Online dating: The races differ

With a plethora of interracial dating sites on the Web and a black president in office, one might think that we're living in a post-racial era. But, apparently, that's not the case.

According to a new University of California-Berkeley study of 1 million online daters, cyberspace is just as segregated as the real world. When it comes to dating online, whites prefer whites, research reveals. More than 80 percent of whites - even the 48 percent of males and 28 percent of females who said they were indifferent to race - sent messages to whites, and just 3 percent contacted blacks.

Researchers won't disclose which major dating site they used to compare the racial preferences and online activity of more than 1 million singles. But we do know that they found significant differences between blacks and whites. Young black men are the most likely to cross racial lines when looking for love online, and blacks, including women, were 10 times as likely to contact a white person as whites were to contact blacks.

Some people don't date outside of their race simply because they don't come into contact with people of other races in their communities, where churches, grocery stores, and housing are still quite segregated.

"There's no segregation online, which makes this data so interesting," says Gerald Mendelsohn, a UC Berkeley psychologist and lead author of the study, which analyzed online subscribers in 2009 and 2010. "Online dating is about courtship and attraction. Segregation is a physical matter but it's also a state of mind."

Mendelsohn says there are three possible reasons for the discrepancy between attitudes about interracial coupling and the actual behavior of online daters.

"It might be appearance management," he says. "They think it makes them look better to say that they're open to another race. Also, saying you're open to another race is only stage one of the dating process. Stage two is actually taking the step. Another possibility that can't be discounted is that people are just hypocritical."

Certainly, it's a touchy subject. Just talking about race can make people uncomfortable.

"I don't think I've ever dated someone outside of my race," says Stephanie of Fremont, Calif., who is white and works in retail. She asked that her last name be withheld. "I think I'm just attracted to white guys. It's what I know."

That's not the case for Lynne Herendeen, an operations manager living in Pleasanton, Calif. She has a thing for black guys. "I love the darker skin tone," says Herendeen, 31. "I feel like it makes their features pop, their eyes sparkle, and their smiles more beautiful."

When searching for matches on OKCupid.com, Herendeen specified tall, nonsmoking, African American men. That's how she met her boyfriend, Rick Kamfolt, a Santa Clara, Calif., lab analyst. The two have been dating for four months.

"It adds a certain spice to the relationship," Kamfolt, 29, says of dating outside his race. "It's something different, so you're always learning and growing."

Rob Thompson hears those stories a lot as the cofounder of two Nevada-based interracial dating websites, Afroromance.com and Interracialdatingcentral.com. Thompson, who is white and Australian, met his wife, who is black and Kenyan, online.

"I think people are becoming aware of more dating opportunities outside of their race," says Thompson, whose sites have 1.1 million users combined.

A major objective of the study was to gauge how changing attitudes about interracial marriage and an increase in dating opportunities have played out in relationships between blacks and whites. In the last 40 years, the approval rating of black-white intermarriage has gone from 3-1 opposed to 3-1 in favor, Mendelsohn says. But the study found that attitudes and behavior don't match.