Online Dating is Becoming Ever More Popular
Research by Stanford University shows that more and more people are using a dating site to meet the love of their life, even more so than the usual offline methods. According to Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford, the most common groups to go online are gay and lesbian people and middle-aged heterosexuals. All of them seem to have given up on meeting people through friends, family or local meeting places.
In a surprise finding, Rosenfeld saw that amongst a group of 3,000 surveyed 61% of gay men said they met their partner through online dating, whereas only 21% of heterosexual couples met via Internet dating. Rosenfeld says he didn’t expect the difference to be as big as that, but the numbers don’t lie.
The sociologist says that one of the main benefits of dating through websites such as Parship, Flirtbox or Trust Cupid is the degree of anonymity offered. A dating website allows a user to look around without making themselves known to others and also makes an otherwise limited dating pool much bigger and deeper. According to Rosenfeld, online dating allows anyone to find that needle in a haystack.
It is estimated that there are 120,000 marriages a year that result directly from paid for or free dating sites. This is an enormous number and it is incredible to imagine that few of these people would ever have met in normal circumstances. In addition, the majority of them are likely to have found someone much closer to their ideal than they would have been able to before the Internet dating era.
