Oz Dating

After seeing that PlentyofFish commercial I caught the tail end of another ad for a big international dating site. This one was for Zoosk.

There are several of these all running now. These internationally based sites are clearly muscling in on the Australian market. But there must still be money to be made. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing this.

The saturation point must be fast approaching, though. It will be interesting to see when it does occur!

Locally run dating sites have been running television ads for quite a while now in Australia. I think RSVP might have been the first to do it. Aussie Matchmaker and Adult Matchmaker have done so for years, too. And Oasis Active has been visible on the box lately.

Of the big international sites moving into the Aussie market, I think Lavalife has been at it the longest. And eHarmony has been going for a while, with a lot of ad exposure in recent months.

Then earlier today I saw a television advertisement for POF (Plenty of Fish). That was surprising because it is still basically a free site (although you can pay for an upgraded service that gives you even more options and visibility).

The fact that they've decided to run very expensive TV ads here confirms that POF -- like the big paid dating sites mentioned above -- is doing very well indeed in this country. To use their own metaphor the Australia dating pool is clearly a long from being overfished and there are clearly still many thousands of members yet to be hooked!

It's now very common for researchers (both professional and amateur) to use dating sites as a way to make generalizations about wider behavioural trends. The results of one study, for example, implied that opposites don't find each other quite as attractive as that well known saying suggests. Another one, on the other hand, seemed to confirm some national stereotypes that many would say were false.

And here's another one, which has to be one of the more bizarrely specific dating site surveys of its kind. The results show "a direct correlation between the value of the car a man drives and the length of a date, including the probability of a second date".

Well, it's hardly surprising. It's pretty well established that women do find men with social standing and material possessions more attractive. Still, the survey's focus does seem to be very narrow, even considering the nature of the dating site itself.

It's been obvious for a while that dating scams are on the rise in Australia, and that because of their comparative lack of experience with the internet, older people are more at risk of being fleeced.

A recent study conducted by the Australian Institute of Criminology and other institutions revelaed the extent of the problem.

The most vulnerable were older Australians, who despite using the internet less accounted for four out of 10 victims, the study said.

But people seeking love on the web suffered the most.

Here's yet another case of someone being defrauded of a large amount of money (in this case one hundred grand) by someone she met on a dating site. She was a 55 year old woman from Perth.

These online scams are now a huge problem in Australia. And it seems that dating sites are the primary method by which people are fleeced:

"Romance fraud is number one," Det Supt Hay said. "We have 10,000 Australians sending $10 million every month to Nigeria and Ghana and 70 per cent of those are romance fraud."

Here's yet another example of a dating site being used as a tool for psychological research. This time researches used one to find out if members were mostly attracted to others in their own "league" of desirability, or not. The Berkeley researchers drew this conclusion from their study of 3000 members: "Individuals on the dating market will assess their own self-worth and select partners whose social desirability approximately equals their own."

Maybe their results do measure people's genuine attraction to others. But they might also just show that they are just being more realistic in their choices of who they might want to be with. Either way, they show how powerful social conditioning and environmental factors are in dating and courting behaviour.

We now live in a world that is simply awash with digital technology. Among many other things it enables us to make contact with people almost anywhere, anytime. Online dating sites are a popular example of this. And they all seem to have sprung up in the last ten years or so.

But the actual concept of using a computer to meet a potential partner actually goes back half a century. As this article states:

The first-ever computer matchmaking system was designed by New York accountant Lewis Altfest and his friend Robert Ross. The two were inspired by the Parker Pen Pavilion they came across at New York's World Fair in 1964, where a giant computer selected pen pals for anyone who wanted one. All they had to do was "fill out a questionnaire, feed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match," according to The New Yorker. Sound familiar?

That well worn phrase "everything old is new again" seems to have been confirmed ... yet again.

There's been plenty of media talk about Australia's man drought, and how it has affected people's dating behaviour. This demographic imbalance is most pronounced in the cities on Australia's eastern seaboard, which cumulatively have the vast majority of the nation's population. But in Western Australia the problem is reversed. The state has too many men.

It's unfortunate. But the fact that the eastern states suffer the man drought and the west has a lack of women suggests a neat solution: a mass exodus of women to Perth!

You always know that a reported social phenomenon is widespread if businesses related to it start to pop up. That's been the case in Australia recently in relation to online dating fraud.

This article states that internet romance scams "have increased tenfold". It mentions an affordable identity checking service called DateScreen that is now available in Australia. This joins other sites which are tailored to the US market such as Date Detectives.

And these are not general identity checking services. They cater specifically to people using online dating sites. That proves just how widespread the problem now is.

Australian researchers seem to have just disproved a long held assumption about men and their testosterone levels. In the past, it was widely thought that these levels dropped inexorably with age, leading to an inevitable lowering of the sex drive. But the latest findings suggest this only happens in men whose general health is getting worse.

The fact that this lowering of the libido is so widespread implies something about society. There must be a lot of older blokes out there whose health is declining for various reasons. Of course men are notorious for not looking after themselves. And they do seem to get worse in this regard as the years wear on. But it can't just be that.

Perhaps it is related to men's career progression. They do tend to do less physical work the older they get. That is understandable, since some jobs are done far better by fit young blokes. But this means that they often end up in office jobs working quite long hours. These hours get longer, and more stressful if they are climbing up the career ladder, too. Subsequently they end up stressed out, sedentary and overweight, with no time to exercise. No wonder their health deteriorates!