Toronto has the second-highest foreign-born population of any major city in the world, behind only Miami — roughly half of city residents were born outside Canada, home to more than 250 ethnicities and upwards of 175 languages, spread across neighbourhoods that still carry their names: Chinatown, Little India, Greektown, Little Jamaica, Corso Italia, Roncesvalles. The BBC named it the most multicultural city on the planet in 2016. The city's own motto is, literally, "Diversity, Our Strength."
None of that guarantees it shows up in who Torontonians actually date. A growing body of academic research on dating apps — not specific to Toronto, but broadly applicable to any city running on the same handful of platforms — suggests that the tools people use to meet each other don't automatically reflect the diversity of the population using them. Understanding why is worth doing honestly, because the mechanism isn't really about any individual's preferences. It's about what the apps are built to optimize for.
What the research actually shows
A 2024 study analyzing racial preference patterns across thousands of Tinder users found that dating apps, while technically expanding the pool of people someone might encounter beyond their existing social circle, still show strong patterns of users filtering toward people similar to themselves — a pattern researchers call racial homogamy, observed consistently across multiple platforms and studies over more than a decade. Cornell researchers who studied this directly proposed a specific explanation worth sitting with: many apps let users filter search results by race or rely on algorithms trained on past swipe behavior, and both mechanisms tend to reinforce whatever pattern already exists rather than interrupt it. As the study's lead author put it, plainly: serendipity is lost when people are able to filter each other out before ever seeing a profile.
This isn't a claim about what any individual should want. It's a claim about architecture — a filter, once it exists, gets used, and an algorithm trained on aggregate swipe behavior will tend to show people more of whatever they've already selected for, whether or not that reflects what any given user would have chosen if the option had never been offered as a filter in the first place. The same research points to something more optimistic underneath the finding: users who received messages from outside their usual pattern were more likely to engage across that line than they would have otherwise. The tools shape the outcome as much as any individual's stated preference does.
Toronto's own geography adds a second layer
The city's ethnic neighbourhoods are, on their own terms, one of Toronto's best qualities — genuinely distinct, genuinely lived-in communities rather than tourist set pieces. But the same clustering that makes those neighbourhoods real also means a lot of organic, day-to-day social contact in Toronto already happens within them, before an app or algorithm ever enters the picture. A dating app's default radius search, layered on top of a city where housing and social life already cluster by neighbourhood as much as by any other factor, doesn't necessarily correct for that. It can just as easily compound it.
None of this is a criticism of anyone's dating life or a suggestion that Toronto is somehow failing to live up to its own motto. It's a reasonably well-documented gap between what a population looks like in aggregate and what any one person's actual dating pool ends up looking like once platform design, neighbourhood geography, and ordinary self-selection are layered on top of each other.
What a structured evening does differently — and what it doesn't
A curated, in-person event works on a fundamentally different mechanic than a swipe-based app, and it's worth being precise about what that difference actually is rather than overstating it. Relish's Toronto evenings aren't built around demographic filters at all — guests aren't sorted or matched by ethnicity, and there's no algorithm learning from past selections to narrow who gets shown to whom next. The room is curated around a handful of criteria that have nothing to do with background: age range, general relationship-readiness, and the kind of person likely to show up and engage in an actual conversation. Within that room, everyone rotates through the same set of introductions — the format itself doesn't allow the pre-filtering that shapes so much of app-based dating before a first conversation ever happens.
That's a genuinely different starting point than an app's collaborative filtering system, and in a city with Toronto's population makeup, it means a single evening is more likely to put someone across the table from a wider cross-section of the room than an algorithm optimized around their own past behavior would have surfaced. It isn't a guarantee of anything, and it doesn't erase the deeper patterns the research describes — a structured evening is one evening, not a redesign of the underlying platforms most people are dating on the rest of the time. What it offers is a night without the filter step at all, in a city where that step, research suggests, is doing more work than most people realize.
Matching still happens with real agency, just after the fact rather than before it: through Relish Select, the platform at events.mycheekydate.com, guests submit private selections at the end of the night, and mutual interest is connected the next day — a choice made after an actual conversation, not a photo and a bio.
What this actually means for Toronto
The city's diversity is real, extensively documented, and genuinely unusual even by the standards of the world's most multicultural cities. Whether that diversity translates into who any individual Torontonian actually meets and dates depends heavily on the tools they're using to meet people, and the research on those tools is fairly consistent: filtering mechanisms tend to reinforce existing patterns rather than interrupt them, regardless of how diverse the underlying population is. A single structured evening won't rewrite that on its own. It can, at minimum, remove the filter for one night — which, in a city with this much genuine diversity sitting one subway ride away, might be worth more than it sounds.
Relish hosts structured social evenings across Toronto, and offers curated matchmaking through Luvo. Find an evening near you →