Oz Dating

Canadians have taken to online dating with gusto. An unscrupulous countryman has taken advantage of this, developing several niche dating sites charging exorbitant rates for almost non-existant service.

Every now and then there are reports in the media about how scientists have found the secret to true love. It's usually to do with pheremones, or evolutionary psychology.

Here's another similar story, but with a mathematical angle: After studying 1000 couples, Swiss statisticians have come up with a formula that they think will lift a couple's chances of a happy marriage by up to 20 percent.

A beautiful young woman with a brain tumour is now selling dates to men, and then passing the proceeds to charity.

While it certainly is a constructive and inventive way of dealing with such tragic misfortune, it does seem a little ghoulish to me.

Online dating is hugely popular in many countries now. But the nation that has taken to it with the greatest enthusiasm is Canada.

Iceland might be the first country in the world to outlaw its sex industry. It has just passed a law banning strip clubs.

This is interesting, because these changes have come about not as a result of activism from conservatives, but from feminists.

There are some interesting stats about the online dating industry in this article, including a claim that it is now bigger than the porn industry.

Those niche dating sites continue to get more specific, and intriguing. Here's one in which the members search for potential mates according to whether they have British or American accents.

When a married man has an affair with a woman and his marriage falls apart as a result, he's the one who usually pays for the breakup. But here's a case in which that tradition has been upended: Cynthia Shackelford has sued her husband's mistress for wrecking her marriage, and has been awarded ten million dollars.

There has been a lot of media coverage of the growing problem of sex addiction over recent years. But there is similar condition called "love addiction", in which people simply can't stop getting involved in destructive, tumultuous relationships.

An online poll has indicated that Kiwi women are the world's most promiscuous. The reasons for this are manifold, it seems. One view is that it's something to do with New Zealand men being bad at picking up women in bars, meaning that the women have to be more sexually aggressive themselves. Another is that it's because of the rise internet dating.