Online dating services have become one of the primary venues in which people meet romantic and sexual partners, and the analysis of online dating patterns can shed light on mating behavior, preferences, and mate search, and has potential implications for the large-scale structure of society, persistence of income inequality, spread of sexually transmitted infections, and more. This talk will describe a large-scale quantitative study of a major US online dating service using methods of network science.
Networks are constructed based on the patterns of who sends messages to whom using the service, and the network structure reveals many facets of dating patterns, including age structure, and effects of geography, ethnicity, attractiveness, and the ratio of available men to women.