If you ask an adult—particularly an older one—how they found their significant other, you’re fairly likely to hear about a time-honored ritual: the setup. Somewhere along the line, a mutual connection might have thought: Aren’t X and Y both weirdly into Steely Dan? Or: My two sweetest friends! Or perhaps just: They’re each single. The amateur cupid made the introduction, stepped back, and watched as they fell in love.
If you ask a single 20-something how they’re looking for a partner, you’re fairly likely to hear a weary sigh. The apps, of course. The swiping has been interminable; the chats have been boring, the first dates awkward, and the ghosting—well, it still stings. They might be wondering: Does no one know a marginally interesting, normal-enough person who wants to get to know me?
Once, American couples most commonly met through friends or family; now they’re most likely to meet online. Yet, despite the apps’ popularity, roughly half of users—and more than half of women—say their experience on them has been negative. Many today long for the setup. They imagine an era when couples were tailor-made by the people they cherished; when shared peers would hold creepy or flaky dates accountable; when a new partner would fit seamlessly into their social life.
But there’s one major problem with that vision: Dating people your friends or family know usually means dating people demographically similar to you—and that can lead to an ever more segregated society. “How couples meet ends up being this incredibly primary battlefield to the reinforcement of a distinction of racial, ethnic, and social class groups,” Reuben Thomas, a sociologist at the University of New Mexico, told me. As isolating as apps can be, they are “a huge threat to those boundaries.” They might link you to someone you otherwise never would have met—and allow the two of you to establish your own relationship norms, free from outside judgment. Pair by pair, they could create a more integrated and equitable world.
Recently, Americans have been intrigued by matchmaking. The Netflix shows Indian Matchmaking and Jewish Matchmaking were hits; contemporary matching services are proliferating. But Thomas, who studies social networks and homogeneity, hopes people won’t forget what the practice was historically about in many cultures: ensuring that someone ended up with a racially and economically appropriate partner. “You can think of matchmakers traditionally as agents of maintaining caste boundaries,” he told me. Women, particularly, tended to have little power to challenge decisions made for them by their family or church. One might end up with a man decades older just because of his wealth, Jennifer Lundquist, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist, told me.
Setups are, in a sense, matchmaking’s modern equivalent. They aren’t typically meant to pair people who are demographically suitable, but society is highly segregated. Friend groups that are diverse in one way usually aren’t in others, Thomas told me; think of a racially varied bunch of college friends, all getting degrees. Any two people from the same social bubble will probably be pretty homogeneous. And they might end up pushed together by mutual connections who love the idea of their pals hitting it off.
Studies suggest that couples who meet online, alternatively, are more likely to cut across race, education, and religious boundaries. That’s not to say that romantic relationships—online or off—are totally integrated by any of those measures. When it comes to interracial marriages in the United States, for example, Lundquist told me that “if you were to just sort of put everyone in a bag and randomly assort everyone, the rates of interracial pairings would be three to five times higher than what they actually are.” But such unions are more common than they used to be. When the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage in 1967, interracial couples made up 3 percent of the country’s newlyweds; now they’re up to nearly 20 percent—with spikes not long after the introduction of Match.com in 1995 and Tinder in 2012.
Dating apps still have a major bias problem. In 2014, OkCupid analyzed data from a feature that let people rate potential matches and found that Asian men and Black women and men received lower rankings than any other groups; a 2024 study found that Black Tinder users received fewer likes than white users did. Apps can allow people to efficiently weed out those who are different from them, Lundquist explained. Some, emboldened by the anonymity, use filters to avoid seeing anyone of, say, a certain race. Many have unconscious prejudices shaping whom they swipe right on. Lundquist told me that wading through so many options can lead people to rely on quick judgments—stereotypes, essentially—that they wouldn’t when getting to know someone in person. And research suggests that app algorithms, which aren’t fully public, tend to match users largely based on shared qualities.
But at least on dating apps people have a better chance of encountering others who are different from them. “Very few people have truly diverse networks that really match the kind of diversity you would see” on a dating site like Hinge or Match, Thomas said. Luke Brunning, a lecturer at the University of Leeds, in the U.K., and a leader of the Ethical Dating Online research group, compared it to the integration of physical spaces: You can’t make people from different backgrounds want to hang out, but you can work to remove barriers. “Having people taking the same forms of public transport and using the same parks or the same swimming pools, same public facilities,” he told me, “it’s not going to integrate society overnight. But it will have a kind of gradual positive impact that it definitely wouldn’t have if things were different.” Indeed, a model made by the researchers Josue Ortega and Philipp Hergovich predicted that just exposing people of different races to one another leads to more interracial marriages.
Diversity isn’t just good for society; it can be good for individuals and for couples, too. In plenty of studies, participants mention enjoying the “opening of social possibilities” that the apps bring, Gina Potarca, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool, in the U.K., told me. Some research has suggested that divorce rates are lower among spouses with similar backgrounds. But that idea is contested. And if pairs from different cultures do struggle more, that’s likely in part because society doesn’t always celebrate them, which might not be the case if such relationships were more common, Lundquist pointed out. They’d still probably have more differences to navigate—but people should learn how to do that anyway.
As much as familiarity can be comforting, moving away from it can also be freeing, especially for women. Potarca told me that on the apps, women seem to be “a little bit more assertive with what they look for.” Her research has found that married couples in Germany and Japan who met online divide housework more equitably, on average, than those who met other ways. She thinks this is related to earlier studies that have shown the same among couples who live farther from family. In both cases, it seems, distance from their communities’ expectations lets couples make their own rules.
Dating apps, however potentially disruptive for society, are often alienating for individuals. They leave people to make decisions by themselves, which can be more stressful than empowering. They require people to trust that total strangers will be safe and respectful, and to deal with the ones who aren’t. (Disturbingly, Columbia Journalism Investigations found that more than a third of women surveyed had been sexually assaulted by someone they met on an online dating site; the BBC found that a third had experienced harassment or abuse through a dating app.) They encourage people to choose between other human beings as if playing a game. Users relinquish the support and intimacy of a collective search for love in order to find someone outside their own bubble. But why can’t they have both?
Some people are trying to. Tamar, the daughter of a couple acquainted with my mother, told me that she was on the apps for years without finding a long-term partner. She’d also tried casually asking friends to set her up, but the answer was always the same: Everyone I know is taken or You’re too good for this person. Around her 30th birthday, Tamar (who asked to be identified only by her first name, to speak candidly about her personal life) felt a renewed motivation to meet someone. She’d heard of a friend of a friend writing a mass email asking to be set up, so she decided to devise her own—to old housemates, friends, family, family friends—and encouraged them to “send it near and far. Let’s cast the net quite wide,” she told me. She got a bunch of responses and went on a few dates that didn’t work out, but this time she didn’t feel so discouraged. “This is a person who means something to someone who means something to me,” she remembers thinking. Months later, a family friend reached out to say he knew someone in her city with a matchmaking hobby; that person ended up introducing Tamar to her husband’s friend. Now Tamar and that friend are married.
Her email most likely didn’t reach a particularly diverse pool. Tamar suspects that it went to a lot of highly educated Jewish people, like her; her family recently found a photo of Tamar’s parents dancing in a group with her now-husband at a wedding, neither party knowing the other, taken a year before he and Tamar met. But I wonder if the method is a step in the right direction—a way to throw the stone a little farther while still enlisting loved ones to help. “It was cool to think that there were people all over,” she told me, “wanting me to find my person.” Compared with her experience online dating, “that’s a lot less lonely.”
Some larger-scale attempts to combine range with community exist too. In 2023, Tinder launched an option that lets people’s friends and family browse and recommend profiles without logging into an account themselves. “The feature makes modern dating a team sport,” according to the company’s press release. It also runs into an issue Thomas warned of: Your team might inadvertently keep pulling the same kinds of people from the bench, even if you would have been more open-minded. Other efforts seemed ill-conceived and probably unhelpful. The dating site MySingleFriend lets your friends write your profile—but you’re on your own for whatever comes next. A colleague told me she’d once been added to a Facebook group called “Are We Dating the Same Guy?,” which is exactly what it sounds like. “For the most part it was women posting screenshots of men on dating apps and being like, ‘Anyone know him?’ and then crickets,” she told me. And of course, any vetting of strangers that does happen is done by yet more strangers.
Ultimately, integrating the people close to you into your romantic life might just need to happen after a first date. Perhaps you bring a new prospect to a party early on, or introduce them to your family when the relationship still feels relatively casual. (If anyone doesn’t seem to love your pick yet, remember: They just met the person.) Maybe you make a point to hang out with your new interest’s group, even if you don’t feel like you fit in. After a while, you might get invited to events you never would have before, with people you’ve grown fond of; your friends might get to know their friends too. You’re still part of a larger community—but a new one. And the two of you are building it together.