Dating Across Nativity Lines? Mate Selection Among Immigrant and Native-Born Online Daters in Vancouver

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  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 13. Immigrant Families and Relationships

Abstract

Online dating has profoundly changed the dating landscape, providing users with access to thousands of potential romantic partners whom they would otherwise be unlikely to encounter. The efficiency of online dating may be especially appealing to immigrants. Far from their families and childhood friends, immigrants often face difficulties meeting new people. No research, however, has compared immigrants’ and nonimmigrants’ online dating use or experience. This study aims to provide valuable insight into online dating processes, with a focus on comparing immigrants and native-borns. Considering that the degree to which immigrants establish intimate relationships with native-born people indicates social distance of group boundaries and social assimilation of immigrants, one crucial question arises: Would online dating promote romantic relationships between immigrants and native-borns? Based on in-depth interviews with 60 online daters in Vancouver, Canada, we find that online dating reinforces immigrant-native born boundaries in explicit or implicit ways. Some Individuals, in particular immigrants, have explicit preferences for nativity homogamy and use dating websites or apps that cater to a specific locally based population to look for romantic partners. Others, particularly native-borns, do not rule out the possibilities of dating across nativity lines, but they emphasize mate selection criteria that require cultural capital (such as being “funny,” “witty” or able to hold a good conversation) when screening profiles, exchanging messages, or meeting offline, which in turn implicitly excludes candidates from a different nativity status group. Hence, online dating, instead of promoting dating across nativity lines, seems to reinforce pre-existing group boundaries and social stratifications at the very early stages of mate selection.

Authors

• Yue Qian, University of British Columbia

• Siqi Xiao, University of British Columbia