for other factors. Partnership rate has increased during the Internet era (consistent with Internet efficiency of search) for same-sex couples, but the heterosexual partnership rate has been flat.