Online dating sites are now an established way for modern singles to find love, providing a vast pool of other hopeful romantics from all walks of life, Daily Mail reports.

And despite the fact that nearly all users reported being in favour of inter-race relationships, users of at least one site showed a strong bias toward people of the same ethnicity as themselves when it came to responding to potential matches.

The only exceptions to this trend are black men who tend to favour Latin American women and both Asian and Latin American women, who showed a preference for white men over men of their own ethnicity.

And interestingly it is women who show this preference most strongly, showing more preference for a partner of their own race than men do.
OkCupid CEO and Co-Founder Christian Rudder is quick to point out that this does not mean that the dating sites users are ‘racist’ in the traditional sense of the word. “An individual can’t really control who turns them on. I do think the fact that race is a sexual factor for so many and in such a consistent way, raises deeper questions.”

The only exceptions to this trend are black men who tend to favour Latin American women and both Asian and Latin American women, who showed a preference for white men over men of their own ethnicity.

The results, which come from data collected from over three million OkCupid members, also confirm some age-old stereotypes.
While women search for a partner around their own age, men are in the market for a 21-year-old woman, however old they are.
The data also revealed how ultimately predicable our romantic choices are.

While we may like to believe that how we choose a partner down to the nuances of our personality and the deepest darkest aspects of what makes us unique, the survey shows that in fact our romantic choices can be fairly accurately predicted using some depressingly mundane questions.
Answers to such scintillating questions like ‘do you like scary movies?’ and ‘have you ever travelled alone to another country?’ were the same for over three quarters of the matched couples on OkCupid, suggesting that far from being written in the stars, romantic success is more down to day-to-day compatibility.