Have you considered niche dating sites?

By Rob Miller, Social Media Community Manager for InterracialDatingCentral

In 2015, we’re all way past the shock value that the idea of meeting someone online used to provide just a decade and a half ago. Half the couples in our social circles who have coupled up over the past decade have met online. But now we’re headlong into the culture of Online Dating 2.0. We’re way past general online meeting places like Match.com and eHarmony, and we’ve moved online romance into niches and micro-niches to fulfill just about every style of dating and mating one could possibly dream up.

JDate was the first player to venture into the niche dating waters, courting millions of Jewish singles to join and going on to become a mega-successful prototype for other niche dating sites to follow suit. In recent years, JDate has surely inspired other websites like ChristianMingle.com for Christians looking for love;AshleyMadison.com for married men and women seeking extramarital affairs and hookups; MensaMatch for those only seeking partners with high IQs; and BeautifulPeople.com where one shouldn’t even think about joining unless you’re genetically blessed.

One of the most recent niches in online dating are those who have a specific taste for other races. They’ve managed to tune out the voices of their traditional parents and grandparents just enough to venture across color lines in pursuit of love; slowly shifting our cultural paradigm in the process, and now there’s no going back.

Interracial daters know what they like and aren’t afraid to buck the system. This bold interracial dating trend is substantiated by the website InterracialDatingCentral.com’s 1.2 million strong Facebook community where Facebook.com/InterracialDatingCentral members boast about their interracial love lives, post pictures of themselves with their significant other; and singles who post an image to the page with text content flat-out asking to meet singles of a certain race or color.

Online dating, it seems, has turned looking for love into something of a catalog browse or a mail order relationship where you simply check off exactly what lifestyle, religion, values, skin color, etc. your potential mate should have. While it opens up a cornucopia of options for singles, does too much choice and calculated searching actually take away from the previously organic process of meeting and falling in love that stood the test of time for thousands of years? There are valid arguments to be made on both sides of the topic, but the old-school Jewish yenta who has effectively been put out to pasture by JDate might shake her finger at this whole online dating mishegas.

And just how will all of this niche online dating effect the next generation of offspring that will effectively be produced by niche online dating communities? Will we wind up with sub-populations of super gorgeous people; super-duper smart people; people who grow up and are more likely to cheat on a spouse? We already know how the answer to one question plays out… our population of biracial and multiracial children has grown exponentially as the result of singles seeking out interracial relationships. How will our other online niche daters’ contributions play out? It remains to be seen.