Oz Dating

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.

The free dating site Oasis Active now appears to be pulling ahead of all the others in Australia, with over a million local members. The parent company Oasis has similar sites in other countries that are also hugely successful.

Interestingly, this isn't the only Aussie owned online dating company that is branching out overseas. The Queensland based Cupid Media has been going for over a decade and has 33 niche dating sites, many of them country specific. One of these is for Russian singles and has recently hit the one million member mark.

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.

Shane Warne and Liz Hurley are obviously very fortunate individuals, who clearly enjoy much of the attention they get from the media. But the sheer extent of it is amazing, and would probably be enough to send most normal folk mad.

They are constantly hounded by the paparazzi, with endless conjecture in print and online about what's going on between them, and whether their union will last. Even the delivery of what looked like a mattress to Warnie's Melbourne mansion sparked a frenzy of specualtion about what they'd be up to!

Then of course there was that recent scandal involving Aussie porn star Chloe Conrad. It resulted in Hurley storming off back to Britain ...

But the latest is that they're still an item, and she is about to move in with him. There are even rumours that marriage is on the cards.

If this does eventually occur it proves there must be an extremely strong attraction between them. And they must be amazingly emotionally robust individuals to have even gotten this far.  

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.

A common feature of the people's revolutions that are occurring in the Middle East has been the use of Twitter and other social networking sites to organize resistance and keep people informed.
And an interesting variation on that method has been employed in Libya. Apparently revolutionaries in that country used a Muslim dating site called Mawada to rally their troops.

Amazing stuff.

Here's a new Australian dating site with an interesting concept. It's called Mr Right and it is designed to let women have more control over the whole process. Basically the women get to choose which men can contact them. And if they don't like how things are going then they can simply end the conversation and not receive any more messages from that person.

There seems to have been quite a bit of thought put into the whole concept. It may well do extremely well. But it will be interesting to see how many guys will be interested. I suspect many of them might feel that it's a bit sexist towards them.  

When people assess each other for romantic potential face to face, they are using a large range of different criteria. What the person actually says is, of course, important. But facial expressions, body language, tone of voice and other factors also have an influence.

When the same thing happens online through a dating site, the interaction is much less multi-faceted. However dating site members still make decisions based on less obvious aspects than just what the person writes in their e-mail. As a Queensland University of Technology study discovered, aspects such as grammar and spelling can be influential.

It seems that some people can be turned off if the person they're communicating with is a sloppy writer, or one who goes overboard with the exclamation marks. So it's probably a good idea to take a bit of care when replying to e-mails on these sites.