DO YOU REMEMBER THE STORY ABOUT THE German who wanted to eat someone, who found an Englishman who wanted to be eaten? How did it make you feel? Disgusted, happy or hungry? For me, it was like a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dreary week of news. The meeting and eating of this crazy couple illustrated two very important truths, one as old as the hills, the other a shiny, new 21st-century truth. The old one is this: there are plenty of fish in the sea. And the new millennial one this: everyone and anyone can now trawl the internet to catch their perfect fish.
Until this century, we all thought people who met via their computers were geeks, oddballs, losers and looners. Looners? People who get turned on by balloons. And you thought you were weird. If you’d told friends in the 1990s that you were “internet dating”, they’d have thought you were indeed weird, or worse, but who doesn’t know someone who dates through their computer nowadays?
Today, there are more than 800 dating sites in the UK alone, and more than one in 10 Brits now use dating websites. People aren’t afraid to admit they e-date anymore, and you certainly can’t hide the e-dating truth at Mysinglefriend. com, where daters get their friends to write their profiles for them. It’s a winning formula – the site has grown by a massive 40% this year and now has 350,000 members.
So how did an activity that was considered the last ditch attempt of losers become so central to the lives of so many? The three principal macro-trends that explain the rise of internet dating are: the internet; shifting life-stage patterns; and what The Economist has called “womenomics”.
Online dating began as an extension of the Lonely Hearts column, the first of which was posted in England by a brave woman called Helen Morrison. In 1727, she ran an advertisement in The Manchester Weekly Journal, which said that she wanted to share her life with someone. There is no record of the number of replies she received, but she did excite the interest of the mayor of Manchester. He had her committed to a lunatic asylum.
And just as placing a Lonely Hearts advert was a brave thing to do in the early 18th century, so it was still considered a brave, desperate, embarrassing and slightly mad thing to do in the late 20th century. But then the social networking revolution came along and everything changed.
People now spend more time hanging out with people through their computers than they do emailing – the thing that brought people onto the net in the first place. In just one month in 2008 Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique visitors. To give that some perspective, that’s the same number of people at one social network in a month as visit the world’s top two favourite holiday spots – France and Spain – in a year.
The popularity of social networking means that online is now an acceptable way to hang out with friends and meet people, and people are more used to putting their profiles up for all to see. From there, it’s just a short step on to online dating – who hasn’t clicked on a Facebook friend’s page and checked them out? George Collings, former trend analyst at The Future Laboratory, says: “Social networking means that using the internet to meet people isn’t seen as sad anymore – it’s about having fun and meeting like-minded people.”
Collings also notes that people are becoming busier, leading to a “convenience culture” that delivers things in easy-to-digest chunks that require less commitment. Internet dating site Lovestruck.com has 40,000 unique visitors each month, and its founder, Brett Harding, says its success is thanks in part to this desire for convenience. “You know within three minutes of meeting if you like someone, so why take up more of your precious time? Our users don’t want to sacrifice their social time, so they meet people through us over lunch or coffee so it doesn’t interrupt their calendar.”
Once upon a time, the calendar that was most important to people was the life-stage calendar – the mental yardstick that told them if their life was on track. Most people knew when they wanted to have reached certain life-stage goals, such as getting married and having children, but that calendar is now less important than their social and activity diary. Life now is no longer about life-stage, but lifestyle, resulting in a huge growth in the number of singles in society.
People are staying single longer, they’re marrying later, and they’re often getting divorced. The average marrying age, according to UN figures, was 27 up until the 1990s. Now it’s 29. And since people are marrying later, they’re looking for Mr or Mrs Right when they’re less likely to be in the bars and clubs, where many people have found love in the past. And when you’re too old for that sort of socialising, the number of new people you meet is cut drastically – unless you’re online.
The third social shift that has helped fuel the rise in online dating has been dubbed by The Economist as “womenomics” – the movement of economic, workplace and social power from men to women. Here’s an example of a womenomics statistic: in 1974 there was a one in 50 chance that your line manager would be female. Now there’s a one in three chance that your boss is a woman. With more money and power, women now want to take charge of their lives. They want out of relationships that don’t work and they want to control who they meet. Going online takes that control back.
Sociology professor Janet Lever at California State University thinks that internet dating is having as big an impact for women as the Pill did in the 1960s. “The internet,” she explains, “is levelling the playing field.” Men have traditionally been the ones to ask women out but, online, Lever has found that women are far more likely to initiate dates. Women are flocking to dating sites, and as Charlie Morgan of Mysinglefriend. com, says: “where women go, men follow”.
So where next for internet dating? “Worldwide, internet dating is worth £600m (€736m) now,” says Lovestruck.com’s Harding. “But by 2011, it’ll be worth £1bn (€1.2bn).” And that will increase further, as future generations grow up with technology and don’t see any difference between meeting people on or off line. For them, social networking and internet dating are seen as natural extensions to meeting friends in a bar or at a party, rather than as a replacement.
Now the next big dating step is the move from computers to mobile phones. Just as the iPhone, Google’s Android and BlackBerry Storm are changing the way we think about the mobile internet, so they will alter the way that online dating is carried out. When Lovestruck.com launches its mobile application this summer, for example, it will tell you which people in the room have signed up and are single. So you’ll never have to waste time chatting up the wrong person again – simply check their profile and you’ll know before even saying hello if they want to eat – or be eaten.
Written for Velocity Magazine. See the original article here.
