Oz Dating

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.

One social trend that has been described repeatedly in the media is the increasing number of older people using online dating sites.

There seems to be similar trend when it comes to dating scams. Fraudsters are targeting them because they tend to have accumulated more wealth. They might also be a little easier to fool since they are new to this aspect of the web and don't realize the risks. They also come from a generally more trusting, less cynical age group.

Whatever the reasons for this there's at least one online dating site that has identified this phenomenon and has made preventing scams an integral part of its functionality.

The demographer Bernard Salt has been documenting Australia's "man drought" for several years now.

It seems to be a national problem. And nowhere is it more apparent than in big Australian cities such as Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. In these urban areas young single women outnumber available men to a significant degree.

An enterprising woman called Brie Peterson has seen the potential that such a demographic imbalance creates and has begun sending groups of urban women on rural tours in which they meet the local blokes. As this article describes:

The weekend tours, named Thank Goodness He's A Country Boy, involve eight hours of intensive speed dating at a country pub, where lonely farmers are introduced to single city girls.

More information about how the tours are run can be found at the business's website.

Although it's seen as a bit politically incorrect these days to say that various nations have dominant and very different attitudes to sex and relationships, the belief still persists. One distinction that journalists often make whenever there's a political sex scandal involving infidelity in Britain or the USA is how such things wouldn't bother the French, who are much more relaxed about such matters. It certainly sounds plausible, but they never seem to cite any statistics backing up this assertion.

They might start to do this now, however, since there are some figures available that strongly confirm this belief. Popular international dating community Zoosk conducted a massive survey with almost 13000 of its members, quizzing them on their attitudes to relationship morality.

In line with the stereotype the French respondents were the least concerned with their leaders' sex lives, with 4 out of 5 singles saying they wouldn't care if a politician were unfaithful. Those in America were far more judgmental, however.

The survey turned up lots of other interesting insights into various national attitudes to infidelity. Some of these confirm old stereotypes, while others contradict them.

Here's a heartwarming story about how a brother and sister who had been separated decades ago finally found each other again by chance - through an online dating site. They sensed an affinity before meeting in person in a bar. But when they did sit down and chat to each other face to face they realized that they were actually siblings.

Of course strange coincidences like this happened in the days before online dating. But I suspect there might be more such events like this occurring now simply because the medium allows for connections to be made that cross social, demographic and even geographical boundaries. In the past, people were much more constrained in these ways. You met prospective partners at your local pub, through work, or at parties and get togethers thrown by your friends. It was a much "smaller pool" of people, so the probability of a nasty (or pleasant!) surprise occurring was smaller also.

Dating sites have loads of demographic information about their members. That's why they're constantly being cited in various articles about sociel trends. Sometimes the information offered can give people clues about which geographic areas are better dating-wise for members of a particular demographic group. Sometimes they can reveal which actual dating sites are superior for them.

And this is a perfect example of that. If you are a women looking for a man, it looks like Oasis Active is a particularly good site to join:

Think all the good men are taken? Think again. According to free Australian dating website Oasis Active, which launched in 2008, male memberships now outweigh female memberships by 30 percent, reaching an all-time high.

Google, Facebook and other giants of the digital age continue to bring enormous changes to the way we live our lives. Googling people's names to get an idea of their character is common practice for businesses, real estate agents and other organizations. It's also increasingly being used by single people to check out their prospective dates.

Some specific data on this, as well as related information about how people in (or looking for) relationships interact in the digital age can be found in the results of the latest Zagat Dating and Dumping survey. This press release about it says that "52% of surveyors confessed to 'Googling' a prospective date, and 41% said they used Facebook to snoop around their date's information and check out photos".

So, it's obviously a good idea to Google yourself from time to time. The nature of your online presence clearly has ramifications for both your career prospects and your love life.